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

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

#131
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

you work for the wrong people

If only life could be so easy that we could all avoid working for the "wrong people".

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

#133
post #41

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.

POP has been a problematic protocol since 2000 or so.

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

#134
post #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…

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…

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...

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#136

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'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.

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

#137
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.

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

#138

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…

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.

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

#139
post #136

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'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.

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

#140
post #60
post #41

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.

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.

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.
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