Google Hosted Mail Captcha Gotcha
This one's a real WTF.
If you're using Google hosted email (a great service, BTW) you occasionally run into a situation where you can login and read your email via Google's web interface, but when you try retrieving your email via POP you get a password error.
What the...?
Apparently, GMail wants you to verify the host system using a username, paswword, captcha login. The error message gives you no clue as to this problem. Doing a bit of digging, I discovered that you must go to a special URL for your domain, enter your username, password and captcha, and things will magically work again.
Here's a sample of the URL you'd need to visit to unlock an email account under yourdomain.com:
https://www.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/UnlockCaptcha
The logic of this whole "feature" escapes me. First, how is a user supposed to pass a catcha-based login from within a POP client? Second, how about giving the user half a clue in the POP server error message as to how to resolve the problem. Third, there's no logic behind when this kicks in. All the other accounts on my domain had no problem with a POP login.
From what I've read, others have run into this with their generic GMail accounts as well.
Anyone have an explanation beyond "it's a security thing"?
We get this using Imap with Google Apps, as well as the Gmail App for the Blackberries. For the Imap solution we have altered our checking for new email to every 20 minutes, as from what I have found the Google severs do not like authentication all the time (ie. every 10 mins)
