Ask me how much much I love Gmail and I’ll tell you—it’s a whole lot. I, like many, use it to consolidate all of my addresses. And slowly but surely, they have been eating away at my reasons for not using it 100% of the time. With recent upgrades like better attachment handling, removing “on behalf of”, and, of course, offline support, there’s really not much left for me to complain about. Except for one thing—Gmail is painfully slow about checking my other POP accounts. And you have no control over the polling interval.

It is such a regular occurrence that I head over to Settings > Accounts and click “check mail now” that I have a name for it—”kicking the mule”. And I have often mused about writing a User Script that adds a button to GMail to check all POP accounts with a single click, right from your inbox. What would I call it?  “Kick the Mule”.

It’s not that I don’t understand the problem here. GMail’s POP account retrieval is an always on service, checking my POP accounts constantly throughout the day. And for that, I love it. In fact, for that reason, a spare GMail account can be the perfect email backup system. But because of this always on nature, they can’t go checking everyone’s email every 10 minutes all day every day. That would create a lot of network traffic without adding much benefit. Instead, they have a smart algorithm that learns how often each account needs to be checked.

That’s great! I love smart algorithms. But what about when I am logged in? Couldn’t GMail recognize the distinction and be a tad more swift in checking my other accounts? What about during business hours? What if the smart algorithm learned when my peak email usage is and upped the polling on my other POP accounts then?

Honestly. There has to be a solution to this problem without even giving users control over the polling interval.  Come on, guys. I know it’s not sexy like GMail Goggles, but it’s got teeth.