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

support.google.com

221–230 of 392 posts

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

#221
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#222
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 busine…

> 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.

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

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#224
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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)…

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.

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

#225

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.

But Proton doesn't offer good third-party access either; actually, Gmail is better

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

#226
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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).

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

#227

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.

I suspect this has much more to do with bad actors using automated means to access Gmail and send spam.

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

#228
post #31
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mak…

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.

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.

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

#229
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 busine…

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.

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

#230

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.
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