Zune Moves North

Well, just over a year after my original post, Mr. Bill Gates himself officially announced that the Zune will make it to Canada in the Spring of 2008... if anyone still cares ;)

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.