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

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/16604719?hl=en

by sumanep • 10 months ago

658 365 10 months ago

support.google.com

satisfice• 10 months ago

goddamn it

Animats• 10 months 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.

belst• 10 months ago

only the phone app supports imap. the web app does not, it used to support pop

12435454344345• 10 months ago

Gdiehdis29739237

NetMageSCW14• 10 months ago

I don’t think that is a good way to express it. The gmail service supported POP and any gmail client (e.g. my iOS Mail app) could then get that email. It isn’t about only the web client.

OJFord• 10 months ago

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.

sumanep8• 10 months ago

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

lhamil64• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

TIL what POP meant after three decades. Thanks!

cosinetau• 10 months ago

Nobody has used POP much in years

Writing in as a current POP user. I use it to import email every day.

cosmotic• 10 months ago

I use POP to maintain control over my data.

mrbluecoat• 10 months ago

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.

cortesoft4• 10 months ago

The deprecation is about the webmail version of Gmail. You can’t check other accounts while using the web version of Gmail.

cpncrunch3• 10 months ago

It's a little unclear whether you will still be able to use pop3 on the mobile app or not.

casenmgreen• 10 months ago

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.

sumanep8• 10 months ago

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

ChrisArchitect• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

There’s probably a security issue and the product owner can’t figure out how to vibe code their way out.

jeffbee3• 10 months ago

I guess they couldn't find anyone qualified to maintain the mailfetcher.

mxuribe5• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

Maybe it causes too many issues? POP is pretty unpredictable when multiple clients access the same server.

jimrandomh3• 10 months ago

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.

jeffbee3• 10 months ago

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.

commandersaki2• 10 months ago

Yeah it is either that or the bean counters realised this is an expense with very little upshot.

mustaphah10• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

Or forward your gmail to another proper email domain.

mustaphah10• 10 months ago

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

blibble• 10 months ago

doesn't work very well these days with SPF + DKIM

mustaphah10• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

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.

xp846• 10 months ago

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.

cortesoft4• 10 months ago

Someone created that project 29 years ago… fetchmail

https://www.fetchmail.info/

NetMageSCW14• 10 months ago

Google has an email migration feature useful for one time migration.

windows2020• 10 months ago

Back to the old Thunderbird days I guess.

fxtentacle• 10 months ago

By now, it's new and quite neat :)

bcrl• 10 months ago

Some of us are still using mutt!

jimrandomh3• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

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.

jimrandomh3• 10 months ago

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.

sixhobbits• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

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.

ahofmann• 10 months ago

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.

tempestn2• 10 months ago

You could just set them up to forward to gmail instead. Even if you don't have a server to do this, you could use eg. Cloudflare email forwarding.

andrewguru• 10 months ago

I run Mailcast.io which you can use to forward email on your domains to your personal Gmail account without setting up any new email client

Navarr• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

I use Firebird and have it check my various Gmail accounts using imap, as well as non-google email accounts. Everything in one place.

tarboreus3• 10 months ago

For now.

geor9e• 10 months ago

one mailbox to check: Gmail.

I do this, but I guess I'm safe, since I did it via the setting "Forward a copy of incoming mail to x and archive Gmail's copy" or equivilent option for each provider.

pier254• 10 months ago

Same. What are the alternative you're looking at? Currently looking at Zoho. Apparently Proton doesn't have third party POP accounts.

zwieback• 10 months ago

Learned from this post that Gmail web had POP! Now I'll be mourning loss of a feature I never even used.

invalidusernam3• 10 months ago

I've been using it for many years, super simple way to have many email addresses deliver to a single gmail. The effort I'll spend migrating will be better spent setting up a non-Google alternative

Dwedit• 10 months ago

You can still use a third-party mail client to POP off the server, then use IMAP to send it to Gmail.

NetMageSCW14• 10 months ago

That isn’t very responsive or convenient…

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 10 months ago

Oh damn.I need to migrate everything.

xp846• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

They did the same with free version of Google Workspace. It's just no longer free.

xp846• 10 months ago

Exactly. To Google, wanting to use a domain other than Gmail is a strong signal that they can probably shake you down for a few bucks a month. Sure it’s just $7 for most of these people and they probably only have 1-2 accounts. But multiplied by how many million people they saw using this feature it could be worth it to Google. Plus also ending the infra cost of fetching.

