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.
Google is absolutely notorious for freezing accounts with zero warning, zero explanation and zero recourse.
I personally experienced this while working for a charity that used Google workspace. After 8 years they suddenly froze the account. The freeze lasted 32 days. During this period they could not operate and Google was completely unresponsive for the first 2 weeks. Google then started demanding various forms of proof of incorporation, various employee government ID's, things like that. We provided all this information. After another week of silence they started asking for ID's of people that did not even work there. We told them we could not provide this information, because of that. Silence. Finally at week 4 we got a call from someone in India that told us there was nothing they could do and the response team would continue to investigate. We are not allowed any contact with the investigation team. Then 32 days after being locked out,the account was silently unlocked again with no explanation.
I cannot discourage people from using any google product for their business any more strongly than this story. They are a terrible company and do not care at all about their customers. They are too big to fail so they just stomp all over you.
Remember google has no way to contact them other than an email form. Which we filled out 2-5 per DAY, which went mostly un-responded to. In the painfully rare case that you do get someone one the phone they will just be someone in India that tells you sorry, nothing we can do.
I was about a week from launching a react native app on iOS/Android, so decided to go through all the administrative motions to get things going in case there were any delays in getting that moving.
Google Developer account cost me $25. A few days go by and I get an e-mail asking for identification documents and a bill that shows that I live at the place I'm at. I send my passport and utility bill with my name on it, those get rejected with absolutely 0 reason the next day.
Zero explanation. I raised about 8 different support tickets and DMed several people on twitter and linkedin that worked for google and emailed a few higher up people.
At one point I got some communication from a completely different department that wasn't accessible to the support lines publicly available, and it looked like they were going to help me.
But in the end nothing.
This was a copy/paste response I saw for every support ticket:
Thanks for contacting the Google Play team.
As much as I'd like to help, I’m not able to provide any more information. Unfortunately, we are unable to verify the documents you provided and are unable to grant your appeal.
If you are located in the EU, you may have additional redress options. Learn more about those potential options in the EU Out-of-Court Dispute Resolution Help Center. Routing ID: ZLFS
Thanks again for your understanding.
My final response after a week of relentless effort:
I'll concede in understanding that:
No one has actually looked at my documents
No one wants to give me a reason why you won't help me
No one on your entire support team is capable of performing basic customer support tasks.
Thanks for treating me like some untouchable beggar when you were the ones that stole $25 from me.
Apple/iOS cost me $100 and my developer account was verified within two days with zero hassle.
If you have a business on there sure take out will save the data. How are you going to restructure your entire business on a new platform that you now have to evaluate and purchase under duress. Not even including retraining everyone.
There have been studies about what happens to business when this happens. They go out of business nearly without exception.
> I was paying $10/month for workplace and a couple days ago they froze my account because I was accessing it via IMAP.
I used to pay for Workspace and left because a good chunk of features across all Google products simply didn't work with Workspace accounts, or were held back for a year or more after free Google accounts got them. It's a mess. Then they kept increasing the price for good measure, and there's no off-ramp, if you stop paying then the account is left in a zombie state with even less functionality than a free one until you start paying again.
Do yourself a favour and use Fastmail or Proton or anything else for your vanity domain instead.
I have this annoying problem. When not plugged into my car I can say
"Hey google remind me to call in sick tomorrow"
and it will put an entry into the calendar for me.
But if it is plugged into my car the same request will elicit an
"I'm sorry please talk to your system administrator to get this feature enabled"
This has gone on for years with google assistant and workspace accounts. There is always some random interlock in some byzantine permissions table that get's triggered at the most inconvenient moment and you can't do what yesterday you could do.
This is a super annoying quirk, lots of things don't work well if you're using workspace as a normal gmail account, and they don't quite warn you up front.
It's pretty much my #1 example of Google's propensity for shipping its org chart.
Workspace accounts come with their own compliance requirements and edge cases that products need to handle, but rather than do that and provide a consistent user experience most product teams don't answer to the relevant PAs and so don't care, and Workspace accounts are a small enough minority of users that nobody has to care.
I've often railed against a particular way of doing product that's really common in our industry, but I suppose it's been a while so I'll do it again:
We have a real problem with metrics-driven product development, where we exclusively care about the 95% use case and actively disdain the 5% use cases.
On paper it makes sense - you direct your energies towards the highest-payback activities. But the problem is that every user falls into some 5% use cases, so a product that is purely made up of 95% use cases ends up becoming a patchwork that is frustrating to every user, somehow.
Rather than "product works great for 95% of users" you get "100% of users cut themselves on some corner of the product".
Google converted my mum's Gmail account to a workspace account automatically. Now she can't use her bedroom alarm clock because it's connected to my dad's Gmail account and you can't share access to workspace accounts. It's stupidly maddening.
And yes I realise that an IoT alarm clock is ridiculous, but that's not the point.
It was a proper Gmail account? Or was it an email@domain account that maybe was using her work email address?
I’m asking because I used to work adjacent to this area, and I know of only a few scenarios where an account becomes a workspace account after being a consumer account.
Off topic a bit: Facebook just converted my personal account to a professional account. I have no idea why. Although as I think about it for a moment, it might be related to the fact that I visit/use Facebook less than once a year....
It's a completely avoidable situation too, there's nothing stopping them from offering custom domains as a perk of paid Google One plans for regular Google accounts. Workspace is beyond overkill for individuals, you shouldn't need all that complexity just to attach a custom domain to a personal Gmail account.
I had to admin Google Workspace maybe 9-10 years ago. It was rough but I thought they'd beep refining it. I'm back in a company using GW and I swear to god it's gotten worse. The basic features that simple don't exist are boggling. It is not a serious product and I feel bad for companies that have to use it. I've been here three months and I'm already planning our migration away.
I tried Proton and my test emails couldn’t even get through that I sent myself. Kept going to spam instantly. The big providers have us in a stranglehold here.
I don’t have a domain. It was Proton emails going straight to Gmail spam. I absurdly have even had similar issues on fresh virgin iCloud email accounts going straight to spam in Gmail.
Is it possible to drop workspace, but keep the same account running for your android account? Or still log in with the same account (I guess downgraded to a non-paid account) for sheets etc?
IIRC you can still log into a lapsed Workspace account, but the core "business" products like Gmail, Docs and Meet are completely disabled until you reactivate your subscription. The rest of Google still works to the extent that it ever did under the weird Workspace limitations.
You cannot migrate a Workspace account into a regular Google account, you're stuck with Workspace forever unless you start over on a brand new account.
I honestly believe that last point is the reason people still have their free grand-parented in workspace accounts. Google went to close them down realized they didn't have a graceful way to let people keep their paid for apps and realized the engineering time to create a workspace to consumer migration was worth much more than any costs associated with those accounts.
>> you can actually contact real humans as a workspace customer easily.
I can barely get replies from my Google Cloud rep and we’re paying them a lot more than $10 per month. Having reps on staff doesn’t mean they have time until things are escalated. When Google threw captchas up on Workspace accounts with integrations (which our product is) for 20ish minutes on Friday and everything was a panic we got responses from a few reps all at once, but mostly to hand wave away the outage.
If you want a fun example there’s a LegalEagle video where he details the difficulty in getting imposter accounts taken down from YouTube through his contacts. He’s not just a random YouTube user, he makes them money.
And for what it’s worth, these experiences are what I have come to expect from everyone outside of the high tiers of AWS Premium Support and a couple other vendors where you pay what is essentially a timeshare agreement for a support team.
Ha, no way man. I've been trying to get YouTube/Google to reactivate my YouTube account for 14 years which has all my daughters baby videos (then a 2 year old). They shut it down due to some vague copyright violation which they still can't explain to me, and haven't activated it despite about 20 support tickets being filed. And I'm a paying customer.
BTW, if anyone works for Google here and can help me to get it back I'll pay you $100.
>> you can actually contact real humans as a workspace customer easily.
