Gmail Website Down ? Get your mails anyway

We had some reports coming in about some outages of the gmail - that is google mail - web interface which meant that some users could not access their mail accounts for several hours which seems to be a big problem for at least some of those users. In the time where customers for instance demand a fast, almost immediate, reaction to their emails it could become a matter of survival to receive and react to the mail.

I discovered the suggestion to retrieve the email by pop3 at the digital inspiration blog. Amit discovered that he was able to retrieve mails from his gmail account even though the web interface was down. This is a pretty neat trick which can be used, or at least tried, if you cannot connect to the gmail web interface.

To enable POP in your Gmail account:

• Log in to your Gmail account.
• Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
• Click Forwarding and POP in the orange Mail Settings box.
• Select Enable POP for all mail or Enable POP for mail that arrives from now on.
• Choose the action you’d like your Gmail messages to take after they are accessed with POP.
• Configure your POP client* and click Save Changes. (pop.gmail.com, smtp.gmail.com)