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Marc Cannava  //  A technologist living in the chilly Northeast.

 
Jun 4 / 9:39am

GMail Auto-Retrieval of POP Mail

Well this was annoying..

A while back, I set up GMail to auto-pull mail from my old MobileMe account, setting it up as an automatic POP retrieval in settings. This worked fine, and I'd see the few remaining MobileMe mails showing up in a GMail tag automatically. Worked well.

After a while, due to problems getting GMail to sync with my iPhone and iPad properly (another adventure best saved for a later rant), I decided to switch back to using MobileMe (for mail, anyway), and deleted the auto-pull settings in GMail.

Thus, as of last night, there was and currently is no account listed in my Settings page for POP retrieval.

Sometime during the night between 1am and 7am, GMail automatically resurrected these settings and pulled down all mail from my MobileMe Inbox, deleting them from that account and placing them in my GMail inbox. When I checked my GMail account this morning, there are still no accounts set for automatic POP pull, so it's not something I can delete or change.

Many questions in my head:

  • Why did GMail decide to pull down mail last night?
  • Months ago, I deleted the account from GMail's POP importer, and it said it was deleted. But it obviously was not, and this means that I have a mail password floating around GMail's servers that I can't delete. And GMail could decide to do this at any time. That's alarming. 
  • How can I be sure that GMail doesn't ever do this again?

I can answer #3: Change the password on my MobileMe account. And change all the devices that sync to it. A pain, and something I shouldn't have to do if GMail wasn't storing my credentials without my permission.