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

support.google.com

71–80 of 392 posts

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

#71
post #3

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.

The deprecation is about the webmail version of Gmail. You can’t check other accounts while using the web version of Gmail.

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

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#73
post #39

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/

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

#74

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.

I use Firebird and have it check my various Gmail accounts using imap, as well as non-google email accounts. Everything in one place.

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

#75

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"…

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,…

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.

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

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 @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)

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

#77
post #3

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.

> 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.

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

#78
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.

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

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Subaddressing != aliasing.

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

#80
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.

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