Got the Galaxy, but uh oh

Well I took the plunge and got my wife and myself a Galaxy S.  Got everything transfered over and now comes the steps to understanding the droid over the iphone.  Well, we started to get things in order, but then I noticed a serious problem.  I use emails from Comcast which is a pop system and also gmail.  Well neither of those emails notify me on the phone.  In fact, if my phone is in the sleep mode, I will never know I have an email.  I can be sitting at my desk and get 5 emails through my comcast account and 5 from gmail and hours later, nothing on the Samsung.  Even when using it, it's haphazard at best. 
Yes, I have set everything up properly.  I've assigned it tones.  I even have it set to deliver every 5 minutes.  The gmail should be instant, but it also only gives me options of never, 5, 10 etc just like the comcast account.  We went back to the store today but they don't have tech support.  The one guy who might be able to help is off 2 days.  I have a friend who is an IT tech and has this phone and he too is stumped. 
I'm going to let this tech type rep look at our phones, if he can't make them work properly, then I can't use this phone.  As much as I hate it, I have to go back to the iPhone.  The iPhone did everything I needed it to do and more. 
Anyone have any ideas?
thanks, ron

-ronl

Hey Ron,

I'm not quite sure I understand; are you getting the emails, but just not getting the notification, or are the emails not showing up at all on your Galaxy?
Where are you seeing the options for the gmail account, because I don't recall having the options for different times on my gmail (not saying it's not there, I just can't find them on my phone).
I don't have a pop email set up on my Showcase, so I'm not sure how that should work. I do have gmail, though, so if I can help I'll try.
Either way, hope you get it sorted out... I like mine better than the iphone that I used to have.

Thanks for the reply.  Basically when we set up the phones at the CS store, I added my comcast account which is a pop email, and then loaded my gmail.  With my iPhone, both accounts came up when I pressed the email icon.  Also, when gmail arrived it was instantanious.  Comcast, I had to push for 15 minute alerts.  But I got those alerts. 

At this time with the Samsung, most of the time, I don't get any comcast mail unless I refresh, which wouldn't work for me to always have to do.  The gmail only appears through the gmail icon on the homepage but doesn't show up on through the email icon unless I refresh.  So I'm beginning to see a pattern here, but not sure what it all means.

Any one have ideas?

I found away around pop 3 email accounts and the Galaxy.  I want to share it so anyone else using comcast mail can get things working.  There is a free app called k-9 that nicely integrates both the pop 3 as well as my gmail account.  It's seemless, works perfectly and easy to setup.  I have the pop 3 account to search mail every 5 minutes.  Of course gmail is instant.

This has helped me to really appreciate the phone and now I look forward to learning other aspects and making this a handy device.

Thanks!
Ron

Hey, glad you figured out something that works! I don't really understand why everything wasn't working properly in the first place, but that's great you've got it going now. There are a lot of things I like about this phone!
Good luck, and ask more questions if you need to!

Ok more issues.  Must be user error.  :-)

I figured out how to put custom ringtones on my contacts.  It was working perfectly and now it doesn't.  It just reverts to the default tone.  Anyone got any ideas?

Oddly enough, each contact I assigned ringtones to had multiple of the same ringtone showing up on the contact page.  I did some changes and it's working again for now.