For those of us who were just using the feature to aggregate mail from other email addresses like an old Yahoo account or something, I doubt Google cares about it, they even probably kind of liked it that you’re viewing their ads instead of the other guys, but they probably don’t matter enough.

beejiu• 10 months ago

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.

ocdtrekkie2• 10 months ago

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.

jonathantf2• 10 months ago

I have had multiple people scream at me on the phone for daring to suggest that a new person working needs their own email account and it will cost about £4 ($5.30~) a month

OhMeadhbh5• 10 months ago

Yeah... but Workspace has other problems. The only thing Workspace gives you is a more direct way to pay Google until they freeze your account.

pier254• 10 months ago

Per user/domain.

I'm retrieving POP emails from multiple domains. To migrate to Google Workspace I'd need to pay like $40 per month... and a couple of those inboxes rarely receive any emails.

tln• 10 months ago

Very cheap email hosting still generally comes with IMAP I think? Which gmail is still supporting. EG Namecheap $1/mo email comes with IMAP.

cracki2• 10 months ago

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.

sossles• 10 months ago

I have an email forwarder on my personal domain that forwards to my gmail address, and gmail lets me send email as if it were coming from that address. Seems like it's the same result, and they're not blocking that.

lmm• 10 months ago

They've been gradually making it more difficult (you now have to use a backdoor route with a machine access token if you want to register a new sending address).

anty3• 10 months ago

Gmail quietly drops forwarded mails sometimes. They don't put them into the spam directory, either.

pbreit2• 10 months ago

IMAP, which is MUCH better at doing the same thing, is still supported.

DominikPeters2• 10 months ago

It is not supported. You can only add an IMAP mailbox on the mobile app and not on gmail.com. The IMAP account is then displayed as an inbox completely separate from your gmail inbox. There is no pull and no integration.

yaur• 10 months ago

POP has been a problematic protocol since 2000 or so.

xp846• 10 months ago

Perhaps for main email-management use, but it perfectly fits the model of yanking a single stream of email from server A to load into server B - without resorting to forwarding, which is problematic because the middlemen don’t want the spam that gets forwarded to reflect poorly upon their IP reputation.

yard2010• 10 months ago

I would happily pay to get something else than the enshitified Gmail experience

pier254• 10 months ago

while getting Gmail features for free

Maybe initially. But if you use Gmail for third party email storage (which is what the POP feature is really about) after some time you'll have to pay for Google One for more storage.

lxgr2• 10 months ago

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?)

NetMageSCW14• 10 months ago

I think it was adding third party accounts via POP but automated for large well known third parties.

Tyr42• 10 months ago

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.

lxgr2• 10 months ago

Thank you! I never knew this was a thing.

So it was only available for a small list of services?

bound008• 10 months ago

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• 10 months ago

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.

cyberax• 10 months ago

Likely because one of the backend systems that implements this functionality depends on some deprecated service. And nobody cares enough to port the POP checker to use something new.

warp• 10 months ago

Google nowadays just seems afraid to store personal data. Google have moved your maps history/timeline to be on-device only, seemingly in response to geofence warrants. They're also deprecating health (Google Fit) APIs, and moving that data to be on-device.

So, removing POP (where they need to download emails to their servers), and only supporting IMAP (where emails stay on the third-party server) via their GMail app, that would be consistent with a policy to store as little personal data as possible. (it could also be completely unrelated :)

DominikPeters2• 10 months ago

They have worded things dishonestly to make you think that POP can be replaced by IMAP. The IMAP support is only available in the mobile app (not gmail.com) and isn't a "fetch" that integrates fetched emails to your Gmail inbox. It's kept as a separate inbox.

NetMageSCW14• 10 months ago

That doesn’t make sense if it is POP to third party accounts because they’ve never supported IMAP to third party accounts.

sumanep8• 10 months ago

You didn´t understand the article. You can use your gmail with POP or IMAP. What you won´t be able to do is to use POP (IMAP was never an option) to download emails from external account into your gmail account.

timbre1234• 10 months ago

Fetchmail ftw

MarkusWandel• 10 months ago

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.

cracki2• 10 months ago

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.

commandersaki2• 10 months ago

The solution is to push. Configure whatever system handles the "other" mail address to forward the mails to your Gmail account.

Yep, I have 4 gmail addresses that I set to copy and forward to my fastmail inbox, unless gmail kills that feature I am golden.

mikaraento• 10 months ago

Heads-up to people trying this: Gmail will often put forwarded email into spam. Be careful especially in the beginning to check your spam folder. They may also reject the mail as spam, esp if your volume is large.

