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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

#311
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know a lot of people who use it, in fact I'm one of them. 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…

"A number" much closer to zero than the the number of Gmail DAUs.

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

#312

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…

> I was paying $10/month for workplace and a couple days ago they froze my account because I was accessing it via 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…

"a good chunk of features across all Google products simply didn't work with Workspace accounts"

Hugely frustrating - they penalize their paying customers. Can't attach Nest devices, can't use the YouTube family plan.

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

#313

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…

Google is absolutely notorious for freezing accounts with zero warning, zero explanation and zero recourse.

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.

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

#314

They're almost certainly doing this to put the screws on Gmail users. Data export compat isn't great with Gmail to begin with, but at least with a vanity domain you could have the option to use that instead and if Google went bad, you could still use it directly without having to reconfigure a lot of stuff. (Since this feature is meant to integrate with shared hosting providers that offer an email service "for free".…

Forwarding works fine and has been how I’ve always used gmail.

Yahoo doesn't allow forwarding anymore

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

#315

They're almost certainly doing this to put the screws on Gmail users. Data export compat isn't great with Gmail to begin with, but at least with a vanity domain you could have the option to use that instead and if Google went bad, you could still use it directly without having to reconfigure a lot of stuff. (Since this feature is meant to integrate with shared hosting providers that offer an email service "for free".…

You can't do the same thing with imap.

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

#316
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 linked page don't say that. Pop will still be supportedand imap was never an option for adding external accounts in gmail webmail

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

#317
post #5
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.

No, they're discontinuing POP 'import' (so mail ends up stored in Gmail) configured in the web app and available everywhere, in favour of IMAP client access from the mobile clients only. 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.

You can use pop still, just not to see external emails in gmail web (and you cant use imap either to do that)

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

#318

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.

That does not make sense

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

#319
post #42

What in the world was "Gmailify"? Was it different from adding third-party accounts via POP? (Was it maybe just IMAP for third-party accounts?)

It was IMAP sync between the Gmail server and the Outlook/Yahoo/etc server.

Then you have a regular Gmail account and get notifications, spam checking, mobile push notifications etc.

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

#320

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…

> I was paying $10/month for workplace and a couple days ago they froze my account because I was accessing it via 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…

I have this annoying problem. When not plugged into my car I can say

"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.

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