11 ms·

Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP

658 points by sumanep 1y ago

satisfice 1y ago
goddamn it
Animats 1y ago
The linked page says that Gmail is discontinuing support for the old Post Office Protocol in favor of IMAP. Nobody has used POP much in years. Decades, maybe. IMAP can check for mail without downloading. But apparently Gmail doesn't support that. You can do this the other way round. Use a local email client such as Thunderbird on desktop or FastMail on Android to check Gmail and any other email accounts you have.
- belst 1y ago
  only the phone app supports imap. the web app does not, it used to support pop
  - 12435454344345 1y ago
    Gdiehdis29739237
  - NetMageSCW 1y ago
    I don’t think that is a good way to express it. The gmail service supported POP and any gmail client (e.g. my iOS Mail app) could then get that email. It isn’t about only the web client.
- OJFord 1y ago
  No, they're discontinuing POP 'import' (so mail ends up stored in Gmail) configured in the web app and available everywhere, in favour of IMAP client access from the mobile clients only. Fine for some people, not at all equivalent for others. (I'm disinterested, fwiw, haven't used Gmail other than an alumni forwarding address for years.) It's not just a protocol change.
  - sumanep 1y ago
    You can use pop still, just not to see external emails in gmail web (and you cant use imap either to do that)
- lhamil64 1y ago
  Huh, apparently I still have a POP3 email setup in Gmail, my old ISP provided email. Mildly annoying that it's going away, but I never use that email anyway so I guess it's not a big deal for me.
- gausswho 1y ago
  TIL what POP meant after three decades. Thanks!
- cosinetau 1y ago
  > Nobody has used POP much in years Writing in as a current POP user. I use it to import email every day.
- cosmotic 1y ago
  I use POP to maintain control over my data.
  - mrbluecoat 1y ago
    This. I use POP and Thunderbird to download all my email and erase it from their servers so they can't later use it for AI training, ad personalization, persona tracking, etc.
    - jasonfarnon 1y ago
      Unfortunately deleting your email probably doesn't "erase it from their servers". This was the substance of one of the old google location history lawsuits, where "erase my history" only erased your device's access to it. They retain a possibly transformed copy for training etc.
    - cortesoft 1y ago
      You don’t have an ability to “erase it from their servers”. There is no way to be sure they actually delete anything when you erase it, they could just be hiding the access.
      - userbinator 1y ago
        Speaking as someone who worked in a large company before (although perhaps not Google-sized), and several smaller ones, they are very motivated to reduce storage costs whenever possible. Sure they could be "just hiding the access" immediately after you request them to delete, but that storage will likely be overwritten soon by something else.
        teo_zero 1y ago
        > they are very motivated to reduce storage costs whenever possible On the other hand, they are also very motivated to have a large mass of data to train their AI. Which of the two motivations wins, is debatable. Today I'd bet on AI.
- cortesoft 1y ago
  The deprecation is about the webmail version of Gmail. You can’t check other accounts while using the web version of Gmail.
  - cpncrunch 1y ago
    It's a little unclear whether you will still be able to use pop3 on the mobile app or not.
    - cortesoft 1y ago
      I think you can, but those emails are only going to exist on your phone, though. They aren't imported into your Gmail account itself.
      - cpncrunch 1y ago
        Yeah, that's fine for my needs. Just hoping it will continue to work that way.
- casenmgreen 1y ago
  > Nobody has used POP much in years. Decades, maybe. I use it in preference to IMAP, to reduce attack surface; to get my emails off the server and down onto my laptop as quickly as possible. I don't like the idea of leaving all my email on a server.
- sumanep 1y ago
  The linked page don't say that. Pop will still be supportedand imap was never an option for adding external accounts in gmail webmail
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
I thought they would want us sucking down our external mail into their system to keep us inside the wall with scannable data. What the heck.
- righthand 1y ago
  There’s probably a security issue and the product owner can’t figure out how to vibe code their way out.
jeffbee 1y ago
I guess they couldn't find anyone qualified to maintain the mailfetcher.
- mxuribe 1y ago
  I wonder if this is a little about storage costs? I mean, at their scale, i imagine the core cost of the actual storage by itself is pretty negligible...but maybe combined with other infra. (beyond storage) that needs to be considered in the total costs related to storing and managing POP pulls...maybe their data shows that it simply wasn't worth it to them to keep said functionality around? But, your comment did make me chuckle a little! :-)
  - jjcob 1y ago
    Maybe it causes too many issues? POP is pretty unpredictable when multiple clients access the same server.
    - mxuribe 1y ago
      Yeah, that would be a good point...like, maybe its not just about cost, but more trouble than its worth. On another comment i made here, i wondered if its not just storage costs, but costs or *annoyance* of running infra. that oversees the fetching, the storage, yada, yada...al for POP, whose users leveraging said functionality are crazy low.
  - jimrandomh 1y ago
    They already have a quota and billing framework in place for email storage. If it was about storage costs, I'd expect them to address it through that.
    - mxuribe 1y ago
      Makes sense.
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    The number of people who actually use this feature to fetch mail into their Gmail account in the year 2025 has got to be pretty damn near zero.
mustaphah 1y ago
A quick hack: forward @yourdomain.com emails to your Gmail (e.g, Cloudflare Email Routing). Outbound emails sent via "Send mail as:" using SMTP remain unaffected.
- flakeoil 1y ago
  Or forward your gmail to another proper email domain.
  - mustaphah 1y ago
    I just can't live without the Gmail spamfilter. It's just the best. Industry-leading; no question.
    - nulbyte 1y ago
      Gmail regularly lets through spam, including backscatter spam from mail sent to the google.com domain spoofing Gmail users. Industry-leading is not the term I would use to describe their spam heuristics. Grey listing has been far more effective at stopping spam than some half-baked AI garbage from Google.
      - mustaphah 1y ago
        Not ideal - can't disagree. Still, it's the industry leader. I'm not aware of a better spamfilter. Grey listing doesn't scale; not for me.
        akkartik 1y ago
        I forward everything including spam to Fastmail. Their spam filter is absolutely fine. This way I don't need to check for false positives in 2 places. You're probably losing one genuine message a year if you don't check your Gmail spam folder.
      - nottorp 1y ago
        Hmm. Not really. I run greylisting on my personal domain which is extremely low traffic and lately I'm getting like 4-5 spams per day that obey it correctly. Which is more than the non spam emails that come on it :)
herczegzsolt 1y ago
This will be a major inconvenience for migrating mail accounts. I used the POP feature a lot to get mails from one account to the other without requiring a client to do the dirty work. A migration is still possible, but needing to keep a client up and running to push up mails via IMAP will be a major painpoint.
- xp84 1y ago
  This sounds like an opportunity for a cool open source project: A container which checks a given POP account every few minutes, and copies the message into an IMAP server of your choice.
  - cortesoft 1y ago
    Someone created that project 29 years ago… fetchmail https://www.fetchmail.info/ https://www.fetchmail.info/
    - xp84 1y ago
      Am I expected to keep abreast of developments in the tech world every three decades?? I’ve been busy.
- NetMageSCW 1y ago
  Google has an email migration feature useful for one time migration.
windows2020 1y ago
Back to the old Thunderbird days I guess.
- fxtentacle 1y ago
  By now, it's new and quite neat :)
- bcrl 1y ago
  Some of us are still using mutt!
jimrandomh 1y ago
I can't tell whether I use this; the description in the article sort-of matches a feature I use, but not exactly. The feature I use is labelled "Check mail from other accounts" and appears in the "Accounts and Import" tab in Gmail web; it causes Gmail to periodically retrieve emails from an external server using POP, and merge them into my main inbox. This article refers to the option "Check mail from other accounts", which matches, but also says "POP only works with a single device", which is false (wrt this feature) and makes me think it may be talking about something different. I'm hearing about this for the first time from HN (not from Google). I don't like having Google randomly drop IT tasks on my plate, and the possibility that emails might just silently stop being delivered is nighmarish. Sigh.
- iLoveOncall 1y ago
  The top comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45440465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45440465 makes it clear that what you're referring to is exactly what is being deprecated.
  - jimrandomh 1y ago
    No it doesn't make it clear, because it's written by a third party reading the same internally-inconsistent page I am; any information added beyond the Google documentation page is conjecture.
    - znort_ 1y ago
      "Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts through POP." seems quite clear.
      - mschuster91 1y ago
        Good god Google can't be bothered to not wreck shit that doesn't cost them much, eh? Doesn't surprise me too much though, Gmail hasn't seen much maintenance and polish over the last few years.
mobilene 1y ago
Well _this_ is a pisser for sure. I've relied on POP3 email transfer for years and years so that I have one mailbox to check: Gmail.
- leptons 1y ago
  I use Firebird and have it check my various Gmail accounts using imap, as well as non-google email accounts. Everything in one place.
  - tarboreus 1y ago
    For now.
- geor9e 1y ago
  >one mailbox to check: Gmail. I do this, but I guess I'm safe, since I did it via the setting "Forward a copy of incoming mail to x and archive Gmail's copy" or equivilent option for each provider.
- pier25 1y ago