This is only relative to the experience when you're a free google account user. Compared to alternatives like Fastmail contacting support - and actually getting a successful resolution - is still very difficult. I finally switched our org after many years when Google announced yet another price increase (nominally for things I don't want or need) and I really wish we'd gone sooner.
yep I had an issue with an ownership change of a Google Workspace account recently and to their credit it was fairly easy (as a paying customer) to find a human to talk to who could escalate to someone who could fix the issue. It still was an annoying process that took a couple of hours instead of a couple of minutes, but they certainly didn't just ghost me or leave me out for dead.
I wonder why people come to conclusion like that to that specific problem.
surely the user may knows that there is probably zillions (by that i mean a lot) of users using gmail via IMAP (at least the enterprise accounts) don't you think it's maybe something else you are doing that flags your account
Raises hand for another n=1 that I'm currently going through. My point being, it doesn't matter than you can get hold of someone because the bureaucracy is kafkaesque.
WTF has happened to Google?
We're a supplier being onboarded. We've been in on-boarding hell for about 2 months now.
We've completed the job and are still being passed around teams in order to get paid.
As an aside, one of the scourges of modern business is Ariba. Google use Ariba along with many other large organisations and it SUCKS.
It feels like using Ariba forces big companies to map their bureaucracy around its structure rather than the other way around ... which means people getting bounced from team to team while different queries are raised and some random person somewhere raises another query, etc etc ... and even the internal staff struggle to make things happen.
Whatever happens, it feels like the bureaucratic structure and use of Ariba has imprisoned staff at Google. They can't get beyond their own system now.
The process was a real eye-opener as to what goes on when a firm becomes huge.
In my experience, once a company implements Ariba, it's over and they're just cash-cowing it.
The savings they make in automation are costs passed on to the consumer or supplier in the hassle factor of getting things done. I want to say "Never again", but that's not entirely my choice.
I don't think anything happened regarding customer support. Culturally, Google on the non-ads products was always "we have a billion users, it's free, we're super smart and invented SRE, so we don't care about support." Enterprise tries harder but has that baggage.
Off topic to the main point of this thread, but wanted to help you out. If there’s a PR submitted, tell your main stakeholder to go into Ariba into the PR and have them locate the approval flow with the corresponding approvers. Then they can easily individually target the approvers to accelerate your PO and get you paid.
They're a publicly traded company, so the shareholders are the primary customer.
They're an advertising and data harvesting company with significant investment in free-to-consumer services, so users are viewed as products. That means user support looks like overhead.
They're extremely large and extremely diverse, so losing business is not a significant concern.
The problem is that they have too many incentives to not care about you at all, even at the rates you're paying.
Most places I know of seem to use Microsoft 360 for "cloud office productivity apps" vs. Google Workspace. The exception being schools which tend to use Google (maybe because they often buy cheap Chromebooks for the kids?).
IDK if Microsoft is better with onboarding or support but I'd be inclined to assume that given their longer history with Office and business customers.
We (small tech company) migrated away from Microsoft 365 because it was extremely buggy and many supposedly simple things are so incredibly complicated and convoluted.
They have several overlapping admin sites for absolutely everything, plus some hidden old sites from the early 2000s that support will guide you to use for some archaic settings that still influence how more modern stuff works.
In my experience, Microsoft support is good in the sense that they are easy to contact and keen to help. But working with them just took too much of my time. Their approach is to schedule a call to guide you through layers and layers of legacy stuff just to try things that often end up not working.
With Google Workspace I don't actually know if support is good or bad because we never needed support in the first place. Google's software is far simpler and less buggy.
We also use Proton now, which has been working pretty well so far. Better than expected.
Microsoft 365 is for companies that can afford to employ a full-time, specialised Microsoft 365 admin.
If you don't get paid for a contract, either repossess the work output, and/or file suit. That's the way to get paid for a contract when someone doesn't pay you for a contract. That's just how business is. A lot of businesses are out to get ahead by any means necessary.
I don't know why you are downvoted or the parent is upvoted. Clearly the GP is not telling the details and it is highly doubtful that they freeze the workspace account ever without good reason. Unlike standard account, freezing worspace admin account for this definitely means huge customer loss.
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?
I imagine their support is like UPS/Fedex, where they do everything possible to get you to hang-up, make you sit and wait between harrowing phone menus, all so that you can get a person in India who only can see the same tracking website that you see.
That's not really true, in my experience, but for this issue, I suspect they will be mostly useless. Account closures via algorithm are rarely reversible via customer support.
Citibank closed a 22 year account recently, via an algorithm, and I had to write an actual letter to get it reopened. And even then, the people on the other end were mostly useless, though they did reopen the account.
Haven’t you heard? The best way to contact gmail support is by posting about it on tech websites /s
It’s sad that I often see resolutions happen here after an engineer scrolls through the comments. I agree that not having backups and your own domain is asking for trouble the way things are currently structured with online mail.
I will say that I hosted my own servers for years, but it’s a lot of trouble and not for everyone (plus, I could never quite get the spam filtering tweaked how I wanted).
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.
I‘m using this feature, and I‘ve understood the article right away. Yes it’s #2, a little known but very useful feature that I have no idea how I‘ll replace.
Set your other accounts to forward them to your gmail with ARC headers, which gmail now supports. Used to be forwarding into gmail was almost unusable due to spam false positives, but I've found it to be significantly improved now (albeit not perfect).
I switched to doing this just last week (having been using POP3 previously). It's honestly a lot nicer in IMO, since the emails show up on the gmail side pretty much immediately instead of sometimes being delayed.
Unrelated, but I noticed this in your two comments and it seems to be something you do frequently—you’re using the wrong side of the quotation character as the apostrophe. You’re using ‘ but it should be ’. See the difference: I‘ll VS I’ll.
The page you linked to lists both ’ and ', in that order. There’s no point in being (wrongly) pedantic about either, both have strengths and weaknesses (explained in the Wikipedia pages). The point is that if someone cares to use proper typographic characters not immediately visible in the keyboard (which the person I replied to seems to), they probably care to use the right ones. Both ’ and ' are correct, but ‘ is not.
It’s interesting that you say there’s no point in being pedantic but this entire boring subthread started because you were pedantic about punctuation. A character really doesn’t matter.
Please don’t engage in bad faith. My post was very clear about its goal. It’s one thing to wrongly “correct” someone (as the poster above me did) and quite another to notice that someone is taking the care to do something but is making a mistake, and politely point them in the right direction.
Just because you don’t care about something doesn’t make it worthless or boring. If I didn’t think the OP cared I wouldn’t have pointed it out. Above all my point was constructive and took the other person’s interests into account, it was not a pedantic critique.
If you find the matter boring, I encourage you to move along. Prolonging it seems counterproductive.
Hmm, I transitioned from Gmail to my own domain years ago, but it's still Gmail. However, I'm still both receiving and sending mail from my old @gmail.com address, using POP. Do you know if that's still possible?
I also have an old Gmail account that I don't use directly anymore. Instead of POP, I set it up to forward everything to my mailbox.org account. It works for me this way for several years now. The only issue is that I don't get the spam forwarded, so you can't see if there are false positives. You can still see it in Gmail if you occasionally log in. For me, since this is a rarely used account, the spam I get is usually indeed spam, so I don't miss it. It might be different for a more active account, though.
For sending in Mailbox.org webmail there is a thing called alternative senders where I can add email addresses to send from. I have something similar on my Android K9 app, where it's under Manage identities where I can also add the allowed senders.
I set it up a long time ago this way and I'm unsure of I had to somehow configure Gmail to be able to send from my other account. But I have the same also for @live.com and @zoho.com as I was trying different providers. This allows me to easily reply to forwarded emails with the old email addresses.
Google Workspace handles this nicely (for $10/month...). I used to use the to-be-deprecated feature but ran into some occasional issues, so I bit the bullet to go to Workspace.
Feels overkill just to achieve the same outcome as we previously had for free, though.
The other account may provide IMAP but it won't help you because GMail only supports POP (which is now going away). GMail does NOT support IMAP for 3rd party accounts.
The GMail mobile app does support IMAP, but that is different from GMail as a service supporting it. The mobile app having IMAP support does nothing for people who use a web browser.
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.
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?"