IIUC it’s hard to make forwarding to play nicely with DKIM and spf. There’s some disagreement on how to handle it. (I’m being purposefully vague as I did interact with folks handling this on the google side and don’t want to cause them trouble for helping me out).

enkrs• 10 months ago

There are also rate limits on Google side for incoming mails. By just forwarding four domains to my Gmail I used to hit them quite often. Then 2 years ogo, I stopped forwarding and switched to the now discontinued Gmail fetching domain mails over POP...

tracker15• 10 months ago

free email forwarding was one of the most useful features of Google Domains before selling... since the selloff, I've configured the domains to use Cloudflare which offers the same feature relatively transparently. I haven't seen too many issues with non-spam going into my spam, even relayed mail.

Aside: I do have a dedicated ip/vm for mailu setup, and will likely switch to using a vanity email as my catch-all instead of gmail soon enough. It's kind of sad how generally bad email has become at this point. Will also likely start playing with a few different self-hosted webmail clients, I'd considered and played with Nextcloud, just not sure how much I care for it or not.

sumanep8• 10 months ago

In the gmail app you can use both protocols POP or IMAP. The article is about fetching external accounts in gmail web.

cpncrunch3• 10 months ago

The article isn't explicitly clear about whether or not POP will continue working with the mobile apps or not though.

jaykru• 10 months ago

RIP gomailify :( https://www.gomailify.com

ranger_danger• 10 months ago

emailnator.com

metadat2• 10 months ago

I suppose the heyday is over, it's time to migrate to something else. Oh, I won't be able to POP push gmail to my new email address, nice.

There is an opportunity for someone to make a low-friction service which does server-side forwarding via IMAP with decent anti-spam. If done right, you could soak up a significant chunk of the Internet email biz.

gazby• 10 months ago

I suppose the heyday is over, it's time to migrate to something else. Oh, I won't be able to POP push gmail to my new email address, nice. > There is an opportunity for someone to make a low-friction service which does server-side forwarding via IMAP with decent anti-spam. If done right, you could soak up a significant chunk of the Internet email biz.

NetMageSCW14• 10 months ago

POP doesn’t do push, only pull, and it seems that gmail will still support clients using POP.

There is no chance another email service will get any chunk of Internet email if it has to charge for services.

devmor• 10 months ago

Oh man there goes my access to my old college email from 14 years ago that for some reason never got deactivated, just web login restricted.

seydor2• 10 months ago

They are discontinuing fetching from POP server, but fetching from IMAP is not supported either. So they are discontinuing fetching altogether, right?

it won't even be available in the paid version, right?

why are they being confusing?

kumarharsh• 10 months ago

IMAP is supported afaik: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/78892?hl=en#zippy=

bonzini• 10 months ago

That's fetching from Gmail via IMAP.

With IMAP there's no particular need for fetching from third party accounts. The article itself says that IMAP is supported in the app ("You can still read and send emails from your other account within the Gmail app. This uses a standard IMAP connection, which is supported in the Gmail mobile app"). But indeed this removes altogether the possibility to fetch from third-party accounts into Gmail.

suzzer994• 10 months ago

I finally figured out the confusion here. What a terribly worded article. Could mean two different things:

1) Some kind of third-party account (whatever that is) can no longer check (fetch) emails from Gmail via POP. I have a test suite that uses POP to fetch emails from Gmail, so this concerns me.

2) Gmail itself can no longer fetch emails from other email accounts over POP (a feature I had no idea existed).

I guess it means #2. But it took me a long time to figure that out. You'd think a $trillion company could word things better.

nl• 10 months ago

"from third-party accounts" is a better worded version of your (2).

Your (1) would be worded in the opposite order.

suzzer994• 10 months ago

The problem is unless you know what "third-party accounts" means, it's ambiguous as to which account is being connected to and which account is doing the connecting over POP. "Gmail will no longer support checking emails from [thing I'm unclear on] over POP."

The whole sentence hinges on knowing that Gmail itself can (or could) become a client and go out to other email accounts and fetch emails over POP. In my mind I'm wondering, "Are they talking about something like where Slack connects to gmail?"

makach• 10 months ago

It's a shame. I use this functionality to retrieve and delete messages from other mailboxes on a daily basis in order to use Gmail as my primary email interface.

OhMeadhbh5• 10 months ago

Yeah. The interface isn't bad. Just remember to backup your email somewhere.

suzzer994• 10 months ago

I do the opposite. I forward all my gmails to my primary account.

manmal5• 10 months ago

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.

comboy• 10 months ago

Does your other account not provide IMAP?

rhyswallace• 10 months ago

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.

tempestn2• 10 months ago

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).

crazygringo• 10 months ago

I just had to check how I've set up my Gmail to collect all my e-mail from other accounts.