  Same. What are the alternative you're looking at? Currently looking at Zoho. Apparently Proton doesn't have third party POP accounts.
zwieback 1y ago
Learned from this post that Gmail web had POP! Now I'll be mourning loss of a feature I never even used.
- invalidusernam3 1y ago
  I've been using it for many years, super simple way to have many email addresses deliver to a single gmail. The effort I'll spend migrating will be better spent setting up a non-Google alternative
Dwedit 1y ago
You can still use a third-party mail client to POP off the server, then use IMAP to send it to Gmail.
- NetMageSCW 1y ago
  That isn’t very responsive or convenient…
Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y ago
Oh damn.I need to migrate everything.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
xp84 1y ago
Hypothesis: This feature is actually a very serviceable way for a small business or individual to have a branded email address on very cheap email hosting, while getting Gmail features for free. Google wants such people to be paying for Google Workspace if they don't want to be advertising the Gmail brand on their address.
- czechdeveloper 1y ago
  They did the same with free version of Google Workspace. It's just no longer free.
  - xp84 1y ago
    Exactly. To Google, wanting to use a domain other than Gmail is a strong signal that they can probably shake you down for a few bucks a month. Sure it’s just $7 for most of these people and they probably only have 1-2 accounts. But multiplied by how many million people they saw using this feature it could be worth it to Google. Plus also ending the infra cost of fetching. For those of us who were just using the feature to aggregate mail from other email addresses like an old Yahoo account or something, I doubt Google cares about it, they even probably kind of liked it that you’re viewing their ads instead of the other guys, but they probably don’t matter enough.
- beejiu 1y ago
  Doesn't Google Workspace start at $7 per month? I can't see a business user going to those lengths to save $1 or $2 per month.
  - ocdtrekkie 1y ago
    I know businesses that use Gmail and have all their staff make username.businessname@gmail.com addresses. Do not bet against how much small businesses don't want to pay for stuff, you will always lose.
    - cj 1y ago
lxgr 1y ago
What in the world was "Gmailify"? Was it different from adding third-party accounts via POP? (Was it maybe just IMAP for third-party accounts?)
- NetMageSCW 1y ago
  I think it was adding third party accounts via POP but automated for large well known third parties.
- Tyr42 1y ago
  It was IMAP sync between the Gmail server and the Outlook/Yahoo/etc server. Then you have a regular Gmail account and get notifications, spam checking, mobile push notifications etc.
  - lxgr 1y ago
    Thank you! I never knew this was a thing. So it was only available for a small list of services?
bound008 1y ago
I'm not one to defend google, but it seems that they are only ending support for POP accounts, and retaining support for IMAP/SMTP. Seems like a reasonable deprecation for 2025, although they could have given more than a quarter to let people handle the change.
- bigwheels 1y ago
  But why do they need to remove the functionality? It's been working fine for around 2 decades. As a user of the feature, this is supremely annoying. They didn't even send me a warning message it will be discontinued.
  - cyberax 1y ago
    Likely because one of the backend systems that implements this functionality depends on some deprecated service. And nobody cares enough to port the POP checker to use something new.
  - warp 1y ago
    Google nowadays just seems afraid to store personal data. Google have moved your maps history/timeline to be on-device only, seemingly in response to geofence warrants. They're also deprecating health (Google Fit) APIs, and moving that data to be on-device. So, removing POP (where they need to download emails to their servers), and only supporting IMAP (where emails stay on the third-party server) via their GMail app, that would be consistent with a policy to store as little personal data as possible. (it could also be completely unrelated :)
    - sumanep 1y ago
      IMAP was never supported and is still not supported for external account un gmail web. And they don´t remove pop. You can use pop to access your gmail in any email client or in the app if you wish.
- DominikPeters 1y ago
  They have worded things dishonestly to make you think that POP can be replaced by IMAP. The IMAP support is only available in the mobile app (not gmail.com) and isn't a "fetch" that integrates fetched emails to your Gmail inbox. It's kept as a separate inbox.
timbre1234 1y ago
Fetchmail ftw
MarkusWandel 1y ago
Aaaah, OK. So connecting to Gmail via POP is still going to work. I use that with a (otherwise rarely used) Thunderbird instance to keep a live backup of my mail. Because I'm old enough that I don't feel I "own" my data unless it's on a storage device I own.
cracki 1y ago
There are two "Gmail" things here: the actual service with a web site (mail.google.com), and an android app on your phone that is called "Gmail". They are axing the "pull" path of the actual service. That path only supported POP for pulling those mails. There never was an IMAP pull path. They are telling you to read your mails of the "other" account by configuring your Gmail app to access it via IMAP. That obviously won't import those mails from the other account into your Gmail account. The solution is to push. Configure whatever system handles the "other" mail address to forward the mails to your Gmail account.
- commandersaki 1y ago
  The solution is to push. Configure whatever system handles the "other" mail address to forward the mails to your Gmail account. Yep, I have 4 gmail addresses that I set to copy and forward to my fastmail inbox, unless gmail kills that feature I am golden.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- mikaraento 1y ago
  Heads-up to people trying this: Gmail will often put forwarded email into spam. Be careful especially in the beginning to check your spam folder. They may also reject the mail as spam, esp if your volume is large. IIUC it’s hard to make forwarding to play nicely with DKIM and spf. There’s some disagreement on how to handle it. (I’m being purposefully vague as I did interact with folks handling this on the google side and don’t want to cause them trouble for helping me out).
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - enkrs 1y ago
    There are also rate limits on Google side for incoming mails. By just forwarding four domains to my Gmail I used to hit them quite often. Then 2 years ogo, I stopped forwarding and switched to the now discontinued Gmail fetching domain mails over POP...
jaykru 1y ago
RIP gomailify :( https://www.gomailify.com https://www.gomailify.com
- ranger_danger 1y ago
  emailnator.com
metadat 1y ago
I suppose the heyday is over, it's time to migrate to something else. Oh, I won't be able to POP push gmail to my new email address, nice. There is an opportunity for someone to make a low-friction service which does server-side forwarding via IMAP with decent anti-spam. If done right, you could soak up a significant chunk of the Internet email biz.
- gazby 1y ago
  > I suppose the heyday is over, it's time to migrate to something else. Oh, I won't be able to POP push gmail to my new email address, nice. > > There is an opportunity for someone to make a low-friction service which does server-side forwarding via IMAP with decent anti-spam. If done right, you could soak up a significant chunk of the Internet email biz.
- NetMageSCW 1y ago
  POP doesn’t do push, only pull, and it seems that gmail will still support clients using POP. There is no chance another email service will get any chunk of Internet email if it has to charge for services.
ThrownOffGame 1y ago
[dead]
devmor 1y ago
Oh man there goes my access to my old college email from 14 years ago that for some reason never got deactivated, just web login restricted.
seydor 1y ago
They are discontinuing fetching from POP server, but fetching from IMAP is not supported either. So they are discontinuing fetching altogether, right? it won't even be available in the paid version, right? why are they being confusing?
- kumarharsh 1y ago
  IMAP is supported afaik: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/78892?hl=en#zippy= https://support.google.com/mail/answer/78892?hl=en#zippy=
  - bonzini 1y ago
    That's fetching from Gmail via IMAP. With IMAP there's no particular need for fetching from third party accounts. The article itself says that IMAP is supported in the app ("You can still read and send emails from your other account within the Gmail app. This uses a standard IMAP connection, which is supported in the Gmail mobile app"). But indeed this removes altogether the possibility to fetch from third-party accounts into Gmail.
suzzer99 1y ago
I finally figured out the confusion here. What a terribly worded article. Could mean two different things: 1) Some kind of third-party account (whatever that is) can no longer check (fetch) emails from Gmail via POP. I have a test suite that uses POP to fetch emails from Gmail, so this concerns me. 2) Gmail itself can no longer fetch emails from other email accounts over POP (a feature I had no idea existed). I guess it means #2. But it took me a long time to figure that out. You'd think a $trillion company could word things better.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- nl 1y ago
  "from third-party accounts" is a better worded version of your (2). Your (1) would be worded in the opposite order.
  - suzzer99 1y ago
    The problem is unless you know what "third-party accounts" means, it's ambiguous as to which account is being connected to and which account is doing the connecting over POP. "Gmail will no longer support checking emails from [thing I'm unclear on] over POP." The whole sentence hinges on knowing that Gmail itself can (or could) become a client and go out to other email accounts and fetch emails over POP. In my mind I'm wondering, "Are they talking about something like where Slack connects to gmail?"
- makach 1y ago
  It's a shame. I use this functionality to retrieve and delete messages from other mailboxes on a daily basis in order to use Gmail as my primary email interface.
  - OhMeadhbh 1y ago
    Yeah. The interface isn't bad. Just remember to backup your email somewhere.
  - 1y ago
OhMeadhbh 1y ago
