Apparently, in order to bring messages over to Google and get them to show up sorted into mailboxes, you must import them using POP. Then the mail is IMAP. I learned the hard way by disabling POP from Google Mail and it screwed it up. When I turned it back on, the accounts flooded with old email that was still at the web hosting site, (even though much had been deleted,) the inbox part of the mailboxes at the hosting site that were already forwarded to Google but I set to keep after forwarding, as described in a previous post in this string, to have a backup of at least one site of each conversation.
I quickly changed the POP setting in Google to enable POP only for that day instead of everything. An avalanche of emails that were from Google flooded the info@ account anyway, about 1,200. I emptied most of it previously, this was weird. I was able to catch one user's personal account that began to come through from the web hosting site despite defining the POP import day. That was 8,000 emails. I didn't look at how large the individual users accounts were and only deleted mail from the info@ box. I frantically deleted them from the web hosting site, leaving only about six months stuff. It was a wild ride.
The upside is that I was able to set the email originating at Google to be sent to the web hosting mailboxes first and sent out from there via SSL. It does not slow outgoing mail for whatever reason and I am able to retain a copy. No need to back up because the web hosting service also does a backup and space there is free. However, I am going to set space limits for each user so things don't get crazy, no more 8,000 eamils on a single account. Can someone suggest a reasonable limit to hold about 18 months email. They then remove older ones the same way as Time Machine does, years, months, days when space runs out.
I did instruct the client to delete as many emails from their Google mailboxes as possible. Am waiting to see if that had any effect.
Last edited by slolerner; 04/22/15 02:46 PM. Reason: accurate