#2 was frequently used as a spam filter for private domain emails that don't want to deal with setting up spam filters on their mail servers. I used this a decade or so ago in one of my online store it was very good at spam filtering and you get to use one webmail client to process all your emails from different domains.
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.
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).
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...
free email forwarding was one of the most useful features of Google Domains before selling... since the selloff, I've configured the domains to use Cloudflare which offers the same feature relatively transparently. I haven't seen too many issues with non-spam going into my spam, even relayed mail.
Aside: I do have a dedicated ip/vm for mailu setup, and will likely switch to using a vanity email as my catch-all instead of gmail soon enough. It's kind of sad how generally bad email has become at this point. Will also likely start playing with a few different self-hosted webmail clients, I'd considered and played with Nextcloud, just not sure how much I care for it or not.
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.
I 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.
They've been gradually making it more difficult (you now have to use a backdoor route with a machine access token if you want to register a new sending address).
How 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.
The 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.
I always find the admin panel hugely restrictive. It's missing basic features like "just let me impersonate this user now".
The number of times our support staff have to walk someone through the process of doing something when the ability to impersonate a user would just let them do it far quicker.
> Nobody deserves even a modicum of privacy. Let's make it 0 friction to inspect what they're doing at all times.
Features cut both ways. Am I respectful of my work equipment? Yes. Would it be net good for my boss to automatically get a report of everything on my screen everyday, not particularly. So could we not have the largest platforms make it even easier than it already is to be creepy AF?
Every system I design has this "impersonation" feature, and none of them have any capability for surveilling usage. It's just a way for me to see what my customers are seeing. Helps me understand their problems, bugs in my system, etc.
I have direct access to all the prod databases and lots of tools for inspection/auditing. This isn't for that. It's for helping people by seeing/using the system through their eyes.
It ideally doesn't need to be a privacy-invading thing, but rather a way for administrators troubleshoot issues a bit easier without having to get on a screensharing call. I think maybe what makes it difficult is that Gmail might be used as the key to authenticate into other accounts (like for shadow IT).
And in the ideal case, even this action that a Google Workspace administrator logged in as someone else would be automatically written into an audit trail.
It's funny how many assume impersonation is all about privacy, when it's really about empathy: letting you see the situation through the eyes of the person you're trying to help, instead of just responding I don't have that problem in my setup or when using a god account.
I 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.
You 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.
Same 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!
I 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
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.
It 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.
This 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.
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.
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.
Perhaps 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I use exactly this on my personal (free) and work (paid workspace) accounts. I got an official notification from Google that one member in my workspace (me) has used the feature in the last 30 days and will be affected. I didn't (yet) get a notification on my personal account.
I also rely pretty heavily on this feature for a few very low traffic domains that I need but only have super set up on super clunky web mail, so I guess I'm in the market for a new mail client :(
Maybe you can automatically forward mails from that domain to Gmail and find a way to label them.
At worst you can write a mail client to do that by logging in, listing mails, mailing them to you and keeping track of what it already sent (sqlite?) They are very well known protocols with plenty of implementations, so probably a LLM can write the code with not much guidance.
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.
I have a test suite that accesses a gmail account through POP. It's a regular gmail account. Will that be affected?
Edit: Okay I think not. But man is this confusing over whether it's Gmail that's doing the fetching over POP (a feature I had no idea existed) or somehting they're calling a third-party account fetching Gmail emails over POP.
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.
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.
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.
The point is that Google is harming paying customers, and as a paying customer Proton respects me more and it is based in Europe, which is a big plus for me.
> Looks like Google wants to force people to use the WebUI instead of email clients (no google ads on IMAP/POP).
I think that’s a valid criticism, but Protonmail also doesn’t allow people to use a standard email client. I agree with the parent commenter that it’s strange that you’re suggesting it as an alternative, especially when there’s services like Fastmail and Purelymail that both have accessible human support and let you use a standard email client.
Proton has an official bridge software which sets up a local imap/smtp server. I then can use a 3rd party email client. The reason they don't support it directly from their servers is it allows them to not have to decrypt emails in their servers. Only the client can decrypt emails as everything in proton is encrypted so that proton cannot see your emails
I'm having a really good experience with Proton. I even interacted with them here on HN once, they cleared up some uncertainties by posting technical OpenPGP information that wasn't covered in their documentation.
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?
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....
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
On one machine I have offlineimap.py[1] (with mutt), on the other laptop Evolution[2] that archives my mail locally that I can also export and back up regularly.
Ok, interesting. I checked the docs of offlineimap (thanks, I hadn't found that one when googling!) and it looks like I could use the `maxage` option for the incremental option (I think I want to create a folder for each week, back it up , and delete it after a while).
Do you have anything set up with evolution to handle things automatically?
Sorry, my laptop where I had evolution got a new OS installed and I haven't configured it yet and just started mutt, but my original setup had a local archive folder, with sub-folders per year (I think, I even had a higher level grouping of 5 or 10 years). Unfortunately, I don't have setup right now to check, but I think it was semi-manual, like Evolution was archiving to a local folder automatically, then every new year I just moved the mails from the previous year into a folder).
It's the most performant solution that's also mature. I've used it for years to retrieve all of my email accounts (of which gmail is one) to a folder that I also backup.
I have not tried to do this, but I think you can set MaxMessages in your config to achieve something like this. If I'm understanding correctly, it essentially does a tail on your mailbox. The latest X messages will be kept, where X is the number after MaxMessages: https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/isync/mbsync.1.en.html#...
E-Mails don't take up that much space for it to be any issue to me. Every five years or so I clean out some of the old ones and leave them only in backups.
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.
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.
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.
If their DMARC alignment relies on SPF only, it will break. But if it relies on DKIM (far more common) or both SPF and DKIM (best practice), forwarding won't cause any issues.
If your email breaks when forwarded, your setup is broken. Tons of people use Cloudflare Email Routing or similar services; you must account for them.
That being said, I forward mail addressed @mydomain.com to my Gmail, and I've had a couple of cases where legit messages landed in spam because it was SPF-aligned only.
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.
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.
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 :)
I control spam by using email aliases. And it makes it easy to track exactly who leaked/sold my email address. But I don't use gmail, as I value my privacy.
I whitelist using regular expressions (specific prefixes mostly). Gibberish and random localparts are unlikely to match those, it effectively never happens.
Agreed, there are also ways to employ aliases which won't prevent spam, but this still doesn't explain the relation to the subaddressing regex or why other ways or employing aliases (e.g. masking) are never enough.
Just joking, I expect nothing from GMail team after I noticed that "block sender" option just puts emails in spam folder instead of deleting them on arrival.
Proton Mail is good (just not as good), but you can't integrate external SMTP for outbound emails; you have to pay to send from @yourdomain.com.
With Gmail, you can configure an external SMTP server using "Send mail as" setting. Super convenient. Tons of mail services offer a generous free tier for personal use (e.g., Mailgun 100 emails/day).
It's not really worth paying just to send a few personal emails from @yourdomain.com each month.
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.
> 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.
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! :-)
I know a lot of people who use it, in fact I'm one of them.
I have an @gmail.com account with about 20 years of stuff associated with it, from purchases to YouTube subscriptions, from calendars to GCP accounts.
However, I use a vanity email (me@somedomain.example) that everyone I know uses to get hold of me. Until about 10 years ago I could just forward emails but that slowly became unworkable as more and more stuff just broke due to SPF etc. So, I've been using POP pickup (and accepting the 5-30 minute delay) ever since.
As I understand it, I can't move all my gmail.com data into a GWork profile easily, and POP has worked for years. This is very frustrating.
Yeah, i agree...which adds to my guess that its not *just* about storage...but something else above/beyond storage. In other words, maybe whatever infra is in place to do the fetching, storing, etc...is way more costly than the storage and way too costly to justify for the crazy low numbers that i would agree would still be using POP in this day and age and via gmail.
Working with a client that has thousands of customers using this setup. Common? Perhaps not, but definitely not near zero.
Many people are fiercly attached to the Gmail interface, but refuse to pay for Google Workspace, or even manage multiple email accounts in a desktop client.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
You didn´t understand the article. You can use your gmail with POP or IMAP. What you won´t be able to do is to use POP (IMAP was never an option) to download emails from external account into your gmail account.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :(
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.