Yeah. Gmail is an anti-pattern. I was paying $10/month for workplace and a couple days ago they froze my account because I was accessing it via IMAP. Fortunately, I own the domain so I pointed it at amazon. I pretty much only use google apps to share docs I've written elsewhere, so I didn't really lose too much when I lost access to apps. It would be much cooler if there were a human I could talk to to find out what we did to trigger the account freeze. The only thing I can think of is I accessed my gmail account from a location I don't normally access it from (business trip) about a week after changing from SMS based 2FA to authenticator based 2FA. The cloud is someone else's computer. Sometimes they don't want you on their computer, even if you're paying them to be there. As a reminder, Google Takeout is your friend. We copy email off of gmail via IMAP, mostly so we can have a local backup. I use Takeout for my personal account. Had I thought google would freeze a paid account, I would have used Takeout every week or so to backup the few google apps docs I had up there.
- planb 1y ago
  I‘m paying for workplace too (ex-free account), can you share more details on why it was frozen? Did they give an explanation or do you just assume it was because you use IMAP? Do you never login to your account on the web and just had it in your mail client?
  - OhMeadhbh 1y ago
    no explanation. no response to emails so I have no idea what we did.
    - samat 1y ago
      Did you try calling them?
- taneq 1y ago
  Can I use POP3 to access Gmail? No. Ah okay, IMAP then? Also no. Edit: Ohhh. According to other posts it’s about gmail not pulling email from other servers via POP3, not about accessing gmail.
PeterStuer 1y ago
One more step to bring email in line with being messages on a website rather than messages on your computer.
heavyset_go 1y ago
RIP to my OG Gmail account that I forgot the password to but still have POP access to via the Gmail web client.
- breakingcups 1y ago
  Wonder if it's possible to change the POP server without changing the credentials... You could set up your own sniffer server to retrieve the password that Gmail sends to you.
  - shagrath 1y ago
    I'm in the same boat, and unfortunately, no
mijoharas 1y ago
Somewhat related. What do people use to keep an offline backup of Gmail, and other mail accounts? Do you need to keep a full download of your mailbox, or is there some way to get an incremental dump (i.e. just things that changed since X)
- rendx 1y ago
  I use imapsync. Yes you can limit it to mails sent or received in a certain timespan. https://imapsync.lamiral.info/FAQ.d/FAQ.Archiving.txt https://imapsync.lamiral.info/FAQ.d/FAQ.Archiving.txt
  - mijoharas 1y ago
    Hey, first off, thanks. How do you go about that? The documentation says: Q. Can imapsync be used to maintain and restore a local offline copy of a mailbox, eg for backup purposes, using Mbox or Maildir format, so that if the server fails, then the mailbox could be reinstated? R1. No. Imapsync plays with IMAP servers only.
    - rendx 1y ago
      Ah yes, I run a local IMAP server (Dovecot).
  - password4321 1y ago
    I'm guessing imapsync could be used to transfer email into Gmail to replace this POP client feature that is being removed, as long as it can sync into a folder.
    - tracker1 1y ago
      Maybe... but at that point you're self-hosting a service/app instead of relying on google to pull your other account into gmail. At such point it may be best just to use your vanity email first, and yoink out your gmail into that account.
- 1y ago
srb24 1y ago
POP is not perfect (could a new version be created - POP4??) but IMAP is not always the solution. For one thing it makes switching mail provider very hard when you haven't got a copy of all your historic emails - with POP you just change settings and away you go. Ms are also always trying to turn off POP access for the Office Outlook program. Hmmmmmm It's almost as if both they and Google run two of the largest subscription email hosting platforms which would both benefit if it's harder for people to change provider... Of course the less you download the more you have to store on their servers and the more you store the more you pay and of course every day brings more emails to store....
- yreg 1y ago
  This is about uploading data to gmail. You continue to be able to download from gmail via pop3.
randomtoast 1y ago
Gmail's endgame plan is that virtually everyone in the world is forced to use Gmail or have a very reduced email experience.
- vladms 1y ago
  Good luck with that. I changed to a different provider like 10 months ago and to be honest I do not see big differences. It was a problem with a couple of other sites that don't allow you to change your user/email, but we can't blame that on Gmail.
Andrew_nenakhov 1y ago
Well, I'm that Gmail user who used POP3 fetching from my previous email from day 1 of using Gmail. I guess I'll have to set up IMAP then, at least until the time they'll take it away, too.
- NetMageSCW 1y ago
  I would replace POP with forwarding unless you are okay with storing your email in multiple services.
xdanger 1y ago
Oh no, I have to go and setup my family's emails again. We have a domain and I used to forward to some gmail accounts (few don't want to use multiple email programs/accounts), but so much mail got lost (not even in spam folder) that I just had to switch everyone to pop3 fetch to gmail.com. Now at least email get's there, even if it's 30-60mins late (really annoying for logins/verifications/etc.). Maybe it's time to switch everyone out of gmail and make gmail forward the email to out hosted accounts.
- ThePowerOfFuet 1y ago
  Migadu.
  - lagniappe 1y ago
    Migadu.
- tracker1 1y ago
  I've been using mail forwarding with my cloudflare domains without issue in gmail since google domains sold... you may want to consider that, delivery has been very good. As another alternative, if you self-host an MTA, you can relay through SendGrid, which also has had really good outbound deliverability, I've used this for a hobby site/app that has a built in MTA.
- sunnybeetroot 1y ago
  Is my understanding correct that if you stop paying for your domain, someone else will register it and get access to all your accounts?
noirscape 1y ago
They're almost certainly doing this to put the screws on Gmail users. Data export compat isn't great with Gmail to begin with, but at least with a vanity domain you could have the option to use that instead and if Google went bad, you could still use it directly without having to reconfigure a lot of stuff. (Since this feature is meant to integrate with shared hosting providers that offer an email service "for free".) Axing this feature (title is slightly misleading - you can't do the same thing over IMAP with the Gmail service; external mail fetch is dead) is an attempt to get people to stop using vanity domains so they're locked in/tied to the Gmail ecosystem. Pretty awful and I wonder how wise of a business decision this is, given Google is one of the companies who's getting side-eyed in Europe due to being an American big tech company with ties to the US government. Wouldn't be surprised if a good number of people will just abandon the big G's mail service as a result. Regular people (so not tech people) are more aware about this sort of thing than they were before, and Gmail specifically has been getting the stinkeye because of how obvious it is. This will only end up confirming those fears.
- NetMageSCW 1y ago
  Forwarding works fine and has been how I’ve always used gmail.
  - sumanep 1y ago
    Yahoo doesn't allow forwarding anymore
- sumanep 1y ago
  You can't do the same thing with imap.
CTOSian 1y ago
I am using the gmail web-app to access emails from eg yahoo and outlook, well if they pull off the plug of this feature (gmail mobile app only) no big deal - sod off gmail (web app again) there is zoho that you can do this with a very small cost (abt £1/mo IIRC)
cess11 1y ago
I think most readers here could afford a domain name and email accounts with some local or otherwise small provider, that's a much better option.
- NetMageSCW 1y ago
  That’s a terrible idea - putting your email at risk with a small local provider is asking for future trouble.
  - cess11 1y ago
    Not really, no.
anty 1y ago
Is there any solution that does not require me to run my own email server? I have a 2GB email server. I use POP to regularly import the mails into Gmail. This deletes the mails on my limited-storage-server. I already pay for Google storage. I do not want to pay (more) for another email server just so I can keep all my emails forever. Forwarding mails does not work, because Gmail quietly drops mails. They don't even put them into the spam folder. My webhoster told me I could pay for Google Workspace. There you apparently can use your own domain. But then I have a third service I have to pay.
- Jolter 1y ago
  Did you rule out using IMAP?
  - anty 1y ago
    With IMAP i need to run a mail server that stores my mails forever, right? I want to "import" a copy into Gmail and delete it on the original server.
- NetMageSCW 1y ago
  Forwarding is the right solution, but it needs to be at a lower level than a regular user style email forward - more like a DNS delivery change.
noduerme 1y ago
FUCK THIS. This is disgusting. I've been using Thunderbird for 10 years as the way I normally download my gmail. I have no interest in using IMAP, I store everything locally. I suppose the idea is that they can make more money if you don't delete after you download your mail, then you have to pay them for storage?! Is that what this is about?? Because there have to be a small handful of people in the world still using POP to access gmail. Feels fucking personal.
- hackernewds 1y ago
  Bit of an overreaction since your use case isn't being affected at all. Rather they are making no money off it, and continue to support it.
  - noduerme 1y ago
    That was not very clear from the article, but yeah. Understood. I don't even know wtf "third party accounts" are. Nowhere does it say that they will continue to support :995 access. They should mention that somewhere.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  The article is about Gmail checking third party account through POP and not about checking Gmail using POP which remains supported.
  - noduerme 1y ago
    Ah. Thanks. Since I don't have any kind of multiple account setup with Gmail, it really wasn't clear on a first read of the article that it wouldn't apply to all POP access. Sigh of relief...? Sirens going off? I run my own mail server, but I use gmail as a backstop - i.e. if a hosting provider needed to verify me, that would go to my gmail account. I should probably radically reconsider that now before it's too late, because I really don't like the way this is trending.
