Mac Forum / Applications / Eudora / May 2007

I think this is in fact a non-issue. Whatever you set in Eudora, GMail
keeps the messages forever, it just stops showing them to you via the
POP interface once you've retrieved them.

You mean that it enforces adding an expiration period
(making ISPs happy :)

Bill Cole is right; Gmail ignores client instructions,
so you don't have to worry at all -- one of the very reasons
that they do ignore Eudora is just that, so you don't have
to worry about anything disappearing from the web view.

The entire design of the "Post Office" (POP) protocol and system
was geared to put all intelligence in the client
and leave the server dumb, just obeying client orders;
POP servers are normally never seen, anyway -- all you see
is your downloaded mail, and you forget about the dumb box
which just waits for you to come grab away the mail
and take it back home to read instead, hopefully
(from other ISPs' perspective) leaving an empty box.

Gmail, however, is designed entirely around web access,
which is where most people do all their reading
(and the only place where the advertising gets pitched).

Gmail wants you to leave your mail there anyway,
for all their clever reasons, including the preservation
of even long-term "conversations," and because
they don't want email clients messing up anything
of the original grand design at the web end,
Gmail puts all the intelligence (and control) on its own end,
and sort of tells the client to "get stuffed,"
except for offering exactly one download of each message
to the first POP client to ask for it -- you can't even
re-fetch your "left on server" mail from another computer,
because once a message has been fetched completely, Gmail,
which can't distinguish one POP client from another
(because POP protocol offers no such ability),
never again admits to still having it, which
ingeniously solves other provider's lack of insight
that every time a client asks for the "unique ID"
list of mail still on the server, they have to send back
an ever increasing list of all messages ever collected
and still on the web site, and one day when the client
loses its list of those thousands of messages,
all of them get downloaded as if new again.

But Gmail sends back only a list of new (and partially downloaded)
messages, giving great relief to both the network
and the POP client, at the expense of not being able
to "share" Gmail's POP access between multiple computers.

By the way, I limit my Eudora as to the size of messages to download,
and it took a while for me to realize that when I don't elect
to download a message from Gmail, I should *tell*Eudora*
that I want to *delete* the message from the "server,"
only because that's the only way to "retire" that message
from being "advertised" again to me forever afterwards
(you may not see this happening, but Gmail keeps listing
those messages on every mail check as "still on server,"
and Eudora keeps piling up their remembered IDs in its "LMOS" list,
reminding itself to keep ignoring and not download again,
until somebody breaks the cycle, either by actually deleting
from Gmail via web access, or by Eudora commanding Gmail
to delete it (which Gmail then *pretends* to have done,
so that Eudora wouldn't again think it a new message).

Sure enough, when I decided to locate all my saved
Eudora messages marked "still on server" and "delete" them,
my "LMOS" file shrunk greatly in Eudora;
this also relieved me from an occasional bombardment
of a pile of year-old Gmail messages, which "poltergeist"
I had never understood, until I realized that they were
only messages that I had refused to completely download,
which came back now and then from the dead
only when Eudora lost its record of having seen them
once before, way back in the distant past.

-[ ]-

Leaving the space blank tells Eudora to leave the mail forever.