Fortunately, they're all set up to forward to Gmail. Gmail never checks them itself.

Does e-mail forwarding not work in your case?

tambourine_man• 10 months ago

Thank you. I still use POP to download and backup my emails. Terribly worded article.

hollerith• 10 months ago

I understood the title right away despite never having known about the feature. (I knew about the standard way to use POP with a gmail account.)

burnte3• 10 months ago

It's number 2. But IMAP still works.

pdntspa• 10 months ago

I've been using (2) for probably 15+ years, combined with tagging it has been great for consolidating multiple email boxes into one feed.

That said you can get the same thing by setting up an auto-forwarder to your gmail box.

ezconnect• 10 months ago

#2 was frequently used as a spam filter for private domain emails that don't want to deal with setting up spam filters on their mail servers. I used this a decade or so ago in one of my online store it was very good at spam filtering and you get to use one webmail client to process all your emails from different domains.

hsn915• 10 months ago

Oh? I had no idea it could mean #2 until I saw this comment.

OhMeadhbh5• 10 months ago

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 we did to trigger the account freeze. The only thing I can think of is I accessed my gmail account from a location I don't normally access it from (business trip) about a week after changing from SMS based 2FA to authenticator based 2FA.

The cloud is someone else's computer. Sometimes they don't want you on their computer, even if you're paying them to be there.

As a reminder, Google Takeout is your friend. We copy email off of gmail via IMAP, mostly so we can have a local backup. I use Takeout for my personal account. Had I thought google would freeze a paid account, I would have used Takeout every week or so to backup the few google apps docs I had up there.

planb• 10 months ago

I‘m paying for workplace too (ex-free account), can you share more details on why it was frozen? Did they give an explanation or do you just assume it was because you use IMAP? Do you never login to your account on the web and just had it in your mail client?

OhMeadhbh5• 10 months ago

no explanation. no response to emails so I have no idea what we did.

taneq• 10 months ago

Can I use POP3 to access Gmail? No. Ah okay, IMAP then? Also no.

Edit: Ohhh. According to other posts it’s about gmail not pulling email from other servers via POP3, not about accessing gmail.

ndr• 10 months ago

Are you saying that accessing a gmail exclusively via IMAP won't keep the account alive?

archb• 10 months ago

It doesn't seem to be the free Google account either. The fact it happened to a paid Google Workspace account is pretty concerning.

OhMeadhbh5• 10 months ago

no, we also frequently accessed the webmail jnterface. or at least I did.

jsheard4• 10 months ago

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-ramp, if you stop paying then the account is left in a zombie state with even less functionality than a free one until you start paying again.

Do yourself a favour and use Fastmail or Proton or anything else for your vanity domain instead.

Dennip• 10 months ago

This is a super annoying quirk, lots of things don't work well if you're using workspace as a normal gmail account, and they don't quite warn you up front.

GCUMstlyHarmls• 10 months ago

Is it possible to drop workspace, but keep the same account running for your android account? Or still log in with the same account (I guess downgraded to a non-paid account) for sheets etc?

Mistletoe2• 10 months ago

I tried Proton and my test emails couldn’t even get through that I sent myself. Kept going to spam instantly. The big providers have us in a stranglehold here.

WillPostForFood• 10 months ago

"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.

injidup• 10 months ago

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.

_el1s7• 10 months ago

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.

YetAnotherNick• 10 months ago

I don't know why you are downvoted or the parent is upvoted. Clearly the GP is not telling the details and it is highly doubtful that they freeze the workspace account ever without good reason. Unlike standard account, freezing worspace admin account for this definitely means huge customer loss.

LightBug12• 10 months ago

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 business is Ariba. Google use Ariba along with many other large organisations and it SUCKS.

It feels like using Ariba forces big companies to map their bureaucracy around its structure rather than the other way around ... which means people getting bounced from team to team while different queries are raised and some random person somewhere raises another query, etc etc ... and even the internal staff struggle to make things happen.

Whatever happens, it feels like the bureaucratic structure and use of Ariba has imprisoned staff at Google. They can't get beyond their own system now.

The process was a real eye-opener as to what goes on when a firm becomes huge.

In my experience, once a company implements Ariba, it's over and they're just cash-cowing it.

The savings they make in automation are costs passed on to the consumer or supplier in the hassle factor of getting things done. I want to say "Never again", but that's not entirely my choice.