  - NetMageSCW 1y ago
    I hope so but the article is incredibly unclear about that since it suggest an alternative is to configure IMAP on your third party account as an option.
sylware 1y ago
And a few months ago, they did, literaly, block noscript/basic (x)html browsers for their dominant search engine (right before that they were white-listing a few of those browsers). Gogol has been on the super evil guys side for a while. The US admin has been trying to "anti-trust" them for years, without any results to make them behave: because its need to have a technical part. With enforced, minimal, simple and good enough to do the job technical protocols/file formats. Usually, a small subset of what it is already running IRL would be defined as those protocols/file formats. For the web, that would be noscript/basic (x)html (remember when most of the web was running perfectly fine with basic html forms?) All that to allow alternative small implementations to be real-life alternatives. I could buy on amazon with lynx browser hardly a few years back, now I cannot (well I have not tried in a while), the agenda of the devil is followed perfectly.
anentropic 1y ago
That sinking feeling... I have no idea if I'm using this. I set something up like 20 years ago when migrating from a self-hosted email to Gmail. But I think maybe at least one of my addresses might still be a POP mailbox.
- chanux 1y ago
  They would surely send an e-mail with the specifics if you are affected, right?
bborud 1y ago
I have a Google Workspace for my family. Mostly for email. Has anyone had a similar setup and moved in to Protonmail?
shauntest12321 1y ago
Forward Email for me.
paride5745 1y ago
I already started to move most of my communications to ProtonMail. Looks like Google wants to force people to use the WebUI instead of email clients (no google ads on IMAP/POP). What's annoying is that they are impacting paying customers as well, which is quite bad.
- kelvinjps10 1y ago
  But Proton doesn't offer good third-party access either; actually, Gmail is better
  - mempko 1y ago
    Yes it does, they have an official software called the bridge which allows you to connect a 3rd party email client.
- ianhawes 1y ago
  I suspect this has much more to do with bad actors using automated means to access Gmail and send spam.
  - NetMageSCW 1y ago
    How does gmail using POP to retrieve messages to your account from your account with another service facilitate spam and how can the bad actor take advantage of that?
  - sumanep 1y ago
    That does not make sense
- newscracker 1y ago
  Last I checked, Proton Mail does not support standard email client protocols. So you’re stuck with its apps and a browser interface or with buying a paid subscription and using a bridge software on desktop to use a client like Thunderbird. Getting mails out of Proton Mail is also not as easy as setting up a client with IMAP or using other tools like imapsync.
daitangio 1y ago
I set up my personal mail server https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver and I have wrote about it here https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-on-docker https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-on-docker I am GMail-free from 2020 and I am a lot happier. I keep my GMail account, but I use just as failsafe or as seconday account. In the meantime, I have very little trouble managing my mail-server.
- ddtaylor 1y ago
  Wow this is awesome!
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enigma101 1y ago
that's a bit rich from google to not support the essential protocol of email
- NetMageSCW 1y ago
  Are there other email services that support scheduled POP transfer of email from other accounts?
michaelbryzek 1y ago
Thanks for mentioning Google Takeout - was not aware of that service and found it very useful
schnable 1y ago
It's amusing to me that big friendly Google that started out giving massive amounts of storage away for free (effectively unlimited at the time) has been on a kick to roll that back.
- bunderbunder 1y ago
  Their advertising used to be so wildly profitable that they just straight-up had money to burn. That business model has been getting less and less sustainable as their advertising profits continue to erode.
matheusmoreira 1y ago
Stop using gmail. I bought a Proton Mail subscription. Truly one of the best things I've ever done.
- mcpar-land 1y ago
  especially if you have a custom domain with google workspace (or whatever it's named now). my switch to pointing my domain from google to proton was totally painless, you can migrate all your old emails, etc. i imagine if you just have an @gmail.com it might be a little more annoying what with having to do forwarding, but still worth it.
- ImJamal 1y ago
  Proton doesn't support pop either?
  - matheusmoreira 1y ago
    I didn't need it. Alternatives like fastmail should be good in that case.
pier25 1y ago
Well fuck. I've been using this feature since I started using Gmail in 2007 or so.
- DamnInteresting 1y ago
  I'm in the same boat, watching Google preparing to capsize it. I'm a paying customer, and they keep making my life more difficult.
nla 1y ago
The Google enshitification continues unabated.
neves 1y ago
Everytime someone tells me about the advantages of decentralization, I ask them to explain me why e-mail, the decentralization protocol per excellence, now is centralized in a handful of companies.
chrisfinazzo 1y ago
Why are people surprised by this? (No, really) IMAP "defeated" POP long ago if you wanted to use a third-party client but still access mail from anywhere. By definition, this doesn't work in a POP environment, but that's increasingly an outdated mindset. For historical reasons (intertia, and being early enough that I was able to acquire a "firstname.lastname" address), I don't plan to leave Gmail unless things really go south. My personal domain (Fastmail) is used for other things and I've never anything other than Mail.app and their own web interface.
- tracker1 1y ago
  This is about importing email from your non-gmail account INTO your gmail account. POP is simply the easiest way to do this, and just from GMail's own IMAP interface, it's pretty clear that IMAP is NOT reliable for this task... The details in TFA are that you can add an external IMAP account to the gmail client app in Android. This does nothing for the gmail web ui, meaning you need something else for your external email. Wouldn't mind exploring something akin to a web-based, self-hosted Thunderbird mail client giving a server hosted web UI for multiple email and nntp services. If if synced to desktop/mobile apps and/or had a decent mobile web UX, that would be gravy.
  - chrisfinazzo 1y ago
    I see the appeal of using Gmail to manage all of your mail, including the fact that you can still send through external SMTP servers, but it's just not for me. Native clients continue to improve, and the mismatch between how I handle Gmail on iOS vs (for example) Fastmail shows that they're so wedded to this particular mindset that it's unlikely to ever be fully solved. I look at people like my Dad -- early 70's, who spent most of his career as the "desktop infrastructure" manager at a midsize insurer -- who still wants to have Outlook available because he likes how Outlook does mail. It's just how his mind works. IMAP exists, but it's an implementation detail that's separate from the specific client features they add. Wouldn't mind exploring something akin to a web-based, self-hosted Thunderbird mail client giving a server hosted web UI for multiple email and nntp services. Self hosting your own mailserver is almost always a bad idea unless you're really a dyed-in-the-wool mail nerd - I worked for one at a small startup one summer during college, but they're a rare breed.
mlhpdx 1y ago
I'm so glad I bit the bullet and wrote my own email service.
arbuge 1y ago
Lots of comments here suggesting forwarding emails from the external account to Gmail as a workaround for this. This isn't a complete workaround though. In particular, the option to delete the email from your server after retrieving it will not be replaceable. At least cPanel doesn't seem to offer the option to delete automatically after forwarding, and you could argue it shouldn't - with a push, you never know if the other end actually got it, unlike with a pull.
wiseleo 1y ago
I've been using this feature (POP3 fetch from external accounts, send as external accounts) for over 10 years. It's unfortunate that it will break soon. :(
usapopularsell 1y ago
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wkat4242 1y ago
Funny, at the same time Microsoft is making it mandatory to do just that if you want to use outlook with another provider.
trueismywork 1y ago
What's the motivation?
tracker1 1y ago
I've been experimenting with a few different email options, still relying heavily on my gmail account... but I can say, I'd look into a dedicated host running mailu which is pretty much a docker compose file and configuration that lets you spin up a mail server really quickly and relatively easily. You have to configure a bunch of DNS records accordingly but it tends to work well enough. I've had delivery issues with outlook.com email, but not hotmail or office465, and delivery to gmail has also worked without issue. I need to get off my ass and just create an inbox on my mail server to use instead of the blind/wildcard mail forwarding I currently have. It was a useful feature before google domains set off, and I setup my domains on cloudflare for it, bit really should just self-host it all with a good hourly backup/rsync out.
mrWiz 1y ago
Right now I'm using a grandfathered-in free Google Workspace account to send/receive email from a custom domain. I'd like to transfer my email to another provider (Zoho, maybe?) to avoid getting rug-pulled by Google down the road. I'm assuming that if I transfer my email and domain (via IMAP, probably) I'll need to make new Google account for non-email related things (Docs, Drive, Youtube, etc). Does anyone know if this assumption is valid?
- monocularvision 1y ago
  I have had this same question for a while now.
- hcaz 1y ago
  Protonmail is a good alternative if its imap restrictions are not a problem for you
  - mrWiz 1y ago
    I'd prefer to have full IMAP support without needing a specialized app, otherwise Proton seems like a better choice than Zoho, which is definitely overkill for my needs. [edit] I just found purelymail, which seems like a good fit.
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658 points by sumanep 1y ago

