Question about Thunderbird and Gmail

[mcseguy9]

Hello everyone. I have a friend who has a few PC's, one is hers, one is her husbands, and another is at a vacation home. They have a Gmail account they share and all of the PC's have the latest version of Thunderbird with the Gmail account setup in it. What they're finding is that if one Thunderbird client downloads a message then it's unavailable for the other clients to download. We've checked the settings in Thunderbird and they're all set to leave the items in the Gmail inbox until they are deleted manually. Any thoughts on why this happens? Is this normal and it's just not possible for a shared mailbox to work in the way they'd like it to work? If this just can't work is there an e-mail option out there that will work? Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.?

[BipolarBill]

You say that the messages are "unavailable" to the other clients. You did not say if the messages are still available through a web browser.

[BipolarBill]

As a follow-up, since Gmail knows when a message has been read (marks it as such), we must assume that any mail client can mark messages that reside on a server in more than one way. It may be marking the messages as downloaded by Thunderbird, even though it is not deleting them.

Best advice is to use the "Gmail client" that is available after installing Google Apps. When you install Google Apps through the Google Pack, it installs a desktop icon for Google Mail. I'm pretty sure that Chrome must be installed for this to work.

http://pack.google.com/intl/en/pack_installer.html

[mcseguy9]

Interesting points. I'll look into using Google Apps as an alternative.

[AMD-homebuilt]

Try using Seamonkey as an e-mail client. Messages are available until deleted.