goddamn it

The linked page says that Gmail is discontinuing support for the old Post Office Protocol in favor of IMAP. Nobody has used POP much in years. Decades, maybe.

IMAP can check for mail without downloading. But apparently Gmail doesn't support that.

You can do this the other way round. Use a local email client such as Thunderbird on desktop or FastMail on Android to check Gmail and any other email accounts you have.

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.

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

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.

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.

Back to the old Thunderbird days I guess.

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.