goddamn it

The linked page says that Gmail is discontinuing support for the old Post Office Protocol in favor of IMAP. Nobody has used POP much in years. Decades, maybe. IMAP can check for mail without downloading. But apparently Gmail doesn't support that. You can do this the other way round. Use a local email client such as Thunderbird on desktop or FastMail on Android to check Gmail and any other email accounts you have.

belst 1y ago
only the phone app supports imap. the web app does not, it used to support pop
- 12435454344345 1y ago
  Gdiehdis29739237
- NetMageSCW 1y ago
  I don’t think that is a good way to express it. The gmail service supported POP and any gmail client (e.g. my iOS Mail app) could then get that email. It isn’t about only the web client.
OJFord 1y ago
No, they're discontinuing POP 'import' (so mail ends up stored in Gmail) configured in the web app and available everywhere, in favour of IMAP client access from the mobile clients only. Fine for some people, not at all equivalent for others. (I'm disinterested, fwiw, haven't used Gmail other than an alumni forwarding address for years.) It's not just a protocol change.
- sumanep 1y ago
  You can use pop still, just not to see external emails in gmail web (and you cant use imap either to do that)
lhamil64 1y ago
Huh, apparently I still have a POP3 email setup in Gmail, my old ISP provided email. Mildly annoying that it's going away, but I never use that email anyway so I guess it's not a big deal for me.
gausswho 1y ago
TIL what POP meant after three decades. Thanks!
cosinetau 1y ago
> Nobody has used POP much in years Writing in as a current POP user. I use it to import email every day.
cosmotic 1y ago
I use POP to maintain control over my data.
- mrbluecoat 1y ago
  This. I use POP and Thunderbird to download all my email and erase it from their servers so they can't later use it for AI training, ad personalization, persona tracking, etc.
  - jasonfarnon 1y ago
    Unfortunately deleting your email probably doesn't "erase it from their servers". This was the substance of one of the old google location history lawsuits, where "erase my history" only erased your device's access to it. They retain a possibly transformed copy for training etc.
  - cortesoft 1y ago
    You don’t have an ability to “erase it from their servers”. There is no way to be sure they actually delete anything when you erase it, they could just be hiding the access.
    - userbinator 1y ago
      Speaking as someone who worked in a large company before (although perhaps not Google-sized), and several smaller ones, they are very motivated to reduce storage costs whenever possible. Sure they could be "just hiding the access" immediately after you request them to delete, but that storage will likely be overwritten soon by something else.
      - teo_zero 1y ago
        > they are very motivated to reduce storage costs whenever possible On the other hand, they are also very motivated to have a large mass of data to train their AI. Which of the two motivations wins, is debatable. Today I'd bet on AI.
cortesoft 1y ago
The deprecation is about the webmail version of Gmail. You can’t check other accounts while using the web version of Gmail.
- cpncrunch 1y ago
  It's a little unclear whether you will still be able to use pop3 on the mobile app or not.
  - cortesoft 1y ago
    I think you can, but those emails are only going to exist on your phone, though. They aren't imported into your Gmail account itself.
    - cpncrunch 1y ago
      Yeah, that's fine for my needs. Just hoping it will continue to work that way.
casenmgreen 1y ago
> Nobody has used POP much in years. Decades, maybe. I use it in preference to IMAP, to reduce attack surface; to get my emails off the server and down onto my laptop as quickly as possible. I don't like the idea of leaving all my email on a server.
sumanep 1y ago
The linked page don't say that. Pop will still be supportedand imap was never an option for adding external accounts in gmail webmail

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

I thought they would want us sucking down our external mail into their system to keep us inside the wall with scannable data. What the heck.

righthand 1y ago
There’s probably a security issue and the product owner can’t figure out how to vibe code their way out.

jeffbee 1y ago

I guess they couldn't find anyone qualified to maintain the mailfetcher.

mxuribe 1y ago
I wonder if this is a little about storage costs? I mean, at their scale, i imagine the core cost of the actual storage by itself is pretty negligible...but maybe combined with other infra. (beyond storage) that needs to be considered in the total costs related to storing and managing POP pulls...maybe their data shows that it simply wasn't worth it to them to keep said functionality around? But, your comment did make me chuckle a little! :-)
- jjcob 1y ago
  Maybe it causes too many issues? POP is pretty unpredictable when multiple clients access the same server.
  - mxuribe 1y ago
    Yeah, that would be a good point...like, maybe its not just about cost, but more trouble than its worth. On another comment i made here, i wondered if its not just storage costs, but costs or *annoyance* of running infra. that oversees the fetching, the storage, yada, yada...al for POP, whose users leveraging said functionality are crazy low.
- jimrandomh 1y ago
  They already have a quota and billing framework in place for email storage. If it was about storage costs, I'd expect them to address it through that.
  - mxuribe 1y ago
    Makes sense.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  The number of people who actually use this feature to fetch mail into their Gmail account in the year 2025 has got to be pretty damn near zero.

mustaphah 1y ago

A quick hack: forward @yourdomain.com emails to your Gmail (e.g, Cloudflare Email Routing). Outbound emails sent via "Send mail as:" using SMTP remain unaffected.

flakeoil 1y ago
Or forward your gmail to another proper email domain.
- mustaphah 1y ago
  I just can't live without the Gmail spamfilter. It's just the best. Industry-leading; no question.
  - nulbyte 1y ago
    Gmail regularly lets through spam, including backscatter spam from mail sent to the google.com domain spoofing Gmail users. Industry-leading is not the term I would use to describe their spam heuristics. Grey listing has been far more effective at stopping spam than some half-baked AI garbage from Google.
    - mustaphah 1y ago
      Not ideal - can't disagree. Still, it's the industry leader. I'm not aware of a better spamfilter. Grey listing doesn't scale; not for me.
      - akkartik 1y ago
        I forward everything including spam to Fastmail. Their spam filter is absolutely fine. This way I don't need to check for false positives in 2 places. You're probably losing one genuine message a year if you don't check your Gmail spam folder.
    - nottorp 1y ago
      Hmm. Not really. I run greylisting on my personal domain which is extremely low traffic and lately I'm getting like 4-5 spams per day that obey it correctly. Which is more than the non spam emails that come on it :)

herczegzsolt 1y ago

This will be a major inconvenience for migrating mail accounts. I used the POP feature a lot to get mails from one account to the other without requiring a client to do the dirty work. A migration is still possible, but needing to keep a client up and running to push up mails via IMAP will be a major painpoint.

xp84 1y ago
This sounds like an opportunity for a cool open source project: A container which checks a given POP account every few minutes, and copies the message into an IMAP server of your choice.
- cortesoft 1y ago
  Someone created that project 29 years ago… fetchmail https://www.fetchmail.info/ https://www.fetchmail.info/
  - xp84 1y ago
    Am I expected to keep abreast of developments in the tech world every three decades?? I’ve been busy.
NetMageSCW 1y ago
Google has an email migration feature useful for one time migration.

windows2020 1y ago

Back to the old Thunderbird days I guess.

fxtentacle 1y ago
By now, it's new and quite neat :)
bcrl 1y ago
Some of us are still using mutt!

jimrandomh 1y ago

I can't tell whether I use this; the description in the article sort-of matches a feature I use, but not exactly. The feature I use is labelled "Check mail from other accounts" and appears in the "Accounts and Import" tab in Gmail web; it causes Gmail to periodically retrieve emails from an external server using POP, and merge them into my main inbox. This article refers to the option "Check mail from other accounts", which matches, but also says "POP only works with a single device", which is false (wrt this feature) and makes me think it may be talking about something different. I'm hearing about this for the first time from HN (not from Google). I don't like having Google randomly drop IT tasks on my plate, and the possibility that emails might just silently stop being delivered is nighmarish. Sigh.

iLoveOncall 1y ago
The top comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45440465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45440465 makes it clear that what you're referring to is exactly what is being deprecated.
- jimrandomh 1y ago
  No it doesn't make it clear, because it's written by a third party reading the same internally-inconsistent page I am; any information added beyond the Google documentation page is conjecture.
  - znort_ 1y ago
    "Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts through POP." seems quite clear.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      Good god Google can't be bothered to not wreck shit that doesn't cost them much, eh? Doesn't surprise me too much though, Gmail hasn't seen much maintenance and polish over the last few years.

mobilene 1y ago

Well _this_ is a pisser for sure. I've relied on POP3 email transfer for years and years so that I have one mailbox to check: Gmail.

leptons 1y ago
I use Firebird and have it check my various Gmail accounts using imap, as well as non-google email accounts. Everything in one place.
- tarboreus 1y ago
  For now.
geor9e 1y ago
>one mailbox to check: Gmail. I do this, but I guess I'm safe, since I did it via the setting "Forward a copy of incoming mail to x and archive Gmail's copy" or equivilent option for each provider.
pier25 1y ago
Same. What are the alternative you're looking at? Currently looking at Zoho. Apparently Proton doesn't have third party POP accounts.

zwieback 1y ago

Learned from this post that Gmail web had POP! Now I'll be mourning loss of a feature I never even used.

invalidusernam3 1y ago
I've been using it for many years, super simple way to have many email addresses deliver to a single gmail. The effort I'll spend migrating will be better spent setting up a non-Google alternative

Dwedit 1y ago

You can still use a third-party mail client to POP off the server, then use IMAP to send it to Gmail.

