Why gmail reimports old mail again?

Question

I'm importing mail from our own mail server via POP3 (without removing mail on import). It worked flawlessly for a few years, but recently gmail reimported all old mail again and showed up us unread (edit: all the mail from a certain date in mid-2012, not all the mail since the beginning of time). I thought it was some kind of our server misconfiguration, blamed our sysadmin and sent all the old mail to trash in gmail. The problem, however, repeated, and our admin claims that no changes were made to our server configuration. What to do to prevent old mail showing up again in inbox? Gmail import settings are as follows:

Import mail using POP3
username: [my mail at company domain]
password: [my password]
pop server: [our pop server address], port: 110
[YES]: Leave a copy of received message on the server
[NO]: Always use SSL connection (that probably should get switched on, but it's a different story)
[NO]: Apply a label
[NO]: Archive incoming mail

phoops · Answer

The problem is with your Email client. The client controls what data to receive with POP3. As I bet you have a setting on which would leave messages in POP3 server after downloading (not deleting), once you changed/updated your email client, it downloads everything as it lost track of what was previously downloaded.

You can avoid this by using IMAP as when using POP3, servers cant distinguish between "read" and "unread" messages. Messages are just there and your client usually keeps information on which emails were already downloaded (so it does not redownload everything every time if you have "leave messages on the server" option enabled).

Why gmail reimports old mail again?

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