Google Suite Woes

Late today.  Had things going on.

My boss is unhappy with our current hosting service. (And, to be honest, I agree with him, on the one hand our email keeps getting marked as “unreliable”–i.e spammy, which we don’t do–and on the other their tech support can be prodigiously unhelpful.) The idea of using G Suite for email and Google Compute for hosting has captured his fancy and he has had me looking into it. I bit my tongue over my own feelings about Google and reminded myself that he signs the paychecks.

So, after having looked into online documentation and having reviewed a number of tutorials, I thought I’d try some experimenting. I have a domain thewriterinblack.com, you know…this one, which did not have any email associated with it (my current email is through hotmail–they let me have thewriterinblack without any punctuation or trailing numbers). So I set up a trial G Suite account, created a gmail account and set it up with an email address with @thewriterinblack.com.

First problem was when I tried to set it up for POP3 access for my email clients (which is what everybody at our office uses). Gmail didn’t want to talk to my client. I eventually got that worked out but then I set it up on my office computer (an old XP machine–I know. I know. I have been lobbying for an upgrade but my boss has been resistant) and set it up on my personal laptop. Both were set to leave messages on server, much like I have my other emails set–work computer and home computer so that I can read on either. One is generally told to “leave it” and the other is told to “delete after X days”. This gives time for me to get email on both computers to grab the message before it’s deleted from the server to save mailbox space.

I use Thunderbird. Other folk use Outlook Express.

This may not be best practice but it’s worked and it’s what everyone here is used to. Resistance is high to changing. The thing is it did work. It works with our current host. It worked with our previous host. It worked with at least a half dozen private accounts I’ve had over the years.

It doesn’t work with GMail. Oh, sure I can download messages using either computer but any messages I download on one do not show up on the other. Apparently once a message has been downloaded by one client it is no longer considered “new” for the other client to download. And I can’t figure out what makes this one different from everything else I’ve ever worked with.

My best guess is Google is just being evil.