Google Apps GMail bug with multiple sign-in and POP3 access

The skinny : Trouble with POP3 or forwarding from one GMail or Google Apps account to another? Make sure you're signed out of all multiple-sign-ins in all browsers for the affected accounts, and don't multiple-sign-in again with the account your trying to get emails from.

The fat : read on...

GMail is a very refined product, but unfortunately, its rare bugs tend to be extremely poorly handled, causing wasted time chasing rabbits hither and thither.

Take my recent challenge of combining a Google Apps email account into my personal GMail account. Should be easy, right? And it did seem so.

I configured my personal GMail account to be able to send as my Google Apps email address - all worked fine.

And I configured the Google Apps email account to auto-forward to my personal email account and delete - and that was working fine too.

Then I discovered a cool new feature in GMail (and the wider world of Google) called "multiple sign-in", making it possible to be concurrently signed in to multiple accounts! Whoohoo! I tried it, but it wasn't as seamless an experience as I'd hoped for, so I decided to just stick with having everything pouring into my personal GMail account.

And the world got pretty quiet.

But hey - it was new year, so I figured everyone was away.

But I did get a report of an email sent to me, that definitely never arrived.

And then another report from a different sender.

Hmmm..........

I logged into my Google Apps email account, and there were 15 emails that had never been forwarded to my personal GMail account!!! How did that happen!!!??!!?!!

I looked at the Google Apps email account's settings, and it had reverted back to not automatically forwarding emails. I corrected that, telling it once again to forward all emails to my personal GMail account.

That's not the end of the story - it's just getting started - but on this matter my educated guess is that GMail automatically disabled the auto-forwarding when that Google Apps email account became enabled for concurrent multiple sign-in. (Whether they would do that generally, or whether they did it because the forward-to email address was associated with the other of the concurrently-signed-in accounts, I don't know. It would be easy enough to test - you could let us know in the comments if you determine either way.)

So now my problem was 15 emails sitting in the one account when I wanted them in the other. I could manually forward each one - not optimal. Or I could try to use POP3 import that I use successfully in GMail for other accounts.

Only, every time I try POP3 import from the Google Apps email account to my personal email account, GMail tells me that the username + password combination is not accepted. Very strange.

I dig around and manage to confirm that pop.gmail.com is the correct POP3 server name even for Google Apps email accounts. So no problem there.

I've definitely set the POP3 port to 995 and set to use encryption. No problem there.

I try some other combinations of settings anyway just in case, but the error messages made it clear they weren't the right answer.

I found the POP3 bulk downloader tool in my personal GMail account, and tried to use that to download the emails from the Google Apps email account. But it just sat there saying "Connecting" for many minutes, until I closed the window. tried again with equal non-success and gave up on that approach.

I found a note about using Captcha Unlock for your GMail account, so I tried to use it for the Google Apps account, just in case that would help, but crazily, it kept telling me that the password I'd enterted was incorrect, even though it was correct. Just in case, I even went ahead and changed the password, which involved entering the current password for verification, and the change password proceeded fine, but even the new password was rejected as incorrect by the Google Captcha Unlock page.

Bizarre! Some Google pages knew my password, but others rejected it. Go figure.

I even tried multiple browsers - same result.

So it was no thanks to useless error messages and processes that totally failed me that I finally found what seems to be the solution.

I document it here for the few travellers encountering the same problem.

The solution? I signed out of all Google accounts in all browsers, and then studiously avoided using the multiple-sign-in feature. That was all it took. When signed in only to my personal GMail account, I was able to easily add a POP3 download from my Google Apps email account, and it worked flawlessly.

No thanks Google for the time wastage, but hey, big thanks still for an in-nearly-all-other-respects AWESOME product. GMail fanboy is me.