f13.net

Going through orientation at the Japanese university, and this is quite possibly the worst mail system in the world.  There is no central e-mail server; you have to literally carry a floppy disk around with you that holds all your e-mails, or nothing you write can be saved.

I have the address of the POP and SMTP servers, and my username and password.  Is there any way I can get this sucker to forward to Gmail, if there's not an obvious option for it?

Not easily. Forwarding is usually handled by the mail server and AFAIK Gmail doesn't allow you to pull in mail from other email accounts. Yahoo Mail, on the other hand, does allow you to pull in mail from POP accounts. If you absolutely had to use Gmail one solution if you had a shell account on a server somewhere would be to write a little bot that sucked down your Japanese email and then forwarded it on to your Gmail account.

Yahoo mail is fine.  Anything to not have to use a floppy disk.  I'll check that out.

Use IMAP nub.  :-D

I have never used IMAP, whats the main differences?

The main differences are that IMAP keeps all the mail messages on the server and you can also create folders on the server to organize your mail. With POP3 every time you open your Inbox, any messages in there are downloaded to your machine and removed from the server by default (IMAP only downloads the headers). Some POP3 setups allow you to keep a copy on the server but you still only have just the one Inbox folder since you can't create anymore on the server (only locally).

You can use Mozilla Thunderbird with some addon which name I forgot to download and readress your e-mails to gmail.