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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, whil
by 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 agoThey did the same with free version of Google Workspace. It's just no longer free.
- xp84 1y agoExactly. 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 agoDoesn'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 agoI 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 agoThe bigger cost of Google Workspace is the administrative overhead. The admin panel for Google Workspace is extremely powerful. Hundreds/thousands of settings. Great for medium/large businesses with a dedicated IT person. A huge headache for small businesses.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoI think a minimum of being able to shut down an account when you fire someone and delete the data is worth having manageability, but small businesses will do anything, even additional staff administrative overhead, to avoid paying a subscription.
- Brian_K_White 1y agoYou can't both realize that getting people to pay you even a tiny but recurring subscription is how you get a fat and easy life, and at the same time fail to realize that paying anyone else even a tiny but recurring subscription is how you give someone else a fat and easy life at the expense of your own.
- cj 1y agoThe majority of small businesses aren’t subscription based services. I was assuming we were talking about companies like your local coffee shop.
- TeMPOraL 1y agoSame companies are also mortally offended by the very idea of having to pay salaries and (gasp!) taxes; asking them to also pay for tools feels like adding an insult to injury!
- londons_explore 1y ago
- jonathantf2 1y agoI have had multiple people scream at me on the phone for daring to suggest that a new person working needs their own email account and it will cost about £4 ($5.30~) a month
- luckydata 1y agoyou work for the wrong people
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoIf only life could be so easy that we could all avoid working for the "wrong people".
- schnable 1y agoGoing from $0? That isn't surprising.
- OhMeadhbh 1y agoYeah... but Workspace has other problems. The only thing Workspace gives you is a more direct way to pay Google until they freeze your account.
- pier25 1y agoPer user/domain. I'm retrieving POP emails from multiple domains. To migrate to Google Workspace I'd need to pay like $40 per month... and a couple of those inboxes rarely receive any emails.
- tln 1y agoVery cheap email hosting still generally comes with IMAP I think? Which gmail is still supporting. EG Namecheap $1/mo email comes with IMAP.
- cracki 1y agoHow is google mail still supporting a "fetch" via IMAP of mails stored in a third party service? What are the settings to poke on mail.google.com for this? The announcement clearly says that "Check mail from other accounts" will disappear. They say it's about POP, but if the entire feature disappears, then it's not just about POP.
- entropie 1y agoIam not sure about that - the wording is weird > Starting January 2026, Gmail will no longer provide support for the following: > POP: Unlike IMAP connections, with POP, emails are downloaded, and you decide how often you want to download new emails.
- sossles 1y agoI have an email forwarder on my personal domain that forwards to my gmail address, and gmail lets me send email as if it were coming from that address. Seems like it's the same result, and they're not blocking that.
- pbreit 1y agoIMAP, which is MUCH better at doing the same thing, is still supported.
- DominikPeters 1y agoIt is not supported. You can only add an IMAP mailbox on the mobile app and not on gmail.com. The IMAP account is then displayed as an inbox completely separate from your gmail inbox. There is no pull and no integration.
- isaachinman 1y ago[flagged]
- aragilar 1y agoBut you can't pull from a third party into gmail via IMAP.
- isaachinman 1y agoCorrect
- sccxy 1y agoSo why you say "Not true at all"? Is it AI spam to advertise your product?
- bloat 1y agoThis isn't the same thing. Yes Gmail provides IMAP so you can read it from other clients. The issue here is that Gmail cannot use IMAP to ingest email from other accounts, as it can (or could) using POP3.
- pbreit 1y agoAh, I see, I think you're right. I misread the Google doc.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- yaur 1y agoPOP has been a problematic protocol since 2000 or so.
- xp84 1y agoPerhaps for main email-management use, but it perfectly fits the model of yanking a single stream of email from server A to load into server B - without resorting to forwarding, which is problematic because the middlemen don’t want the spam that gets forwarded to reflect poorly upon their IP reputation.
- yard2010 1y agoI would happily pay to get something else than the enshitified Gmail experience
- pier25 1y ago> while getting Gmail features for free Maybe initially. But if you use Gmail for third party email storage (which is what the POP feature is really about) after some time you'll have to pay for Google One for more storage.