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.
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.
This seems to affect only checking 3rd party email addresses using POP. I think you can still use TB with POP to get your mail that goes straight to Gmail.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Training off data you published for public consumption, e.g. pretty much user-generated content on social media, or anything publicly accessible on the web, is one thing. Training off private conversations is a whole different thing. I doubt any major company is doing the latter. Would be a PR and legal firestorm. Which doesn't serve the interests of companies training AI models either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google is absolutely notorious for freezing accounts with zero warning, zero explanation and zero recourse.
I personally experienced this while working for a charity that used Google workspace. After 8 years they suddenly froze the account. The freeze lasted 32 days. During this period they could not operate and Google was completely unresponsive for the first 2 weeks. Google then started demanding various forms of proof of incorporation, various employee government ID's, things like that. We provided all this information. After another week of silence they started asking for ID's of people that did not even work there. We told them we could not provide this information, because of that. Silence. Finally at week 4 we got a call from someone in India that told us there was nothing they could do and the response team would continue to investigate. We are not allowed any contact with the investigation team. Then 32 days after being locked out,the account was silently unlocked again with no explanation.
I cannot discourage people from using any google product for their business any more strongly than this story. They are a terrible company and do not care at all about their customers. They are too big to fail so they just stomp all over you.
Remember google has no way to contact them other than an email form. Which we filled out 2-5 per DAY, which went mostly un-responded to. In the painfully rare case that you do get someone one the phone they will just be someone in India that tells you sorry, nothing we can do.
I was about a week from launching a react native app on iOS/Android, so decided to go through all the administrative motions to get things going in case there were any delays in getting that moving.
Google Developer account cost me $25. A few days go by and I get an e-mail asking for identification documents and a bill that shows that I live at the place I'm at. I send my passport and utility bill with my name on it, those get rejected with absolutely 0 reason the next day.
Zero explanation. I raised about 8 different support tickets and DMed several people on twitter and linkedin that worked for google and emailed a few higher up people.
At one point I got some communication from a completely different department that wasn't accessible to the support lines publicly available, and it looked like they were going to help me.
But in the end nothing.
This was a copy/paste response I saw for every support ticket:
Thanks for contacting the Google Play team.
As much as I'd like to help, I’m not able to provide any more information. Unfortunately, we are unable to verify the documents you provided and are unable to grant your appeal.
If you are located in the EU, you may have additional redress options. Learn more about those potential options in the EU Out-of-Court Dispute Resolution Help Center. Routing ID: ZLFS
Thanks again for your understanding.
My final response after a week of relentless effort:
I'll concede in understanding that:
No one has actually looked at my documents
No one wants to give me a reason why you won't help me
No one on your entire support team is capable of performing basic customer support tasks.
Thanks for treating me like some untouchable beggar when you were the ones that stole $25 from me.
Apple/iOS cost me $100 and my developer account was verified within two days with zero hassle.
I set a reminder on my calendar to do a take out every 3 months and keep my data backed up and refreshed.
If you have a business on there sure take out will save the data. How are you going to restructure your entire business on a new platform that you now have to evaluate and purchase under duress. Not even including retraining everyone.
There have been studies about what happens to business when this happens. They go out of business nearly without exception.
crazy stuff, looks like youtube is the same
> I was paying $10/month for workplace and a couple days ago they froze my account because I was accessing it via IMAP.
I used to pay for Workspace and left because a good chunk of features across all Google products simply didn't work with Workspace accounts, or were held back for a year or more after free Google accounts got them. It's a mess. Then they kept increasing the price for good measure, and there's no off-ramp, if you stop paying then the account is left in a zombie state with even less functionality than a free one until you start paying again.
Do yourself a favour and use Fastmail or Proton or anything else for your vanity domain instead.
I have this annoying problem. When not plugged into my car I can say
"Hey google remind me to call in sick tomorrow"
and it will put an entry into the calendar for me.
But if it is plugged into my car the same request will elicit an
"I'm sorry please talk to your system administrator to get this feature enabled"
This has gone on for years with google assistant and workspace accounts. There is always some random interlock in some byzantine permissions table that get's triggered at the most inconvenient moment and you can't do what yesterday you could do.
This is a super annoying quirk, lots of things don't work well if you're using workspace as a normal gmail account, and they don't quite warn you up front.
It's pretty much my #1 example of Google's propensity for shipping its org chart.
Workspace accounts come with their own compliance requirements and edge cases that products need to handle, but rather than do that and provide a consistent user experience most product teams don't answer to the relevant PAs and so don't care, and Workspace accounts are a small enough minority of users that nobody has to care.
I've often railed against a particular way of doing product that's really common in our industry, but I suppose it's been a while so I'll do it again:
We have a real problem with metrics-driven product development, where we exclusively care about the 95% use case and actively disdain the 5% use cases.
On paper it makes sense - you direct your energies towards the highest-payback activities. But the problem is that every user falls into some 5% use cases, so a product that is purely made up of 95% use cases ends up becoming a patchwork that is frustrating to every user, somehow.
Rather than "product works great for 95% of users" you get "100% of users cut themselves on some corner of the product".
What alternative to metrics-driven product development would you suggest?
Humane development Metrics are great, but they aren't humane - there's no single human behind the metrics.
It has been said, a typical MS Office user only uses x% of the features of the software, but every one of those millions of users uses a different x%
Google converted my mum's Gmail account to a workspace account automatically. Now she can't use her bedroom alarm clock because it's connected to my dad's Gmail account and you can't share access to workspace accounts. It's stupidly maddening.
And yes I realise that an IoT alarm clock is ridiculous, but that's not the point.
It was a proper Gmail account? Or was it an email@domain account that maybe was using her work email address?
I’m asking because I used to work adjacent to this area, and I know of only a few scenarios where an account becomes a workspace account after being a consumer account.
Off topic a bit: Facebook just converted my personal account to a professional account. I have no idea why. Although as I think about it for a moment, it might be related to the fact that I visit/use Facebook less than once a year....
It's a completely avoidable situation too, there's nothing stopping them from offering custom domains as a perk of paid Google One plans for regular Google accounts. Workspace is beyond overkill for individuals, you shouldn't need all that complexity just to attach a custom domain to a personal Gmail account.
I had to admin Google Workspace maybe 9-10 years ago. It was rough but I thought they'd beep refining it. I'm back in a company using GW and I swear to god it's gotten worse. The basic features that simple don't exist are boggling. It is not a serious product and I feel bad for companies that have to use it. I've been here three months and I'm already planning our migration away.
What are you planning to migrate to?
"a good chunk of features across all Google products simply didn't work with Workspace accounts"
Hugely frustrating - they penalize their paying customers. Can't attach Nest devices, can't use the YouTube family plan.
I tried Proton and my test emails couldn’t even get through that I sent myself. Kept going to spam instantly. The big providers have us in a stranglehold here.
Did you set up the SPF/DMARC/DKIM authentication records on your domain? Those can make a huge difference to deliverability.
I don’t have a domain. It was Proton emails going straight to Gmail spam. I absurdly have even had similar issues on fresh virgin iCloud email accounts going straight to spam in Gmail.
If all your domain email DNS records (security) are correctly set, you should be fine.
Is it possible to drop workspace, but keep the same account running for your android account? Or still log in with the same account (I guess downgraded to a non-paid account) for sheets etc?
IIRC you can still log into a lapsed Workspace account, but the core "business" products like Gmail, Docs and Meet are completely disabled until you reactivate your subscription. The rest of Google still works to the extent that it ever did under the weird Workspace limitations.
You cannot migrate a Workspace account into a regular Google account, you're stuck with Workspace forever unless you start over on a brand new account.
I honestly believe that last point is the reason people still have their free grand-parented in workspace accounts. Google went to close them down realized they didn't have a graceful way to let people keep their paid for apps and realized the engineering time to create a workspace to consumer migration was worth much more than any costs associated with those accounts.
> they froze my account because I was accessing it via IMAP
Stop being misleading, this is your assumption.
And while I agree that Google support generally sucks, you can actually contact real humans as a workspace customer easily.
