Get a better service in Google Mail
Long story short: set your preferred language to be English (US) if you want a better service in Google Mail.
I've been meaning to use Google Mail rather than Thunderbird for my email for a while now and just discovered something which helps: the 'Mail Fetcher'.
I've been using Gmail for a long time and have always been able to rely on it for all Hobo correspondence, however I have an old POP account to which I still need access.
Enter the Mail fetcher. Basically it just gets mail from your POP account. Google have thoughtfully allowed you to leave copies of messages on the server, which helps if you want to slowly migrate away from an old account as I do.
However, if you're thinking of using this feature you have to set your preferred language to English (US). I hadn't realised this because the fresh account I set up to replace this my old POP system was English (US) out of the box.
The problem came when I started looking through the various settings, noticed the language setting, and changed it to English (UK). Suddenly no email.
It was only when I remembered that you need to be English (US) to use the chat facility, that I:
- realised what I'd done
- changed back to English (US)
- worried slightly that my spell checker would no longer work properly
- went back to the Mail Fetcher help page to check that, as I suspected, there was no note about restrictions
- found that there was a note about restrictions
- felt like an idiot
(Actually I think if the help page in question had been more thoroughly user-tested, they would have realised that, since users are looking for help (not notes on restrictions), they're easily going to overlook the innocuous little note on the subject)
Why do Americans get a better level of service? Do Google think English people aren't as clever as Americans?
Wouldn't it be better for Google to use some of their big brother information to look into my search history and realise that I'm the kind of person who wouldn't be baffled by the concept of a POP account.
Better still: avoid confusion by creating an interface which doesn't have to be modified at all and looks the same for all users.