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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

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can't live without the Gmail spamfilter. It's just the best. Industry-leading; no question.

Have you tried other things? And not saying just Microsoft.

Proton Mail is good (just not as good), but you can't integrate external SMTP for outbound emails; you have to pay to send from @yourdomain.com.

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.

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

#52
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.

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.

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

#53
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can't live without the Gmail spamfilter. It's just the best. Industry-leading; no question.

Gmail regularly lets through spam, including backscatter spam from mail sent to the google.com domain spoofing Gmail users. Industry-leading is not the term I would use to describe their spam heuristics. Grey listing has been far more effective at stopping spam than some half-baked AI garbage from Google.

Not ideal - can't disagree. Still, it's the industry leader. I'm not aware of a better spamfilter.

Grey listing doesn't scale; not for me.

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

#54

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.

Unfortunately deleting your email probably doesn't "erase it from their servers". This was the substance of one of the old google location history lawsuits, where "erase my history" only erased your device's access to it. They retain a possibly transformed copy for training etc.

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

#55
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail regularly lets through spam, including backscatter spam from mail sent to the google.com domain spoofing Gmail users. Industry-leading is not the term I would use to describe their spam heuristics. Grey listing has been far more effective at stopping spam than some half-baked AI garbage from Google.

Not ideal - can't disagree. Still, it's the industry leader. I'm not aware of a better spamfilter. Grey listing doesn't scale; not for me.

I forward everything including spam to Fastmail. Their spam filter is absolutely fine. This way I don't need to check for false positives in 2 places. You're probably losing one genuine message a year if you don't check your Gmail spam folder.

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

#56
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts through POP." seems quite clear.

Good god Google can't be bothered to not wreck shit that doesn't cost them much, eh? Doesn't surprise me too much though, Gmail hasn't seen much maintenance and polish over the last few years.

Personally I’m happy about it. It’s the kick in the butt I needed to get my last remaining crap off Google and shut down my accounts for good.

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

#57

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,…

Maybe you can automatically forward mails from that domain to Gmail and find a way to label them.

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.

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

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can't live without the Gmail spamfilter. It's just the best. Industry-leading; no question.

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.

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

#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.
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