I started having problem with receiving e-mail on my blackberry phone about two days ago. I thought this was completely due to blackberry. So I troubleshot the issue in the tools provided by blackberry and verizon. After exausting the things I could try I called verizon. I went through all their levels of tech support and found out that RIM was indeed having trouble with their servers that they were currently fixing. Then the verizon tech person called me back a couple hours later and said the issue should be fixed. We tried sending test e-mails- it didn’t work. We waited…it still didn’t work. She then called up RIM again and put me on hold. While I was on hold I decided to check the google groups just for kicks. I found that others were having similar problems with pop access on their gmail accounts. I then tried to get pop e-mail through thunderbird. Sure enough, gmail wasn’t allowing the client to download all the e-mail through pop. After holding for a long time the RIM tech came on the phone. After I explained the problem to him in more detail, we both came to the conclusion that gmail pop was definately having some problems. He suggested that I should forward the e-mail from my gmail account to my blackberry built in e-mail account. So this is what I did. I now get e-mail much faster than I did before (almost instantly), which is a nice bonus from having this problem. In the meantime, pop access still isn’t working. Hopefully google will get this fixed soon. I wonder what people using outlook express only do when they have this kind of problem? They probably wouldn’t even think that gmail just isn’t letting their client download all the e-mail through pop.

Its funny how one real problem can so easily mask the true nature of another related problem.