Mail receipt deletes message on gmail

1

Hi, long time user of K9, love it! I’ve got a dozen emails coming into my K9 app on galaxy s10+ latest android. I’m having a problem with 2 corporate gmail accounts. One personal gmail account does not have the problem. When I pull email from the corporate accounts, the emails are marked as read and thus are not pulled when Outlook polls the accounts at a later time. I’ve doublechecked K9 to make sure that Deleting Email setting in the Fetching Mail options for that account is set to no (because I want to later pull it down in Outlook). I’ve also doublechecked the gmail account forwarding and pop/imap settings to ensure that “When message are accessed with POP” is set to “kept ‘accounts’ mails copy in the inbox.” So emails should not be marked a read in gmail, but it is for some reason. I’ve doublecheck by sending an email, reading on k9, then trying to pull down from outlook and the email is marked as read on gmail.

Thanks!

2

Not sure if I fully understand it. You mean it is marked as read if you fetch the mail in K9 (but not reading it) or if you read it?

I do not have Gmail and I use IMAP. But there is a setting in Settings / account / Reading Mail / Mark as read when opened. Is this related?

3

There is a setting Leave a copy of messages on the server. as outlined on this page - https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7104828?hl=en-GB#zippy=%2Ci-want-to-download-emails-on-multiple-email-clients - which I’ve set. But every time K9 mail pulls mail from gmail using pop (I have multiple accounts this happens on), the mail on gmail is set to ‘read’, so my Outlook does not pull that mail down… Ugh…

4

You shouldn’t use POP with K-9 Mail. It’s a protocol that is a bad choice if you want to leave messages on the server (and K-9 Mail currently only supports this mode of operation). Use IMAP with K-9 Mail and then POP with Outlook if you want to download and remove messages from the server.

If Outlook isn’t downloading messages marked as read on the server that sounds like a configuration issue with Gmail (or a bug in Outlook).

1 Like
5

I’ve used K9 for many, many years against POP accounts across a dozen different email servers. Never had a problem with POP retrieved email being marked at read/downloaded and thus being able to download again on other mail clients. Did something change?

6

I can’t tell you if anything changed, but POP has never been a decent solution for mailboxes that are used with more than one device. The POP option to leave messages on server has always been a kludge. If you can use IMAP, it is always the better option.

You mentioned that it is a corporate Google Workspace account. Have you asked your company IT about it?

7

It is said that IMAP is preferable over POP3. That might be – I am not technically competent to judge – but the problem is how to convert without losing what one already has with POP3. I have a large number of emails in Sent, and so far as I know there is no way to export and save them. So how would I convert from POP3 to IMAP without loss?