From this Google Groups discussion it seems like Gmail is having some major reliability issues with people not being able to POP mail from their Gmail account. I switched my primary account to Gmail late last year, precisely because they offered the POP feature. (I liked the idea of having a full Google archive of my mail, as well as one that resided on my desktop machine.) But it hasn't worked since mid-December. As far as I can tell, there's been no official acknowledgment in any help docs from Google that there is a problem, though there are hundreds of posts about it in the Google forums. A little disappointing, I have to say...
The Basics
- I'm a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of five books. In early 2007 I went and foolishly got myself a day job running the hyperlocal community site, outside.in that I co-founded the year before. We spend most of the year in Park Slope, Brooklyn, though I'm on the road a lot giving talks. (You can see the full story here.) Personal correspondence should go to sbj6668 at earthlink dot net. Media requests should go to Matthew.Venzon at us.penguingroup dot com. If you're interested in having me speak at an event, drop a line to Wesley Neff at the Leigh Bureau (WesN at Leighbureau dot com.)
Live SBJ
StoryMap
Recent Essays
- The War On Error
Discover column on the web's bottom-up response to Katrina. - Air Purifiers For Data Smog
Discover column on software that helps you focus. - Why The Web Is Like A Rain Forest.
Discover column on Web 2.0. - Finding "Lost"
London Times piece on the mysterious hit show "Lost." - The Urban Long Tail
Discover column on the diversity of cities.
My Books
The Ghost Map
The latest: the story of a terrifying outbreak of cholera in 1854 London 1854 that ended up changing the world. An idea book wrapped around a page-turner. I like to think of it as a sequel to Emergence if Emergence had been a disease thriller. You can see a trailer for the book here.Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
The title says it all. This one sparked a slightly insane international conversation about the state of pop culture -- and particularly games. There were more than a few dissenters, but the response was more positive than I had expected. And it got me on The Daily Show, which made it all worthwhile.Mind Wide Open : Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
My first best-seller, and the only book I've written in which I appear as a recurring character, subjecting myself to a battery of humiliating brain scans. The last chapter on Freud and the neuroscientific model of the mind is one of my personal favorites.Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
The story of bottom-up intelligence, from slime mold to Slashdot. Probably the most critically well-received all my books, and the one that has influenced the most eclectic mix of fields: political campaigns, web business models, urban planning, the war on terror.Interface Culture : How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
My first. The book I wrote instead of finishing my dissertation. Still in print almost a decade later, and still relevant, I think. But I haven't read it in a while, so who knows what's in there!
I, too, switched to gmail as my primary account, partly because of POP and partly because of space issues. But because I access Gmail through POP (and have had no problem doing so) I now have over 10,000 messages in my Gmail inbox, and I fear what I'll do when I reach my Gmail limit. As far as I can tell, there's no easy way of deleting large amounts of mail, and there's also no way of paying Google money to increase the amount of space they give you. I fear that the only thing to do will simply be to set up yet another Gmail account, over and over again, with increasingly suboptimal names.
Posted by: Felix | January 03, 2006 at 12:29 PM
Felix, actually your inbox problem has a nifty fix, which is precisely why I was so pleased with Gmail's POP features before they broke. Basically, you can tell Google to automatically archive your mail once you've Popped it. This is perfect for me at least, because I switch back and forth between a desktop machine and a PowerBook. I have Apple Mail pulling down messages via POP, and then I read mail via Gmail when I'm on the PowerBook. So I have two complete archives of my mail, but when I switch to the Powerbook, the only messages in my Inbox are ones that I haven't yet downloaded on the main machine. It's very elegant, but it's useless right now, since I can't actually download any mail at all...
Posted by: Steven Johnson | January 04, 2006 at 06:48 AM