[HN Gopher] No more "check mail from other accounts" in Gmail web
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No more "check mail from other accounts" in Gmail web
Author : sumanep
Score : 141 points
Date : 2025-10-01 16:25 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (support.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (support.google.com)
| satisfice wrote:
| goddamn it
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| belst wrote:
| only the phone app supports imap. the web app does not, it used
| to support pop
| OJFord wrote:
| 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.
| lhamil64 wrote:
| Huh, apparently I still have a POP3 email setup in Gmail, my
| old ISP provided email. Mildly annoying that it's going away,
| but I never use that email anyway so I guess it's not a big
| deal for me.
| gausswho wrote:
| TIL what POP meant after three decades. Thanks!
| cosinetau wrote:
| > Nobody has used POP much in years
|
| Writing in as a current POP user. I use it to import email
| every day.
| cosmotic wrote:
| I use POP to maintain control over my data.
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| 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.
| jasonfarnon wrote:
| 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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| 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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| The deprecation is about the webmail version of Gmail. You
| can't check other accounts while using the web version of
| Gmail.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| > 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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| I thought they would _want_ us sucking down our external mail
| into their system to keep us inside the wall with scannable data.
| What the heck.
| righthand wrote:
| There's probably a security issue and the product owner can't
| figure out how to vibe code their way out.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I guess they couldn't find anyone qualified to maintain the
| mailfetcher.
| mxuribe wrote:
| 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 make me
| chuckle a little! :-)
| jjcob wrote:
| Maybe it causes too many issues? POP is pretty unpredictable
| when multiple clients access the same server.
| mxuribe wrote:
| Yeah, that would be a good point...like, maybe its not just
| about cost, but more trouble than its worth. On another
| comment i made here, i wondered if its not just storage
| costs, but costs or *annoyance* of running infra. that
| oversees the fetching, the storage, yada, yada...al for
| POP, whose users leveraging said functionality are crazy
| low.
| jimrandomh wrote:
| They already have a quota and billing framework in place for
| email storage. If it was about storage costs, I'd expect them
| to address it through that.
| mxuribe wrote:
| Makes sense.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| mxuribe wrote:
| Yeah, i agree...which adds to my guess that its not *just*
| about storage...but something else above/beyond storage. In
| other words, maybe whatever infra is in place to do the
| fetching, storing, etc...is way more costly than the
| storage and way too costly to justify for the crazy low
| numbers that i would agree would still be using POP in this
| day and age and via gmail.
| xp84 wrote:
| You might be onto something here. Perhaps other mail
| services have a habit of banning the Google mailfetcher
| and it takes effort to get it unbanned.
| mxuribe wrote:
| > Perhaps other mail services have a habit of banning the
| Google mailfetcher and it takes effort to get it
| unbanned.
|
| Yeah, that's a perfectly reasonable theory right there!
| mustaphah wrote:
| A quick hack: forward @yourdomain.com emails to your Gmail (e.g,
| Cloudflare Email Routing).
|
| Outbound emails sent via "Send mail as:" using SMTP remain
| unaffected.
| flakeoil wrote:
| Or forward your gmail to another proper email domain.
| mustaphah wrote:
| I just can't live without the Gmail spamfilter. It's just the
| best. Industry-leading; no question.
| nulbyte wrote:
| 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.
| mustaphah wrote:
| 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.
| akkartik wrote:
| 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.
| xandrius wrote:
| Have you tried other things? And not saying just Microsoft.
| mustaphah wrote:
| 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.
| jp191919 wrote:
| 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.
| mustaphah wrote:
| I do aliases as well. Never enough. A battle-tested
| spammer would run s/+[^@]*// on the address before
| sending.
| lentil_soup wrote:
| I have my own domain and just do <website-
| name>@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)
| mustaphah wrote:
| Catch-all (*) setup is the best, until a spammer hits a
| gibberish localpart (on purpose) and your domain
| cheerfully accepts it.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I use catch-all too (don't tell
| spammers).
| zamadatix wrote:
| Subaddressing != aliasing.
| mustaphah wrote:
| Aliasing !== masked email
| zamadatix wrote:
| You don't need to mask an email to control spam. How you
| proceed in using the aliases to combat spam has several
| possible paths, but none are blocked by the regex you
| specified for catching subaddressing.
| jp191919 wrote:
| Using passmail aliases through protonmail has worked well
| for me, that way my domain isn't exposed. And everything
| forwards to one inbox.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| That's what I thought too until I moved to Fastmail. It
| certainly isn't worse.
| mustaphah wrote:
| Fastmail is great. It's just that I'm not willing to pay
| 5$ each month to send 5 emails from @mydomain.com. 1$ per
| email is too much, right?
| alextingle wrote:
| Gmail is absolutely terrible for false positives. I'm sure
| they do it deliberately to discourage people from using
| other e-mail services.
| mustaphah wrote:
| What's your setup? If you're forwarding, an SPF-only
| aligned email will fail DMARC, and it's the sender's
| fault: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45441243
|
| Next time a legit email ends up in your spam folder, use
| this tool to figure out why:
| https://mxtoolbox.com/EmailHeaders.aspx
|
| I've had a few cases myself, and it's always been the
| sender's fault.
