Symbian's auto-receive feature on the Nokia E61 is pretty great way to avoid getting a Push email service like blackberry connect. Unfortunately, when trying to use Gmail's POP3 with Symbian's auto-receive, you run into a few issues.

The way auto-receive works is that it will only download message headers when it connects each time by itself. Even if you have the download setting for that mail account set to 'messages & attachments'. I assume what Symbian's mail program does when it downloads message headers is that it downloads the message and uses the 'leave copy on server' feature, common to most mail clients. Unfortunately, Gmail's POP3 implementation doesn't seem to support this. No matter what, when you download a message, Gmail will automatically mark it as downloaded via POP3 on their end and won't serve that message to you again. So, when your phone goes out and retrieves the headers, and you try to open one of the mails, the program deletes the local header-only copy and when it tries to fetch the mail again, it comes up with nothing.

To get around this behavior, I decided to setup a regular POP3 account off of trikenit.com's mail server. Then I turned off Gmail's POP3 and set it to forward a copy of every mail I receive to this normal POP3 account. I setup my incoming mail settings on my phone to access the trikenit mail account and the outgoing mail settings to my regular Gmail SMTP server. Now, when my phone auto-receives email headers, a copy *is* left on the server and I can select a message to fetch the body. When I reply to a mail, the from address and the reply-to address are also set correctly to my Gmail account, so no one knows I'm using the trikenit account as an in-between.

Now if only I can figure out a way to get Symbian to auto-receive more frequently than every 30 minutes, I really wouldn't have to sign up for push mail!