>> you can actually contact real humans as a workspace customer easily.
I can barely get replies from my Google Cloud rep and we’re paying them a lot more than $10 per month. Having reps on staff doesn’t mean they have time until things are escalated. When Google threw captchas up on Workspace accounts with integrations (which our product is) for 20ish minutes on Friday and everything was a panic we got responses from a few reps all at once, but mostly to hand wave away the outage.
If you want a fun example there’s a LegalEagle video where he details the difficulty in getting imposter accounts taken down from YouTube through his contacts. He’s not just a random YouTube user, he makes them money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEA0JzhpzPU&vl=en
And for what it’s worth, these experiences are what I have come to expect from everyone outside of the high tiers of AWS Premium Support and a couple other vendors where you pay what is essentially a timeshare agreement for a support team.
Ha, no way man. I've been trying to get YouTube/Google to reactivate my YouTube account for 14 years which has all my daughters baby videos (then a 2 year old). They shut it down due to some vague copyright violation which they still can't explain to me, and haven't activated it despite about 20 support tickets being filed. And I'm a paying customer.
BTW, if anyone works for Google here and can help me to get it back I'll pay you $100.
You probably have a better chance if you put contact info in your profile
>> you can actually contact real humans as a workspace customer easily.
This is only relative to the experience when you're a free google account user. Compared to alternatives like Fastmail contacting support - and actually getting a successful resolution - is still very difficult. I finally switched our org after many years when Google announced yet another price increase (nominally for things I don't want or need) and I really wish we'd gone sooner.
yep I had an issue with an ownership change of a Google Workspace account recently and to their credit it was fairly easy (as a paying customer) to find a human to talk to who could escalate to someone who could fix the issue. It still was an annoying process that took a couple of hours instead of a couple of minutes, but they certainly didn't just ghost me or leave me out for dead.
My anecdata counteracts your anecdata. Now how do we resolve this?
In the face of uncertainty I've found being wary of faceless megacorps to be a pretty useful stance
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
I wonder why people come to conclusion like that to that specific problem.
surely the user may knows that there is probably zillions (by that i mean a lot) of users using gmail via IMAP (at least the enterprise accounts) don't you think it's maybe something else you are doing that flags your account
The main point is that a paying customer shouldn't have to guess at why they were flagged.
Raises hand for another n=1 that I'm currently going through. My point being, it doesn't matter than you can get hold of someone because the bureaucracy is kafkaesque.
WTF has happened to Google?
We're a supplier being onboarded. We've been in on-boarding hell for about 2 months now.
We've completed the job and are still being passed around teams in order to get paid.
As an aside, one of the scourges of modern business is Ariba. Google use Ariba along with many other large organisations and it SUCKS.
It feels like using Ariba forces big companies to map their bureaucracy around its structure rather than the other way around ... which means people getting bounced from team to team while different queries are raised and some random person somewhere raises another query, etc etc ... and even the internal staff struggle to make things happen.
Whatever happens, it feels like the bureaucratic structure and use of Ariba has imprisoned staff at Google. They can't get beyond their own system now.
The process was a real eye-opener as to what goes on when a firm becomes huge.
In my experience, once a company implements Ariba, it's over and they're just cash-cowing it.
The savings they make in automation are costs passed on to the consumer or supplier in the hassle factor of getting things done. I want to say "Never again", but that's not entirely my choice.
/rant
I don't think anything happened regarding customer support. Culturally, Google on the non-ads products was always "we have a billion users, it's free, we're super smart and invented SRE, so we don't care about support." Enterprise tries harder but has that baggage.
Off topic to the main point of this thread, but wanted to help you out. If there’s a PR submitted, tell your main stakeholder to go into Ariba into the PR and have them locate the approval flow with the corresponding approvers. Then they can easily individually target the approvers to accelerate your PO and get you paid.
> WTF has happened to Google?
They're a publicly traded company, so the shareholders are the primary customer.
They're an advertising and data harvesting company with significant investment in free-to-consumer services, so users are viewed as products. That means user support looks like overhead.
They're extremely large and extremely diverse, so losing business is not a significant concern.
The problem is that they have too many incentives to not care about you at all, even at the rates you're paying.
Most places I know of seem to use Microsoft 360 for "cloud office productivity apps" vs. Google Workspace. The exception being schools which tend to use Google (maybe because they often buy cheap Chromebooks for the kids?).
IDK if Microsoft is better with onboarding or support but I'd be inclined to assume that given their longer history with Office and business customers.
We (small tech company) migrated away from Microsoft 365 because it was extremely buggy and many supposedly simple things are so incredibly complicated and convoluted.
They have several overlapping admin sites for absolutely everything, plus some hidden old sites from the early 2000s that support will guide you to use for some archaic settings that still influence how more modern stuff works.
In my experience, Microsoft support is good in the sense that they are easy to contact and keen to help. But working with them just took too much of my time. Their approach is to schedule a call to guide you through layers and layers of legacy stuff just to try things that often end up not working.
With Google Workspace I don't actually know if support is good or bad because we never needed support in the first place. Google's software is far simpler and less buggy.
We also use Proton now, which has been working pretty well so far. Better than expected.
Microsoft 365 is for companies that can afford to employ a full-time, specialised Microsoft 365 admin.
They've always been like this.
If you don't get paid for a contract, either repossess the work output, and/or file suit. That's the way to get paid for a contract when someone doesn't pay you for a contract. That's just how business is. A lot of businesses are out to get ahead by any means necessary.
I don't know why you are downvoted or the parent is upvoted. Clearly the GP is not telling the details and it is highly doubtful that they freeze the workspace account ever without good reason. Unlike standard account, freezing worspace admin account for this definitely means huge customer loss.
Not really if they only ever do it for small, personal workspaces.
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?
no explanation. no response to emails so I have no idea what we did.
Did you try calling them?
Are you saying that accessing a gmail exclusively via IMAP won't keep the account alive?
no, we also frequently accessed the webmail jnterface. or at least I did.
> no, _we_ also frequently accessed the webmail jnterface
We? Did you share an account? That's way bigger a red flag than using IMAP.
If he is using GWorkspace he is probably having more than one user.
It doesn't seem to be the free Google account either. The fact it happened to a paid Google Workspace account is pretty concerning.
As a paying customer you had the ability to get a human on the line. Whether or not they would tell you why the account was closed is another matter.
I imagine their support is like UPS/Fedex, where they do everything possible to get you to hang-up, make you sit and wait between harrowing phone menus, all so that you can get a person in India who only can see the same tracking website that you see.
That's not really true, in my experience, but for this issue, I suspect they will be mostly useless. Account closures via algorithm are rarely reversible via customer support.
Citibank closed a 22 year account recently, via an algorithm, and I had to write an actual letter to get it reopened. And even then, the people on the other end were mostly useless, though they did reopen the account.
I’ve had this happen to numerous friends.
Haven’t you heard? The best way to contact gmail support is by posting about it on tech websites /s
It’s sad that I often see resolutions happen here after an engineer scrolls through the comments. I agree that not having backups and your own domain is asking for trouble the way things are currently structured with online mail.
I will say that I hosted my own servers for years, but it’s a lot of trouble and not for everyone (plus, I could never quite get the spam filtering tweaked how I wanted).
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.
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.
I‘m using this feature, and I‘ve understood the article right away. Yes it’s #2, a little known but very useful feature that I have no idea how I‘ll replace.
Set your other accounts to forward them to your gmail with ARC headers, which gmail now supports. Used to be forwarding into gmail was almost unusable due to spam false positives, but I've found it to be significantly improved now (albeit not perfect).
I switched to doing this just last week (having been using POP3 previously). It's honestly a lot nicer in IMO, since the emails show up on the gmail side pretty much immediately instead of sometimes being delayed.
The other account (over which I have no administrative control) does not support ARC. Yes I guess I‘ll just forward emails.
