Lost emails from external POP3 account in gmail

For the past 6 years I’ve been a happy user of Gmail. Infact it’s so good, that I retrieve all my external email accounts with POP3 into in my inbox. I’m designing a few new business cards with those external email addresses on it, and decided to perform a few tests first. To my great surprise (and horror) mails which report “POP3: Mail successfully fetched” disappear. They’re not in in the inbox, nor in “all emails”, nor junk, nor spam … they just vanished! Makes me wonder how many e-mails I’ve missed this way!

• configured “leave email on server” … no change
• Disabled Google’s Labels: “Fresh POP accounts” manually … no change
• Official Google response: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=29386 indicating a delay between “successfully fetched” and actual delivery. Makes sense for a free service, but I’ve been testing for 24hours now and have not received any of the test e-mail messages. Ahaa!

Messages you send from Gmail to the fetched account will only appear in Sent Mail.

That seems to be the case!