What I wanted was a second (or third) gmail account that I could use just for the WFTL-LUG, and I wanted to be able to manage it in Thunderbird from two locations; work and home. Since there’s no IMAP for gmail, and I’m personally not ready to run an IMAP server on my own, I decided to enable POP on the account, grab the mail, and store it locally. This was a great idea until I remembered that once the email was downloaded into one mail client, the second client wouldn’t see those messages and they wouldn’t be downloaded. Well, this wasn’t going to work, I would either have to use one client, or worry about having some mail in one location and some in another. I can’t be the only one that has this problem. I googled for a solution and came up with “recent mode”. It works like this; you change the username (I did it on both mail clients, but one should have been enough) to recent:username@gmail.com. This retrieves all messages received in the last thirty days whether it’s been collected by another POP client or not. The exact wording for it is here.

Now I only need to worry about marking messages/threads read when I get home. Just thought I’d share as it saved me a headache