Unrelated, but I noticed this in your two comments and it seems to be something you do frequently—you’re using the wrong side of the quotation character as the apostrophe. You’re using ‘ but it should be ’. See the difference: I‘ll VS I’ll.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_single_quotation_mark
no, it should be ' (ASCII 39, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe )
The page you linked to lists both ’ and ', in that order. There’s no point in being (wrongly) pedantic about either, both have strengths and weaknesses (explained in the Wikipedia pages). The point is that if someone cares to use proper typographic characters not immediately visible in the keyboard (which the person I replied to seems to), they probably care to use the right ones. Both ’ and ' are correct, but ‘ is not.
It’s interesting that you say there’s no point in being pedantic but this entire boring subthread started because you were pedantic about punctuation. A character really doesn’t matter.
Please don’t engage in bad faith. My post was very clear about its goal. It’s one thing to wrongly “correct” someone (as the poster above me did) and quite another to notice that someone is taking the care to do something but is making a mistake, and politely point them in the right direction.
Just because you don’t care about something doesn’t make it worthless or boring. If I didn’t think the OP cared I wouldn’t have pointed it out. Above all my point was constructive and took the other person’s interests into account, it was not a pedantic critique.
If you find the matter boring, I encourage you to move along. Prolonging it seems counterproductive.
Yeah the German/English combined iOS keyboard is not working well.
Hmm, I transitioned from Gmail to my own domain years ago, but it's still Gmail. However, I'm still both receiving and sending mail from my old @gmail.com address, using POP. Do you know if that's still possible?
I also have an old Gmail account that I don't use directly anymore. Instead of POP, I set it up to forward everything to my mailbox.org account. It works for me this way for several years now. The only issue is that I don't get the spam forwarded, so you can't see if there are false positives. You can still see it in Gmail if you occasionally log in. For me, since this is a rarely used account, the spam I get is usually indeed spam, so I don't miss it. It might be different for a more active account, though.
Cool thanks, I might set that up as well. And did you just set it up as an alias so you can send email from it as well?
(I don't actually know how often I send email from that address, so maybe I don't even need that, but just in case.)
For sending in Mailbox.org webmail there is a thing called alternative senders where I can add email addresses to send from. I have something similar on my Android K9 app, where it's under Manage identities where I can also add the allowed senders.
I set it up a long time ago this way and I'm unsure of I had to somehow configure Gmail to be able to send from my other account. But I have the same also for @live.com and @zoho.com as I was trying different providers. This allows me to easily reply to forwarded emails with the old email addresses.
Edit: I think you got with the alias, didn't know this is what is called in Google https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en#zippy=%2C...
Google Workspace handles this nicely (for $10/month...). I used to use the to-be-deprecated feature but ran into some occasional issues, so I bit the bullet to go to Workspace.
Feels overkill just to achieve the same outcome as we previously had for free, though.
My understanding is it will be removed from both paid and unpaid versions of Gmail, no?
I use it on my paid workspace account and personal, and I got a notification on the paid workspace account that it will be unavailable.
I guess it applies to the free account too but they just don't bother to state it (yet).
I just had to check how I've set up my Gmail to collect all my e-mail from other accounts.
Fortunately, they're all set up to forward to Gmail. Gmail never checks them itself.
Does e-mail forwarding not work in your case?
It works but is prone to being marked as spam.
Does your other account not provide IMAP?
The other account may provide IMAP but it won't help you because GMail only supports POP (which is now going away). GMail does NOT support IMAP for 3rd party accounts.
The GMail mobile app does support IMAP, but that is different from GMail as a service supporting it. The mobile app having IMAP support does nothing for people who use a web browser.
Its google that never supported fetching mails over imap, not clear if they do now.
No
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.
Yeah. The interface isn't bad. Just remember to backup your email somewhere.
I do the opposite. I forward all my gmails to my primary account.
"from third-party accounts" is a better worded version of your (2).
Your (1) would be worded in the opposite order.
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?"
#2 was frequently used as a spam filter for private domain emails that don't want to deal with setting up spam filters on their mail servers. I used this a decade or so ago in one of my online store it was very good at spam filtering and you get to use one webmail client to process all your emails from different domains.
Thank you. I still use POP to download and backup my emails. Terribly worded article.
I've been using (2) for probably 15+ years, combined with tagging it has been great for consolidating multiple email boxes into one feed.
That said you can get the same thing by setting up an auto-forwarder to your gmail box.
I understood the title right away despite never having known about the feature. (I knew about the standard way to use POP with a gmail account.)
Oh? I had no idea it could mean #2 until I saw this comment.
It's number 2. But IMAP still works.
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.
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).
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...
free email forwarding was one of the most useful features of Google Domains before selling... since the selloff, I've configured the domains to use Cloudflare which offers the same feature relatively transparently. I haven't seen too many issues with non-spam going into my spam, even relayed mail.
Aside: I do have a dedicated ip/vm for mailu setup, and will likely switch to using a vanity email as my catch-all instead of gmail soon enough. It's kind of sad how generally bad email has become at this point. Will also likely start playing with a few different self-hosted webmail clients, I'd considered and played with Nextcloud, just not sure how much I care for it or not.
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.
In the gmail app you can use both protocols POP or IMAP. The article is about fetching external accounts in gmail web.
The article isn't explicitly clear about whether or not POP will continue working with the mobile apps or not though.
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.
I 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.
They've been gradually making it more difficult (you now have to use a backdoor route with a machine access token if you want to register a new sending address).
Gmail quietly drops forwarded mails sometimes. They don't put them into the spam directory, either.
Very cheap email hosting still generally comes with IMAP I think? Which gmail is still supporting. EG Namecheap $1/mo email comes with IMAP.
How 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.
Iam 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.
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.
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.
The 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.
I always find the admin panel hugely restrictive. It's missing basic features like "just let me impersonate this user now".
The number of times our support staff have to walk someone through the process of doing something when the ability to impersonate a user would just let them do it far quicker.
> Nobody deserves even a modicum of privacy. Let's make it 0 friction to inspect what they're doing at all times.
Features cut both ways. Am I respectful of my work equipment? Yes. Would it be net good for my boss to automatically get a report of everything on my screen everyday, not particularly. So could we not have the largest platforms make it even easier than it already is to be creepy AF?
Every system I design has this "impersonation" feature, and none of them have any capability for surveilling usage. It's just a way for me to see what my customers are seeing. Helps me understand their problems, bugs in my system, etc.
I have direct access to all the prod databases and lots of tools for inspection/auditing. This isn't for that. It's for helping people by seeing/using the system through their eyes.
It ideally doesn't need to be a privacy-invading thing, but rather a way for administrators troubleshoot issues a bit easier without having to get on a screensharing call. I think maybe what makes it difficult is that Gmail might be used as the key to authenticate into other accounts (like for shadow IT).
And in the ideal case, even this action that a Google Workspace administrator logged in as someone else would be automatically written into an audit trail.
It's funny how many assume impersonation is all about privacy, when it's really about empathy: letting you see the situation through the eyes of the person you're trying to help, instead of just responding I don't have that problem in my setup or when using a god account.
Impersonation is not what you seem to think it is.
I 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.
You 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.
The majority of small businesses aren’t subscription based services. I was assuming we were talking about companies like your local coffee shop.
Same 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!
I 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
Going from $0? That isn't surprising.
you work for the wrong people
If only life could be so easy that we could all avoid working for the "wrong people".
Per 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.
Yeah... but Workspace has other problems. The only thing Workspace gives you is a more direct way to pay Google until they freeze your account.
IMAP, which is MUCH better at doing the same thing, is still supported.
It 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.
Ah, I see, I think you're right. I misread the Google doc.
[flagged]
This 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.
But you can't pull from a third party into gmail via IMAP.
Correct
So why you say "Not true at all"?
Is it AI spam to advertise your product?
> 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.
They did the same with free version of Google Workspace. It's just no longer free.
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.
I would happily pay to get something else than the enshitified Gmail experience
POP has been a problematic protocol since 2000 or so.
Perhaps 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.
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.
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.
Is my understanding correct that if you stop paying for your domain, someone else will register it and get access to all your accounts?
Migadu.
Migadu.
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.
>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.
I use Firebird and have it check my various Gmail accounts using imap, as well as non-google email accounts. Everything in one place.
For now.
