No more "check mail from other accounts" in Gmail web
support.google.com52 points by sumanep 2 hours ago
52 points by sumanep 2 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or forward your gmail to another proper email domain.
I just can't live without the Gmail spamfilter. It's just the best. Industry-leading; no question.
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.
Back to the old Thunderbird days I guess.
I guess they couldn't find anyone qualified to maintain the mailfetcher.
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! :-)
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.
Maybe it causes too many issues? POP is pretty unpredictable when multiple clients access the same server.
goddamn it
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.