NetMageSCW 1y ago
That isn’t very responsive or convenient…

Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y ago

Oh damn.I need to migrate everything.

deleted 1y ago

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xp84 1y ago

Hypothesis: This feature is actually a very serviceable way for a small business or individual to have a branded email address on very cheap email hosting, while getting Gmail features for free. Google wants such people to be paying for Google Workspace if they don't want to be advertising the Gmail brand on their address.

czechdeveloper 1y ago
They did the same with free version of Google Workspace. It's just no longer free.
- xp84 1y ago
  Exactly. To Google, wanting to use a domain other than Gmail is a strong signal that they can probably shake you down for a few bucks a month. Sure it’s just $7 for most of these people and they probably only have 1-2 accounts. But multiplied by how many million people they saw using this feature it could be worth it to Google. Plus also ending the infra cost of fetching. For those of us who were just using the feature to aggregate mail from other email addresses like an old Yahoo account or something, I doubt Google cares about it, they even probably kind of liked it that you’re viewing their ads instead of the other guys, but they probably don’t matter enough.
beejiu 1y ago
Doesn't Google Workspace start at $7 per month? I can't see a business user going to those lengths to save $1 or $2 per month.
- ocdtrekkie 1y ago
  I know businesses that use Gmail and have all their staff make username.businessname@gmail.com addresses. Do not bet against how much small businesses don't want to pay for stuff, you will always lose.
  - cj 1y ago

lxgr 1y ago

What in the world was "Gmailify"? Was it different from adding third-party accounts via POP? (Was it maybe just IMAP for third-party accounts?)

NetMageSCW 1y ago
I think it was adding third party accounts via POP but automated for large well known third parties.
Tyr42 1y ago
It was IMAP sync between the Gmail server and the Outlook/Yahoo/etc server. Then you have a regular Gmail account and get notifications, spam checking, mobile push notifications etc.
- lxgr 1y ago
  Thank you! I never knew this was a thing. So it was only available for a small list of services?

bound008 1y ago

I'm not one to defend google, but it seems that they are only ending support for POP accounts, and retaining support for IMAP/SMTP. Seems like a reasonable deprecation for 2025, although they could have given more than a quarter to let people handle the change.

bigwheels 1y ago
But why do they need to remove the functionality? It's been working fine for around 2 decades. As a user of the feature, this is supremely annoying. They didn't even send me a warning message it will be discontinued.
- cyberax 1y ago
  Likely because one of the backend systems that implements this functionality depends on some deprecated service. And nobody cares enough to port the POP checker to use something new.
- warp 1y ago
  Google nowadays just seems afraid to store personal data. Google have moved your maps history/timeline to be on-device only, seemingly in response to geofence warrants. They're also deprecating health (Google Fit) APIs, and moving that data to be on-device. So, removing POP (where they need to download emails to their servers), and only supporting IMAP (where emails stay on the third-party server) via their GMail app, that would be consistent with a policy to store as little personal data as possible. (it could also be completely unrelated :)
  - sumanep 1y ago
    IMAP was never supported and is still not supported for external account un gmail web. And they don´t remove pop. You can use pop to access your gmail in any email client or in the app if you wish.
DominikPeters 1y ago
They have worded things dishonestly to make you think that POP can be replaced by IMAP. The IMAP support is only available in the mobile app (not gmail.com) and isn't a "fetch" that integrates fetched emails to your Gmail inbox. It's kept as a separate inbox.

timbre1234 1y ago

Fetchmail ftw

MarkusWandel 1y ago

Aaaah, OK. So connecting to Gmail via POP is still going to work. I use that with a (otherwise rarely used) Thunderbird instance to keep a live backup of my mail. Because I'm old enough that I don't feel I "own" my data unless it's on a storage device I own.

cracki 1y ago

There are two "Gmail" things here: the actual service with a web site (mail.google.com), and an android app on your phone that is called "Gmail". They are axing the "pull" path of the actual service. That path only supported POP for pulling those mails. There never was an IMAP pull path. They are telling you to read your mails of the "other" account by configuring your Gmail app to access it via IMAP. That obviously won't import those mails from the other account into your Gmail account. The solution is to push. Configure whatever system handles the "other" mail address to forward the mails to your Gmail account.

commandersaki 1y ago
The solution is to push. Configure whatever system handles the "other" mail address to forward the mails to your Gmail account. Yep, I have 4 gmail addresses that I set to copy and forward to my fastmail inbox, unless gmail kills that feature I am golden.
deleted 1y ago
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mikaraento 1y ago
Heads-up to people trying this: Gmail will often put forwarded email into spam. Be careful especially in the beginning to check your spam folder. They may also reject the mail as spam, esp if your volume is large. IIUC it’s hard to make forwarding to play nicely with DKIM and spf. There’s some disagreement on how to handle it. (I’m being purposefully vague as I did interact with folks handling this on the google side and don’t want to cause them trouble for helping me out).
- deleted 1y ago
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- enkrs 1y ago
  There are also rate limits on Google side for incoming mails. By just forwarding four domains to my Gmail I used to hit them quite often. Then 2 years ogo, I stopped forwarding and switched to the now discontinued Gmail fetching domain mails over POP...

jaykru 1y ago

RIP gomailify :( https://www.gomailify.com https://www.gomailify.com

ranger_danger 1y ago
emailnator.com

metadat 1y ago

I suppose the heyday is over, it's time to migrate to something else. Oh, I won't be able to POP push gmail to my new email address, nice. There is an opportunity for someone to make a low-friction service which does server-side forwarding via IMAP with decent anti-spam. If done right, you could soak up a significant chunk of the Internet email biz.

gazby 1y ago
> I suppose the heyday is over, it's time to migrate to something else. Oh, I won't be able to POP push gmail to my new email address, nice. > > There is an opportunity for someone to make a low-friction service which does server-side forwarding via IMAP with decent anti-spam. If done right, you could soak up a significant chunk of the Internet email biz.
NetMageSCW 1y ago
POP doesn’t do push, only pull, and it seems that gmail will still support clients using POP. There is no chance another email service will get any chunk of Internet email if it has to charge for services.

ThrownOffGame 1y ago

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devmor 1y ago

Oh man there goes my access to my old college email from 14 years ago that for some reason never got deactivated, just web login restricted.

seydor 1y ago

They are discontinuing fetching from POP server, but fetching from IMAP is not supported either. So they are discontinuing fetching altogether, right? it won't even be available in the paid version, right? why are they being confusing?

kumarharsh 1y ago
IMAP is supported afaik: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/78892?hl=en#zippy= https://support.google.com/mail/answer/78892?hl=en#zippy=
- bonzini 1y ago
  That's fetching from Gmail via IMAP. With IMAP there's no particular need for fetching from third party accounts. The article itself says that IMAP is supported in the app ("You can still read and send emails from your other account within the Gmail app. This uses a standard IMAP connection, which is supported in the Gmail mobile app"). But indeed this removes altogether the possibility to fetch from third-party accounts into Gmail.

suzzer99 1y ago

I finally figured out the confusion here. What a terribly worded article. Could mean two different things: 1) Some kind of third-party account (whatever that is) can no longer check (fetch) emails from Gmail via POP. I have a test suite that uses POP to fetch emails from Gmail, so this concerns me. 2) Gmail itself can no longer fetch emails from other email accounts over POP (a feature I had no idea existed). I guess it means #2. But it took me a long time to figure that out. You'd think a $trillion company could word things better.

deleted 1y ago
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nl 1y ago
"from third-party accounts" is a better worded version of your (2). Your (1) would be worded in the opposite order.
- suzzer99 1y ago
  The problem is unless you know what "third-party accounts" means, it's ambiguous as to which account is being connected to and which account is doing the connecting over POP. "Gmail will no longer support checking emails from [thing I'm unclear on] over POP." The whole sentence hinges on knowing that Gmail itself can (or could) become a client and go out to other email accounts and fetch emails over POP. In my mind I'm wondering, "Are they talking about something like where Slack connects to gmail?"
makach 1y ago
It's a shame. I use this functionality to retrieve and delete messages from other mailboxes on a daily basis in order to use Gmail as my primary email interface.
- OhMeadhbh 1y ago
  Yeah. The interface isn't bad. Just remember to backup your email somewhere.
- 1y ago