Same. What are the alternative you're looking at? Currently looking at Zoho. Apparently Proton doesn't have third party POP accounts.
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.
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.
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.
I use exactly this on my personal (free) and work (paid workspace) accounts. I got an official notification from Google that one member in my workspace (me) has used the feature in the last 30 days and will be affected. I didn't (yet) get a notification on my personal account.
I also rely pretty heavily on this feature for a few very low traffic domains that I need but only have super set up on super clunky web mail, so I guess I'm in the market for a new mail client :(
Maybe you can automatically forward mails from that domain to Gmail and find a way to label them.
At worst you can write a mail client to do that by logging in, listing mails, mailing them to you and keeping track of what it already sent (sqlite?) They are very well known protocols with plenty of implementations, so probably a LLM can write the code with not much guidance.
Good luck getting consistent delivery to Gmail. Even Cloudflare's email forwarding keeps getting blocked / marked as spam.
Which is hilarious considering they can't seem to stop obvious spam from hitting my inbox
I essentially have only forwarded email in my gmail from my personal domain, and it has never been a problem for me.
You could just set them up to forward to gmail instead. Even if you don't have a server to do this, you could use eg. Cloudflare email forwarding.
I run Mailcast.io which you can use to forward email on your domains to your personal Gmail account without setting up any new email client
I switched from Google workspace to zoho.com Zoho is dirt cheap and has great tools to import all my mail, contacts and calendar data.
We’re Gsuite because it happened before I joined the org and it’s just too much of a pain to switch and get everyone re trained off of google apps
Zoho has a lot of nice features and seems less evil. The ticket tracking email system is a really nice feature
I imagine the "POP only works with a single device" is in reference to the Gmail App's support for POP
POP access of a different account on the web would be the "Check mail from other accounts"
The top comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45440465 makes it clear that what you're referring to is exactly what is being deprecated.
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.
"Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts through POP." seems quite clear.
What does "from a third-party account" mean?
I have a test suite that accesses a gmail account through POP. It's a regular gmail account. Will that be affected?
Edit: Okay I think not. But man is this confusing over whether it's Gmail that's doing the fetching over POP (a feature I had no idea existed) or somehting they're calling a third-party account fetching Gmail emails over POP.
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.
Personally I’m happy about it. It’s the kick in the butt I needed to get my last remaining crap off Google and shut down my accounts for good.
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?
IMAP is supported afaik: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/78892?hl=en#zippy=
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.
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.
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.
The point is that Google is harming paying customers, and as a paying customer Proton respects me more and it is based in Europe, which is a big plus for me.
> Looks like Google wants to force people to use the WebUI instead of email clients (no google ads on IMAP/POP).
I think that’s a valid criticism, but Protonmail also doesn’t allow people to use a standard email client. I agree with the parent commenter that it’s strange that you’re suggesting it as an alternative, especially when there’s services like Fastmail and Purelymail that both have accessible human support and let you use a standard email client.
Proton has an official bridge software which sets up a local imap/smtp server. I then can use a 3rd party email client. The reason they don't support it directly from their servers is it allows them to not have to decrypt emails in their servers. Only the client can decrypt emails as everything in proton is encrypted so that proton cannot see your emails
I switched from Proton -> Fastmail and have been happy with the transition.
You get more "stuff" from a ProtonMail subscription, but I really just want email.
But Proton doesn't offer good third-party access either; actually, Gmail is better
Yes it does, they have an official software called the bridge which allows you to connect a 3rd party email client.
I'm having a really good experience with Proton. I even interacted with them here on HN once, they cleared up some uncertainties by posting technical OpenPGP information that wasn't covered in their documentation.
I suspect this has much more to do with bad actors using automated means to access Gmail and send spam.
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?
That does not make sense
Why not just use Gmail api?
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....
This is about uploading data to gmail. You continue to be able to download from gmail via pop3.
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?)
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.
Thank you! I never knew this was a thing.
So it was only available for a small list of services?
I think it was adding third party accounts via POP but automated for large well known third parties.
Learned from this post that Gmail web had POP! Now I'll be mourning loss of a feature I never even used.
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
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.
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.
Someone created that project 29 years ago… fetchmail
https://www.fetchmail.info/
Am I expected to keep abreast of developments in the tech world every three decades?? I’ve been busy.
Google has an email migration feature useful for one time migration.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
Ah yes, I run a local IMAP server (Dovecot).
Docker image of gmvault which still works for me even though the project is basically abandoned: https://hub.docker.com/r/aubertg/gmvault-docker/
On one machine I have offlineimap.py[1] (with mutt), on the other laptop Evolution[2] that archives my mail locally that I can also export and back up regularly.
[1]: https://www.offlineimap.org/
[2]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/wikis/home
Ok, interesting. I checked the docs of offlineimap (thanks, I hadn't found that one when googling!) and it looks like I could use the `maxage` option for the incremental option (I think I want to create a folder for each week, back it up , and delete it after a while).
Do you have anything set up with evolution to handle things automatically?
Sorry, my laptop where I had evolution got a new OS installed and I haven't configured it yet and just started mutt, but my original setup had a local archive folder, with sub-folders per year (I think, I even had a higher level grouping of 5 or 10 years). Unfortunately, I don't have setup right now to check, but I think it was semi-manual, like Evolution was archiving to a local folder automatically, then every new year I just moved the mails from the previous year into a folder).
Re offlineimap, just looked into isync/mbsync suggested here by others, it seems better from the description, I'm probably going to try it when I have some time: https://people.kernel.org/mcgrof/replacing-offlineimap-with-...
https://isync.sourceforge.io/mbsync.html
It's the most performant solution that's also mature. I've used it for years to retrieve all of my email accounts (of which gmail is one) to a folder that I also backup.
Is there any way to only get a subset of the mail (i.e. only changes in last week).
I don't think I want all my email on my local machine, but I do think I want it all in the backups.
I couldn't see anything digging in.
I have not tried to do this, but I think you can set MaxMessages in your config to achieve something like this. If I'm understanding correctly, it essentially does a tail on your mailbox. The latest X messages will be kept, where X is the number after MaxMessages: https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/isync/mbsync.1.en.html#...
An e-mail client? At least that's how I do it, and it's been working well for decades.
My problem is I don't want to keep my entire email downloaded, but to periodically back things up.
Do you use your email client to periodically backup? (I would like it automated).
Do you use thunderbird or something else if so?
E-Mails don't take up that much space for it to be any issue to me. Every five years or so I clean out some of the old ones and leave them only in backups.
I don't use a local mail client. Is there one you'd recommend?
The stock Mac Mail app has been excellent for me. For Windows, I remember that Postbox ( https://www.postbox-inc.com/download ) worked very well.
eM Client might also be worth a look: https://www.emclient.com
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.
I would replace POP with forwarding unless you are okay with storing your email in multiple services.
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.
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.
Did you rule out using IMAP?
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.
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.
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.
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.
doesn't work very well these days with SPF + DKIM
Only if the sender's DMARC setup is broken…
If their DMARC alignment relies on SPF only, it will break. But if it relies on DKIM (far more common) or both SPF and DKIM (best practice), forwarding won't cause any issues.
If your email breaks when forwarded, your setup is broken. Tons of people use Cloudflare Email Routing or similar services; you must account for them.
That being said, I forward mail addressed @mydomain.com to my Gmail, and I've had a couple of cases where legit messages landed in spam because it was SPF-aligned only.
Or forward your gmail to another proper email domain.
I just can't live without the Gmail spamfilter. It's just the best. Industry-leading; no question.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
I control spam by using email aliases. And it makes it easy to track exactly who leaked/sold my email address. But I don't use gmail, as I value my privacy.
I do aliases as well. Never enough. A battle-tested spammer would run s/+[^@]*// on the address before sending.
I have my own domain and just do <website-name>@mydomain.com and redirect everything to the same inbox sorted in folders.
Works pretty well, if any of those addresses gets into some spam list I just block it (hasn't happened yet, though)
Catch-all (*) setup is the best, until a spammer hits a gibberish localpart (on purpose) and your domain cheerfully accepts it.
Don't get me wrong, I use catch-all too (don't tell spammers).
