Gmail leaving messages on POP3 server

Question

I have Gmail set up to pull messages from a POP3 server. It's set up to remove the messages from the server when it does this ("Leave a copy of the retrieved message on the server" is unchecked).

However some messages are being left on the server and never appear in Gmail. Over time, this means my POP3 email server runs out of space and starts rejecting incoming emails.

The emails it's leaving on the server are all obvious spam/phishing type emails, generally with harmful-looking attachments, so I guess it's leaving them there based on some kind of spam detection.

I'd be happy for it to just delete the messages, or retrieve them and put them in the Gmail spam folder, but not to just leave them on the server so that my mail quota is used up by them. Is there any way to do this?

Answer 1

One way to prevent the account from filling is to have the other account that you are pulling from delete messages after X days. And pick X to be a sufficiently large number so that even if gmail fails to pull for a few days nothing will be lost.