| blibble wrote:
| doesn't work very well these days with SPF + DKIM
| mustaphah wrote:
| Only if the sender's DMARC setup is broken...
|
| If their DMARC alignment relies on SPF only, it will break.
| But if it relies on DKIM (far more common) or both SPF and
| DKIM (best practice), forwarding won't cause any issues.
|
| If your email breaks when forwarded, your setup is broken.
| Tons of people use Cloudflare Email Routing or similar
| services; you must account for them.
|
| That being said, I forward mail addressed @mydomain.com to my
| Gmail, and I've had a couple of cases where legit messages
| landed in spam because it was SPF-aligned only.
| herczegzsolt wrote:
| 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.
| xp84 wrote:
| 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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Someone created that project 29 years ago... fetchmail
|
| https://www.fetchmail.info/
| windows2020 wrote:
| Back to the old Thunderbird days I guess.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| By now, it's new and quite neat :)
| bcrl wrote:
| Some of us are still using mutt!
| jimrandomh wrote:
| 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", which matches, but also
| says "POP only works with a single device", which is false (wrt
| this feature) and makes me think it may be talking about
| something different.
|
| I'm hearing about this for the first time from HN (not from
| Google). I don't like having Google randomly drop IT tasks on my
| plate, and the possibility that emails might just silently stop
| being delivered is nighmarish. Sigh.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| The top comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45440465
| makes it clear that what you're referring to is exactly what is
| being deprecated.
| jimrandomh wrote:
| No it doesn't make it clear, because it's written by a third
| party reading the same internally-inconsistent page I am; any
| information added beyond the Google documentation page is
| conjecture.
| znort_ wrote:
| "Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-
| party accounts through POP." seems quite clear.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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.
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| 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.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| 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, so I guess I'm in the market for a new mail
| client :(
| pmontra wrote:
| 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.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| Good luck getting consistent delivery to Gmail. Even
| Cloudflare's email forwarding keeps getting blocked /
| marked as spam.
| ahofmann wrote:
| 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.
| Navarr wrote:
| I imagine the "POP only works with a single device" is in
| reference to the Gmail App's support for POP
|
| POP access of a different account on the web would be the
| "Check mail from other accounts"
| mobilene wrote:
| 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.
| leptons wrote:
| I use Firebird and have it check my various Gmail accounts
| using imap, as well as non-google email accounts. Everything in
| one place.
| zwieback wrote:
| Learned from this post that Gmail web had POP! Now I'll be
| mourning loss of a feature I never even used.
| Dwedit wrote:
| You can still use a third-party mail client to POP off the
| server, then use IMAP to send it to Gmail.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| Oh damn.I need to migrate everything.
| xp84 wrote:
| 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.
| czechdeveloper wrote:
| They did the same with free version of Google Workspace. It's
| just no longer free.
| beejiu wrote:
| 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.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I know businesses that use Gmail and have all their staff
| make username.businessname@gmail.com addresses.
|
| Do not bet against how much small businesses don't want to
| pay for stuff, you will always lose.
| cj wrote:
| The bigger cost of Google Workspace is the administrative
| overhead.
|
| The admin panel for Google Workspace is extremely powerful.
| Hundreds/thousands of settings. Great for medium/large
| businesses with a dedicated IT person. A huge headache for
| small businesses.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I think a minimum of being able to shut down an account
| when you fire someone and delete the data is worth having
| manageability, but small businesses will do anything,
| even additional staff administrative overhead, to avoid
| paying a subscription.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I always find the admin panel hugely restrictive. It's
| missing basic features like "just let me impersonate this
| user now".
|
| The number of times our support staff have to walk
| someone through the process of doing something when the
| ability to impersonate a user would just let them do it
| far quicker.
| tln wrote:
| Very cheap email hosting still generally comes with IMAP I
| think? Which gmail is still supporting. EG Namecheap $1/mo
| email comes with IMAP.
| cracki wrote:
| How is google mail still supporting a "fetch" via IMAP of
| mails stored in a third party service? What are the settings
| to poke on mail.google.com for this?
|
| The announcement clearly says that "Check mail from other
| accounts" will disappear. They say it's about POP, but if the
| entire feature disappears, then it's not just about POP.
| lxgr wrote:
| 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?)
| bound008 wrote:
| I'm not one to defend google, but it seems that they are only
| ending support for POP accounts, and retaining support for
| IMAP/SMTP. Seems like a reasonable deprecation for 2025, although
| they could have given more than a quarter to let people handle
| the change.
| bigwheels wrote:
| But why do they need to remove the functionality? It's been
| working fine for around 2 decades.
|
| As a user of the feature, this is supremely annoying. They
| didn't even send me a warning message it will be discontinued.
| timbre1234 wrote:
| Fetchmail ftw
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| 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.
| cracki wrote:
| 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.
| jaykru wrote:
| RIP gomailify :( https://www.gomailify.com
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