OhMeadhbh 1y ago

Yeah. Gmail is an anti-pattern. I was paying $10/month for workplace and a couple days ago they froze my account because I was accessing it via IMAP. Fortunately, I own the domain so I pointed it at amazon. I pretty much only use google apps to share docs I've written elsewhere, so I didn't really lose too much when I lost access to apps. It would be much cooler if there were a human I could talk to to find out what we did to trigger the account freeze. The only thing I can think of is I accessed my gmail account from a location I don't normally access it from (business trip) about a week after changing from SMS based 2FA to authenticator based 2FA. The cloud is someone else's computer. Sometimes they don't want you on their computer, even if you're paying them to be there. As a reminder, Google Takeout is your friend. We copy email off of gmail via IMAP, mostly so we can have a local backup. I use Takeout for my personal account. Had I thought google would freeze a paid account, I would have used Takeout every week or so to backup the few google apps docs I had up there.

planb 1y ago
I‘m paying for workplace too (ex-free account), can you share more details on why it was frozen? Did they give an explanation or do you just assume it was because you use IMAP? Do you never login to your account on the web and just had it in your mail client?
- OhMeadhbh 1y ago
  no explanation. no response to emails so I have no idea what we did.
  - samat 1y ago
    Did you try calling them?
taneq 1y ago
Can I use POP3 to access Gmail? No. Ah okay, IMAP then? Also no. Edit: Ohhh. According to other posts it’s about gmail not pulling email from other servers via POP3, not about accessing gmail.

PeterStuer 1y ago

One more step to bring email in line with being messages on a website rather than messages on your computer.

heavyset_go 1y ago

RIP to my OG Gmail account that I forgot the password to but still have POP access to via the Gmail web client.

breakingcups 1y ago
Wonder if it's possible to change the POP server without changing the credentials... You could set up your own sniffer server to retrieve the password that Gmail sends to you.
- shagrath 1y ago
  I'm in the same boat, and unfortunately, no

mijoharas 1y ago

Somewhat related. What do people use to keep an offline backup of Gmail, and other mail accounts? Do you need to keep a full download of your mailbox, or is there some way to get an incremental dump (i.e. just things that changed since X)

rendx 1y ago
I use imapsync. Yes you can limit it to mails sent or received in a certain timespan. https://imapsync.lamiral.info/FAQ.d/FAQ.Archiving.txt https://imapsync.lamiral.info/FAQ.d/FAQ.Archiving.txt
- mijoharas 1y ago
  Hey, first off, thanks. How do you go about that? The documentation says: Q. Can imapsync be used to maintain and restore a local offline copy of a mailbox, eg for backup purposes, using Mbox or Maildir format, so that if the server fails, then the mailbox could be reinstated? R1. No. Imapsync plays with IMAP servers only.
  - rendx 1y ago
    Ah yes, I run a local IMAP server (Dovecot).
- password4321 1y ago
  I'm guessing imapsync could be used to transfer email into Gmail to replace this POP client feature that is being removed, as long as it can sync into a folder.
  - tracker1 1y ago
    Maybe... but at that point you're self-hosting a service/app instead of relying on google to pull your other account into gmail. At such point it may be best just to use your vanity email first, and yoink out your gmail into that account.
1y ago

srb24 1y ago

POP is not perfect (could a new version be created - POP4??) but IMAP is not always the solution. For one thing it makes switching mail provider very hard when you haven't got a copy of all your historic emails - with POP you just change settings and away you go. Ms are also always trying to turn off POP access for the Office Outlook program. Hmmmmmm It's almost as if both they and Google run two of the largest subscription email hosting platforms which would both benefit if it's harder for people to change provider... Of course the less you download the more you have to store on their servers and the more you store the more you pay and of course every day brings more emails to store....

yreg 1y ago
This is about uploading data to gmail. You continue to be able to download from gmail via pop3.

randomtoast 1y ago

Gmail's endgame plan is that virtually everyone in the world is forced to use Gmail or have a very reduced email experience.

vladms 1y ago
Good luck with that. I changed to a different provider like 10 months ago and to be honest I do not see big differences. It was a problem with a couple of other sites that don't allow you to change your user/email, but we can't blame that on Gmail.

Andrew_nenakhov 1y ago

Well, I'm that Gmail user who used POP3 fetching from my previous email from day 1 of using Gmail. I guess I'll have to set up IMAP then, at least until the time they'll take it away, too.

NetMageSCW 1y ago
I would replace POP with forwarding unless you are okay with storing your email in multiple services.

xdanger 1y ago

Oh no, I have to go and setup my family's emails again. We have a domain and I used to forward to some gmail accounts (few don't want to use multiple email programs/accounts), but so much mail got lost (not even in spam folder) that I just had to switch everyone to pop3 fetch to gmail.com. Now at least email get's there, even if it's 30-60mins late (really annoying for logins/verifications/etc.). Maybe it's time to switch everyone out of gmail and make gmail forward the email to out hosted accounts.

ThePowerOfFuet 1y ago
Migadu.
- lagniappe 1y ago
  Migadu.
tracker1 1y ago
I've been using mail forwarding with my cloudflare domains without issue in gmail since google domains sold... you may want to consider that, delivery has been very good. As another alternative, if you self-host an MTA, you can relay through SendGrid, which also has had really good outbound deliverability, I've used this for a hobby site/app that has a built in MTA.
sunnybeetroot 1y ago
Is my understanding correct that if you stop paying for your domain, someone else will register it and get access to all your accounts?

noirscape 1y ago

They're almost certainly doing this to put the screws on Gmail users. Data export compat isn't great with Gmail to begin with, but at least with a vanity domain you could have the option to use that instead and if Google went bad, you could still use it directly without having to reconfigure a lot of stuff. (Since this feature is meant to integrate with shared hosting providers that offer an email service "for free".) Axing this feature (title is slightly misleading - you can't do the same thing over IMAP with the Gmail service; external mail fetch is dead) is an attempt to get people to stop using vanity domains so they're locked in/tied to the Gmail ecosystem. Pretty awful and I wonder how wise of a business decision this is, given Google is one of the companies who's getting side-eyed in Europe due to being an American big tech company with ties to the US government. Wouldn't be surprised if a good number of people will just abandon the big G's mail service as a result. Regular people (so not tech people) are more aware about this sort of thing than they were before, and Gmail specifically has been getting the stinkeye because of how obvious it is. This will only end up confirming those fears.

NetMageSCW 1y ago
Forwarding works fine and has been how I’ve always used gmail.
- sumanep 1y ago
  Yahoo doesn't allow forwarding anymore
sumanep 1y ago
You can't do the same thing with imap.

CTOSian 1y ago

I am using the gmail web-app to access emails from eg yahoo and outlook, well if they pull off the plug of this feature (gmail mobile app only) no big deal - sod off gmail (web app again) there is zoho that you can do this with a very small cost (abt £1/mo IIRC)

cess11 1y ago

I think most readers here could afford a domain name and email accounts with some local or otherwise small provider, that's a much better option.

NetMageSCW 1y ago
That’s a terrible idea - putting your email at risk with a small local provider is asking for future trouble.
- cess11 1y ago
  Not really, no.

anty 1y ago

Is there any solution that does not require me to run my own email server? I have a 2GB email server. I use POP to regularly import the mails into Gmail. This deletes the mails on my limited-storage-server. I already pay for Google storage. I do not want to pay (more) for another email server just so I can keep all my emails forever. Forwarding mails does not work, because Gmail quietly drops mails. They don't even put them into the spam folder. My webhoster told me I could pay for Google Workspace. There you apparently can use your own domain. But then I have a third service I have to pay.