I whitelist using regular expressions (specific prefixes mostly). Gibberish and random localparts are unlikely to match those, it effectively never happens.
Using passmail aliases through protonmail has worked well for me, that way my domain isn't exposed. And everything forwards to one inbox.
Subaddressing != aliasing.
Aliasing !== masked email
Agreed, there are also ways to employ aliases which won't prevent spam, but this still doesn't explain the relation to the subaddressing regex or why other ways or employing aliases (e.g. masking) are never enough.
It is at least 5 months since spammers use fake "delivery error" to skip the filter: http://old.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1jzf6o2/fake_... . I would expect more from industry-leading company.
Just joking, I expect nothing from GMail team after I noticed that "block sender" option just puts emails in spam folder instead of deleting them on arrival.
That's what I thought too until I moved to Fastmail. It certainly isn't worse.
Fastmail is great. It's just that I'm not willing to pay 5$ each month to send 5 emails from @mydomain.com. 1$ per email is too much, right?
I have all of my mail (and all of my domains) there, that makes it a fair deal. It also fetches from gmail and other places.
I just can't live without the Gmail spamfilter. It's just the best. Industry-leading; no question.
I have accounts on Gmail and other services, and can say from close to a decade of use that Fastmail's spam filter is usually far better than Gmail's.
Occasionally it'll fall behind for a few weeks, but always seems to catch up or surpass Google's.
Over the last couple of months, for example, 100% of the spam I've received has come from Gmail. 0% from Fastmail.
Have you tried other things? And not saying just Microsoft.
Proton Mail is good (just not as good), but you can't integrate external SMTP for outbound emails; you have to pay to send from @yourdomain.com.
With Gmail, you can configure an external SMTP server using "Send mail as" setting. Super convenient. Tons of mail services offer a generous free tier for personal use (e.g., Mailgun 100 emails/day).
It's not really worth paying just to send a few personal emails from @yourdomain.com each month.
This comment is from 1020.
LOL. Thanks.
Gmail is absolutely terrible for false positives. I'm sure they do it deliberately to discourage people from using other e-mail services.
What's your setup? If you're forwarding, an SPF-only aligned email will fail DMARC, and it's the sender's fault: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45441243
Next time a legit email ends up in your spam folder, use this tool to figure out why: https://mxtoolbox.com/EmailHeaders.aspx
I've had a few cases myself, and it's always been the sender's fault.
Yes, they do. But you'll get 5 responses saying you're doing something wrong.
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.
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.
> 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.
I guess they couldn't find anyone qualified to maintain the mailfetcher.
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! :-)
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.
Makes sense.
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.
I know a lot of people who use it, in fact I'm one of them.
I have an @gmail.com account with about 20 years of stuff associated with it, from purchases to YouTube subscriptions, from calendars to GCP accounts.
However, I use a vanity email (me@somedomain.example) that everyone I know uses to get hold of me. Until about 10 years ago I could just forward emails but that slowly became unworkable as more and more stuff just broke due to SPF etc. So, I've been using POP pickup (and accepting the 5-30 minute delay) ever since.
As I understand it, I can't move all my gmail.com data into a GWork profile easily, and POP has worked for years. This is very frustrating.
"A number" much closer to zero than the the number of Gmail DAUs.
Yeah, i agree...which adds to my guess that its not *just* about storage...but something else above/beyond storage. In other words, maybe whatever infra is in place to do the fetching, storing, etc...is way more costly than the storage and way too costly to justify for the crazy low numbers that i would agree would still be using POP in this day and age and via gmail.
You might be onto something here. Perhaps other mail services have a habit of banning the Google mailfetcher and it takes effort to get it unbanned.
> Perhaps other mail services have a habit of banning the Google mailfetcher and it takes effort to get it unbanned.
Yeah, that's a perfectly reasonable theory right there!
Working with a client that has thousands of customers using this setup. Common? Perhaps not, but definitely not near zero.
Many people are fiercly attached to the Gmail interface, but refuse to pay for Google Workspace, or even manage multiple email accounts in a desktop client.
Maybe it causes too many issues? POP is pretty unpredictable when multiple clients access the same server.
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.
Yeah it is either that or the bean counters realised this is an expense with very little upshot.
Stop using gmail. I bought a Proton Mail subscription. Truly one of the best things I've ever done.
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.
Proton doesn't support pop either?
I didn't need it. Alternatives like fastmail should be good in that case.
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?
Protonmail is a good alternative if its imap restrictions are not a problem for you
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.
I have had this same question for a while now.
RIP gomailify :( https://www.gomailify.com
emailnator.com
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
You didn´t understand the article. You can use your gmail with POP or IMAP. What you won´t be able to do is to use POP (IMAP was never an option) to download emails from external account into your gmail account.
That doesn’t make sense if it is POP to third party accounts because they’ve never supported IMAP to third party accounts.
I set up my personal mail server https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver and I have wrote about it here 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.
Wow this is awesome!
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.
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.
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.
Back to the old Thunderbird days I guess.
Some of us are still using mutt!
By now, it's new and quite neat :)
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.
That’s a terrible idea - putting your email at risk with a small local provider is asking for future trouble.
Not really, no.
Gmail's endgame plan is that virtually everyone in the world is forced to use Gmail or have a very reduced email experience.
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.
I have a Google Workspace for my family. Mostly for email. Has anyone had a similar setup and moved in to Protonmail?
RIP to my OG Gmail account that I forgot the password to but still have POP access to via the Gmail web client.
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.
I'm in the same boat, and unfortunately, no
Oh damn.I need to migrate everything.
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.
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.
They would surely send an e-mail with the specifics if you are affected, right?
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. :(
Funny, at the same time Microsoft is making it mandatory to do just that if you want to use outlook with another provider.
Fetchmail ftw
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.
Thanks for mentioning Google Takeout - was not aware of that service and found it very useful
You can still use a third-party mail client to POP off the server, then use IMAP to send it to Gmail.
That isn’t very responsive or convenient…
I'm so glad I bit the bullet and wrote my own email service.
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.
There’s probably a security issue and the product owner can’t figure out how to vibe code their way out.
What's the motivation?
Forward Email for me.
Well fuck. I've been using this feature since I started using Gmail in 2007 or so.
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.
goddamn it
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.
The article is about Gmail checking third party account through POP and not about checking Gmail using POP which remains supported.
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.
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.
Sorry but there is nothing unclear here. The correct answer is already in the submission title.
The suggestion is also correct. Checking third parties through IMAP remains supported.
I think it’s fair to expect some amount of reading comprehension from commenters. The bar is not particularly high here.
This seems to affect only checking 3rd party email addresses using POP. I think you can still use TB with POP to get your mail that goes straight to Gmail.
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.
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.
One more step to bring email in line with being messages on a website rather than messages on your computer.
The Google enshitification continues unabated.
that's a bit rich from google to not support the essential protocol of email
Are there other email services that support scheduled POP transfer of email from other accounts?
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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.
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.
You can use pop still, just not to see external emails in gmail web (and you cant use imap either to do that)
> Nobody has used POP much in years
Writing in as a current POP user. I use it to import email every day.
I use POP to maintain control over my data.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Training off data you published for public consumption, e.g. pretty much user-generated content on social media, or anything publicly accessible on the web, is one thing. Training off private conversations is a whole different thing. I doubt any major company is doing the latter. Would be a PR and legal firestorm. Which doesn't serve the interests of companies training AI models either.
Would you really put it past them? Gmail is after all a free service.
> 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.
The deprecation is about the webmail version of Gmail. You can’t check other accounts while using the web version of Gmail.
It's a little unclear whether you will still be able to use pop3 on the mobile app or not.
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.
Yeah, that's fine for my needs. Just hoping it will continue to work that way.
TIL what POP meant after three decades. Thanks!
only the phone app supports imap. the web app does not, it used to support pop
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.
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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.
The linked page don't say that. Pop will still be supportedand imap was never an option for adding external accounts in gmail webmail
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.
Forwarding works fine and has been how I’ve always used gmail.
Yahoo doesn't allow forwarding anymore
You can't do the same thing with imap.