Thursday, January 3, 2008

Gmail and Shaw email over POP

This post is mostly about how Gmail seems to know how to set up POP access to my shaw.ca email account better than I do. Not that it is really news to anyone.

You see, I decided to try using Gmail as my central email storage. My ISP is Shaw, so I have a shaw.ca email account. When I started the process of configuring Gmail for POP access, it asked me for the Shaw's POP3 server name - and pre-populated it with 'pop.shaw.ca'. Now, I have had my Shaw email address for some time, and have set up numerous desktop email clients to retrieve my email over that time - and I was pretty sure that the Shaw POP server name was 'shawmail' (or the appropriate FQDN name as described on Shaw's online help). So, I replaced the pre-populated value with the shawmail value. Well, when I finished the configuration, Gmail wasn't able to access my Shaw email account (something about a connection timeout). A quick Google search and I found out that I was not alone. Looking through the Google search results, the consensus seemed to be that Shaw does not allow external access to their POP servers. I was sure that someone must have found a work-around, so I spent the better part of an hour following the numerous search results, without any real solution (other than forwarding your Shaw email to your Gmail account). Then, just as I was about to give up, I came across this handy Shaw support page - lo and behold! Shaw does support external POP access using the server name 'pop.shaw.ca'. If only I had trusted Gmail at the beginning and not changed the POP server name, I could have saved myself some grief...Hopefully, this post saves someone else from a similar fate.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ahhhhh... I also did not trust Google! Thanks for the post, my SHAW email is filling up my GMAIL inbox as I type.

Jeff said...

Thanks Robert. At least something helpful came out of my experience!

Unknown said...

I was just about to email Shaw and then I did a quick Google search and foudn your blog. Thanks! Solved my problem!

Unknown said...

I thought exactly the same way. Thankfully a Google search pulled up you advise 3rd on the list so I wasted little time. Thanks!!

Anonymous said...

Much appreciated! You saved me a whack of frustration.

Anonymous said...

Man o man you saved me from a similar fate. Thank you thank you thank you. - Todd

Airdrie Painters said...

I bought an iphone and I have a shaw email for painting quotes. The problem is I can't get it to work on the iPhone. I tried using a live.ca email as I have Windows Live Mail I use as my main email client of my Windows 7 machine. Frustrating...just signed up for a gmail account. Great! Can add to Windows Live and iPhone likes it too. But, now I gotta get Shaw to Gmail...

CCraigen said...

Thanks. Most helpful... I was wondering why it kept timing out to the local addresses.

Travis Hill said...

Thank you! Like everyone else, I assumed "pop.shaw.ca" was just the gmail setup's default guess.

Yggy said...

Many thanks! As a result of your post popping up near the top of the search results for "gmail shaw pop", I spent only about 3 minutes wondering why things weren't working!