Jolter 1y ago
Did you rule out using IMAP?
- anty 1y ago
  With IMAP i need to run a mail server that stores my mails forever, right? I want to "import" a copy into Gmail and delete it on the original server.
NetMageSCW 1y ago
Forwarding is the right solution, but it needs to be at a lower level than a regular user style email forward - more like a DNS delivery change.

noduerme 1y ago

FUCK THIS. This is disgusting. I've been using Thunderbird for 10 years as the way I normally download my gmail. I have no interest in using IMAP, I store everything locally. I suppose the idea is that they can make more money if you don't delete after you download your mail, then you have to pay them for storage?! Is that what this is about?? Because there have to be a small handful of people in the world still using POP to access gmail. Feels fucking personal.

hackernewds 1y ago
Bit of an overreaction since your use case isn't being affected at all. Rather they are making no money off it, and continue to support it.
- noduerme 1y ago
  That was not very clear from the article, but yeah. Understood. I don't even know wtf "third party accounts" are. Nowhere does it say that they will continue to support :995 access. They should mention that somewhere.
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
The article is about Gmail checking third party account through POP and not about checking Gmail using POP which remains supported.
- noduerme 1y ago
  Ah. Thanks. Since I don't have any kind of multiple account setup with Gmail, it really wasn't clear on a first read of the article that it wouldn't apply to all POP access. Sigh of relief...? Sirens going off? I run my own mail server, but I use gmail as a backstop - i.e. if a hosting provider needed to verify me, that would go to my gmail account. I should probably radically reconsider that now before it's too late, because I really don't like the way this is trending.
- NetMageSCW 1y ago
  I hope so but the article is incredibly unclear about that since it suggest an alternative is to configure IMAP on your third party account as an option.

sylware 1y ago

And a few months ago, they did, literaly, block noscript/basic (x)html browsers for their dominant search engine (right before that they were white-listing a few of those browsers). Gogol has been on the super evil guys side for a while. The US admin has been trying to "anti-trust" them for years, without any results to make them behave: because its need to have a technical part. With enforced, minimal, simple and good enough to do the job technical protocols/file formats. Usually, a small subset of what it is already running IRL would be defined as those protocols/file formats. For the web, that would be noscript/basic (x)html (remember when most of the web was running perfectly fine with basic html forms?) All that to allow alternative small implementations to be real-life alternatives. I could buy on amazon with lynx browser hardly a few years back, now I cannot (well I have not tried in a while), the agenda of the devil is followed perfectly.

anentropic 1y ago

That sinking feeling... I have no idea if I'm using this. I set something up like 20 years ago when migrating from a self-hosted email to Gmail. But I think maybe at least one of my addresses might still be a POP mailbox.

chanux 1y ago
They would surely send an e-mail with the specifics if you are affected, right?

bborud 1y ago

I have a Google Workspace for my family. Mostly for email. Has anyone had a similar setup and moved in to Protonmail?

shauntest12321 1y ago

Forward Email for me.

paride5745 1y ago

I already started to move most of my communications to ProtonMail. Looks like Google wants to force people to use the WebUI instead of email clients (no google ads on IMAP/POP). What's annoying is that they are impacting paying customers as well, which is quite bad.

kelvinjps10 1y ago
But Proton doesn't offer good third-party access either; actually, Gmail is better
- mempko 1y ago
  Yes it does, they have an official software called the bridge which allows you to connect a 3rd party email client.
ianhawes 1y ago
I suspect this has much more to do with bad actors using automated means to access Gmail and send spam.
- NetMageSCW 1y ago
  How does gmail using POP to retrieve messages to your account from your account with another service facilitate spam and how can the bad actor take advantage of that?
- sumanep 1y ago
  That does not make sense
newscracker 1y ago
Last I checked, Proton Mail does not support standard email client protocols. So you’re stuck with its apps and a browser interface or with buying a paid subscription and using a bridge software on desktop to use a client like Thunderbird. Getting mails out of Proton Mail is also not as easy as setting up a client with IMAP or using other tools like imapsync.

daitangio 1y ago

I set up my personal mail server https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver and I have wrote about it here https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-on-docker https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-on-docker I am GMail-free from 2020 and I am a lot happier. I keep my GMail account, but I use just as failsafe or as seconday account. In the meantime, I have very little trouble managing my mail-server.

ddtaylor 1y ago
Wow this is awesome!

deleted 1y ago

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enigma101 1y ago

that's a bit rich from google to not support the essential protocol of email

NetMageSCW 1y ago
Are there other email services that support scheduled POP transfer of email from other accounts?

michaelbryzek 1y ago

Thanks for mentioning Google Takeout - was not aware of that service and found it very useful

schnable 1y ago

It's amusing to me that big friendly Google that started out giving massive amounts of storage away for free (effectively unlimited at the time) has been on a kick to roll that back.

bunderbunder 1y ago
Their advertising used to be so wildly profitable that they just straight-up had money to burn. That business model has been getting less and less sustainable as their advertising profits continue to erode.

matheusmoreira 1y ago

Stop using gmail. I bought a Proton Mail subscription. Truly one of the best things I've ever done.

mcpar-land 1y ago
especially if you have a custom domain with google workspace (or whatever it's named now). my switch to pointing my domain from google to proton was totally painless, you can migrate all your old emails, etc. i imagine if you just have an @gmail.com it might be a little more annoying what with having to do forwarding, but still worth it.
ImJamal 1y ago
Proton doesn't support pop either?
- matheusmoreira 1y ago
  I didn't need it. Alternatives like fastmail should be good in that case.

pier25 1y ago

Well fuck. I've been using this feature since I started using Gmail in 2007 or so.

DamnInteresting 1y ago
I'm in the same boat, watching Google preparing to capsize it. I'm a paying customer, and they keep making my life more difficult.

nla 1y ago

The Google enshitification continues unabated.

neves 1y ago

Everytime someone tells me about the advantages of decentralization, I ask them to explain me why e-mail, the decentralization protocol per excellence, now is centralized in a handful of companies.

chrisfinazzo 1y ago

Why are people surprised by this? (No, really) IMAP "defeated" POP long ago if you wanted to use a third-party client but still access mail from anywhere. By definition, this doesn't work in a POP environment, but that's increasingly an outdated mindset. For historical reasons (intertia, and being early enough that I was able to acquire a "firstname.lastname" address), I don't plan to leave Gmail unless things really go south. My personal domain (Fastmail) is used for other things and I've never anything other than Mail.app and their own web interface.

tracker1 1y ago
This is about importing email from your non-gmail account INTO your gmail account. POP is simply the easiest way to do this, and just from GMail's own IMAP interface, it's pretty clear that IMAP is NOT reliable for this task... The details in TFA are that you can add an external IMAP account to the gmail client app in Android. This does nothing for the gmail web ui, meaning you need something else for your external email. Wouldn't mind exploring something akin to a web-based, self-hosted Thunderbird mail client giving a server hosted web UI for multiple email and nntp services. If if synced to desktop/mobile apps and/or had a decent mobile web UX, that would be gravy.
- chrisfinazzo 1y ago
  I see the appeal of using Gmail to manage all of your mail, including the fact that you can still send through external SMTP servers, but it's just not for me. Native clients continue to improve, and the mismatch between how I handle Gmail on iOS vs (for example) Fastmail shows that they're so wedded to this particular mindset that it's unlikely to ever be fully solved. I look at people like my Dad -- early 70's, who spent most of his career as the "desktop infrastructure" manager at a midsize insurer -- who still wants to have Outlook available because he likes how Outlook does mail. It's just how his mind works. IMAP exists, but it's an implementation detail that's separate from the specific client features they add. Wouldn't mind exploring something akin to a web-based, self-hosted Thunderbird mail client giving a server hosted web UI for multiple email and nntp services. Self hosting your own mailserver is almost always a bad idea unless you're really a dyed-in-the-wool mail nerd - I worked for one at a small startup one summer during college, but they're a rare breed.

mlhpdx 1y ago

I'm so glad I bit the bullet and wrote my own email service.

arbuge 1y ago

Lots of comments here suggesting forwarding emails from the external account to Gmail as a workaround for this. This isn't a complete workaround though. In particular, the option to delete the email from your server after retrieving it will not be replaceable. At least cPanel doesn't seem to offer the option to delete automatically after forwarding, and you could argue it shouldn't - with a push, you never know if the other end actually got it, unlike with a pull.

wiseleo 1y ago

I've been using this feature (POP3 fetch from external accounts, send as external accounts) for over 10 years. It's unfortunate that it will break soon. :(

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wkat4242 1y ago

Funny, at the same time Microsoft is making it mandatory to do just that if you want to use outlook with another provider.

trueismywork 1y ago

What's the motivation?

tracker1 1y ago

I've been experimenting with a few different email options, still relying heavily on my gmail account... but I can say, I'd look into a dedicated host running mailu which is pretty much a docker compose file and configuration that lets you spin up a mail server really quickly and relatively easily. You have to configure a bunch of DNS records accordingly but it tends to work well enough. I've had delivery issues with outlook.com email, but not hotmail or office465, and delivery to gmail has also worked without issue. I need to get off my ass and just create an inbox on my mail server to use instead of the blind/wildcard mail forwarding I currently have. It was a useful feature before google domains set off, and I setup my domains on cloudflare for it, bit really should just self-host it all with a good hourly backup/rsync out.

mrWiz 1y ago

Right now I'm using a grandfathered-in free Google Workspace account to send/receive email from a custom domain. I'd like to transfer my email to another provider (Zoho, maybe?) to avoid getting rug-pulled by Google down the road. I'm assuming that if I transfer my email and domain (via IMAP, probably) I'll need to make new Google account for non-email related things (Docs, Drive, Youtube, etc). Does anyone know if this assumption is valid?

monocularvision 1y ago
I have had this same question for a while now.
hcaz 1y ago
Protonmail is a good alternative if its imap restrictions are not a problem for you
- mrWiz 1y ago
  I'd prefer to have full IMAP support without needing a specialized app, otherwise Proton seems like a better choice than Zoho, which is definitely overkill for my needs. [edit] I just found purelymail, which seems like a good fit.

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