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.
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.
Writing in as a current POP user. I use it to import email every day.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, that's a perfectly reasonable theory right there!
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.
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.
Outbound emails sent via "Send mail as:" using SMTP remain unaffected.
Grey listing has been far more effective at stopping spam than some half-baked AI garbage from Google.
Grey listing doesn't scale; not for me.
Which is more than the non spam emails that come on it :)
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.
Works pretty well, if any of those addresses gets into some spam list I just block it (hasn't happened yet, though)
Don't get me wrong, I use catch-all too (don't tell spammers).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't surprise me too much though, Gmail hasn't seen much maintenance and polish over the last few years.
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.
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 :(
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.
Zoho has a lot of nice features and seems less evil. The ticket tracking email system is a really nice feature
POP access of a different account on the web would be the "Check mail from other accounts"
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.
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.
Do not bet against how much small businesses don't want to pay for stuff, you will always lose.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Then you have a regular Gmail account and get notifications, spam checking, mobile push notifications etc.
So it was only available for a small list of services?
As a user of the feature, this is supremely annoying. They didn't even send me a warning message it will be discontinued.
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 :)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
There is no chance another email service will get any chunk of Internet email if it has to charge for services.
it won't even be available in the paid version, right?
why are they being confusing?
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.
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.
Your (1) would be worded in the opposite order.
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?"
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.
Feels overkill just to achieve the same outcome as we previously had for free, though.
I guess it applies to the free account too but they just don't bother to state it (yet).
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.
(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.)
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...
Fortunately, they're all set up to forward to Gmail. Gmail never checks them itself.
Does e-mail forwarding not work in your case?
That said you can get the same thing by setting up an auto-forwarder to your gmail box.
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.
Edit: Ohhh. According to other posts it’s about gmail not pulling email from other servers via POP3, not about accessing gmail.
We? Did you share an account? That's way bigger a red flag than using 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.
And yes I realise that an IoT alarm clock is ridiculous, but that's not the point.
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.
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".
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.
Hugely frustrating - they penalize their paying customers. Can't attach Nest devices, can't use the YouTube family plan.
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
BTW, if anyone works for Google here and can help me to get it back I'll pay you $100.
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.
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 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.
There have been studies about what happens to business when this happens. They go out of business nearly without exception.
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.
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.
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 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.
Do you have anything set up with evolution to handle things automatically?
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-...
Do you use your email client to periodically backup? (I would like it automated).
Do you use thunderbird or something else if so?
eM Client might also be worth a look: https://www.emclient.com
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.
Maybe it's time to switch everyone out of gmail and make gmail forward the email to out hosted accounts.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
What's annoying is that they are impacting paying customers as well, which is quite bad.
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.
You get more "stuff" from a ProtonMail subscription, but I really just want email.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Native clients continue to improve, and the mismatch between how I handle Gmail on iOS vs (for example) Fastmail shows that they're so wedded to this particular mindset that it's unlikely to ever be fully solved.
I look at people like my Dad -- early 70's, who spent most of his career as the "desktop infrastructure" manager at a midsize insurer -- who still wants to have Outlook available because he likes how Outlook does mail. It's just how his mind works. IMAP exists, but it's an implementation detail that's separate from the specific client features they add.
Wouldn't mind exploring something akin to a web-based, self-hosted Thunderbird mail client giving a server hosted web UI for multiple email and nntp services.
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.
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.
[edit] I just found purelymail, which seems like a good fit.
satisfice•4mo ago