IMAP settings for gmail.

[george57l]

I went to my VM webmail today for the first time in years.

(I had suddenly stopped getting some emails I subscribe to and the provider suggested VM might have decided they were spam and sent an automatic unsubscribe - as my settings on that site for 7 different threads I subscribe to were all reset to 'not send'. I find the provider's explanation implausible to say the least, especially as VM recommends not replying to or unsubscribing from spam so as not to confirm a valid email address - so I came to see what was in the spam folder here. More on that below.)

Firstly, I saw I had 999+ emails in my inbox despite gmail being told to delete mails from server once fetched.

So after much searching I find there's this wonderfully pointless post from 6 years ago telling us VM can't make POP work properly and saying to use IMAP. But the author didn't have the wit to think that a link to the required IMAP settings might be helpful.

Yes, I still use POP settings on gmail.

I've searched the forum extensively. Can't see the IMAP settings. 

Eventually, I managed to find a VM page about how to set up various mail clients but of course gmail is not mentioned as one of the mail clients a user might want to set up. Just the usual offline software suspects such as Apple, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.  Ok, I can use one of those to extract the necessary IMAP settings information and then update my gmail account to IMAP. 

Or, seeing as VM seems not to give a hoot about taking any action to try to fix the inability to provide a proper POP service, or about having thousands of emails (and growing) stuck on its servers, I could just ignore it.

If anyone reads this and is from, or has lines into, VM, perhaps suggest that

a) gmail needs to be listed as a mail client and configuration instructions given, or there needs to be a generic page with plain IMAP settings to use (i.e. one that is not full of detailed instructions as to how to go through a process with a named proprietary offline client)

b) someone needs to go the the post linked earlier above about how POP on VM is broken and add a link to something like a) above.

So - back to spam. Has anyone ever experienced VM's spam filter auto-unsubscribing from things it thinks are spam?

Worse, I now note there are 7 emails in my VM webmail spam folder. They have not been pulled by gmail to either my gmail inbox or put in gmail's spam folder. At least 4 of them ARE NOT SPAM!

1. How do I set up VM webmail to bypass its spam folder and let such spam be pulled by gmail anyway? I'd rather let gmail filter spam seeing as VM's filter is clearly not as good. I check my gmail spam box regularly so can rescue anything it misfiles.

2. How long does VM keep things it has decided to put in its spam folder and not let POP pull across? I now suspect that it has been shoving stuff in its spam folder, stopping gmail from pulling them across and then deleting them - i.e. I never saw any of them - for a long time.

Have I somehow misunderstood what is going on here? 

[coenoby]

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@george57l wrote:

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My use case is mine and yours is yours. Advice to alter my use case is not really relevant to the original problem posted.

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Personally, I completely respect your right to adopt whatever use case you want. 👍

Sadly, the pragmatist in my thinks that in this instance your are going to be forever disappointed.

The reality is that Gmail only supports POP3 to access other email accounts and in 2017 Virgin Media implemented their own non standard version of POP3 when they had to move away from the previous email service they used. (Ironically that was a version of Gmail!)

Clearly both Google and VM have implemented systems that followed their respective use cases and no matter what arguments are used it is high unlikely that either of them is going to change tack any time soon.

It might be worth me adding that I used Gmail as my email client for a while and was happy with their POP3 limitation.  However I soon moved back to using a regular email client because I found it did not fit my "use case" for other reasons.

Coenoby.

[george57l]

POP works fine for me - especially now I've disabled VM's spam filter so everything stays in my VM inbox to be pulled by gmail. With that sorted, the benefit (to VM, not to me) would be that VM's server would not continue to get ever further clogged up with my emails.

So, on the contrary, I am not disappointed. As I already said, above:

So no IMAP on gmail and VM still can't provide a proper POP service. So all those old emails will have to stay on VM's servers.

Do I care? 

🤔

(Having found the solution to my problem re VM spam not getting sent on, email notifications for this thread are turned off now. Use case comparisons are not very productive. Thanks for all contributions.)