One of the great things about using Google’s email client, Gmail, is that you can keep track of several email accounts via Gmail. Emmanuel Pellereau, software engineer on the Google team, for example has a sister that set up Gmail to retrieve emails sent to her school email address. This way she can easily keep track of both email inboxes from within Gmail.

There is a catch though – Gmail performs a message a specific intervals. Which can be annoying if you know you received a message in your other email account. You have to wait for Gmail to perform a fetch for that message to appear in Gmail’s inbox. This is precisely what happened to Emmanuel Pellereau’s little sister. So he used his 20% time (the one day per week when Google software engineers are allowed to work on something that is not in the job description) to come up with a Gmail Labs experiment called “Refresh POP accounts.”

“Turn on "Refresh POP accounts" from the Labs tab under Settings, and the refresh link at the top of your inbox will not only update your inbox with your new Gmail messages, it will also fetch messages from any other accounts which you have set up,” explained Emmanuel Pellereau.

If you would like to turn on Refresh POP accounts, here is what you have to do:

1. - Go to Gmail (click here – a new tab will open), enter your login credentials and click Sign in. If you are already signed into your Google account, click this link and you can just skip step 2 in this tutorial.
2. - In the top right corner of the screen, right next to your user name you should be able to see Settings; click it. Now locate Labs and click it as well.
3. - Scroll down until you find a Labs feature called Refresh POP accounts. Select Enable, then click Save Changes (there’s a Save Changes tab at the top of the experiments list and at the bottom as well) and you’re done.

In related news, see which experiments recently graduated out of Gmail Labs and which were retired – click here.