/rant

ossusermivami• 10 months ago

I wonder why people come to conclusion like that to that specific problem.

surely the user may knows that there is probably zillions (by that i mean a lot) of users using gmail via IMAP (at least the enterprise accounts) don't you think it's maybe something else you are doing that flags your account

skeeter20202• 10 months ago

> 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) and I really wish we'd gone sooner.

recroad• 10 months ago

Ha, no way man. I've been trying to get YouTube/Google to reactivate my YouTube account for 14 years which has all my daughters baby videos (then a 2 year old). They shut it down due to some vague copyright violation which they still can't explain to me, and haven't activated it despite about 20 support tickets being filed. And I'm a paying customer.

BTW, if anyone works for Google here and can help me to get it back I'll pay you $100.

Moto7451• 10 months ago

> you can actually contact real humans as a workspace customer easily.

I can barely get replies from my Google Cloud rep and we’re paying them a lot more than $10 per month. Having reps on staff doesn’t mean they have time until things are escalated. When Google threw captchas up on Workspace accounts with integrations (which our product is) for 20ish minutes on Friday and everything was a panic we got responses from a few reps all at once, but mostly to hand wave away the outage.

If you want a fun example there’s a LegalEagle video where he details the difficulty in getting imposter accounts taken down from YouTube through his contacts. He’s not just a random YouTube user, he makes them money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEA0JzhpzPU&vl=en

And for what it’s worth, these experiences are what I have come to expect from everyone outside of the high tiers of AWS Premium Support and a couple other vendors where you pay what is essentially a timeshare agreement for a support team.

e402• 10 months ago

As a paying customer you had the ability to get a human on the line. Whether or not they would tell you why the account was closed is another matter.

Workaccount22• 10 months ago

I imagine their support is like UPS/Fedex, where they do everything possible to get you to hang-up, make you sit and wait between harrowing phone menus, all so that you can get a person in India who only can see the same tracking website that you see.

grapesodaaaaa• 10 months ago

I’ve had this happen to numerous friends.

Haven’t you heard? The best way to contact gmail support is by posting about it on tech websites /s

It’s sad that I often see resolutions happen here after an engineer scrolls through the comments. I agree that not having backups and your own domain is asking for trouble the way things are currently structured with online mail.

I will say that I hosted my own servers for years, but it’s a lot of trouble and not for everyone (plus, I could never quite get the spam filtering tweaked how I wanted).

citizenpaul2• 10 months ago

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.

qiine• 10 months ago

crazy stuff, looks like youtube is the same

kilroy123• 10 months ago

I set a reminder on my calendar to do a take out every 3 months and keep my data backed up and refreshed.

Naomarik• 10 months ago

I was about a week from launching a react native app on iOS/Android, so decided to go through all the administrative motions to get things going in case there were any delays in getting that moving.

Google Developer account cost me $25. A few days go by and I get an e-mail asking for identification documents and a bill that shows that I live at the place I'm at. I send my passport and utility bill with my name on it, those get rejected with absolutely 0 reason the next day.

Zero explanation. I raised about 8 different support tickets and DMed several people on twitter and linkedin that worked for google and emailed a few higher up people.

At one point I got some communication from a completely different department that wasn't accessible to the support lines publicly available, and it looked like they were going to help me.

But in the end nothing.

This was a copy/paste response I saw for every support ticket:

Thanks for contacting the Google Play team.

As much as I'd like to help, I’m not able to provide any more information. Unfortunately, we are unable to verify the documents you provided and are unable to grant your appeal.

If you are located in the EU, you may have additional redress options. Learn more about those potential options in the EU Out-of-Court Dispute Resolution Help Center. Routing ID: ZLFS

Thanks again for your understanding.

My final response after a week of relentless effort:

I'll concede in understanding that:

No one has actually looked at my documents

No one wants to give me a reason why you won't help me

No one on your entire support team is capable of performing basic customer support tasks.

Thanks for treating me like some untouchable beggar when you were the ones that stole $25 from me.

Apple/iOS cost me $100 and my developer account was verified within two days with zero hassle.

PeterStuer• 10 months ago

One more step to bring email in line with being messages on a website rather than messages on your computer.

heavyset_go• 10 months ago

RIP to my OG Gmail account that I forgot the password to but still have POP access to via the Gmail web client.

breakingcups• 10 months ago

Wonder if it's possible to change the POP server without changing the credentials... You could set up your own sniffer server to retrieve the password that Gmail sends to you.

shagrath• 10 months ago

I'm in the same boat, and unfortunately, no

mijoharas6• 10 months ago

Somewhat related. What do people use to keep an offline backup of Gmail, and other mail accounts? Do you need to keep a full download of your mailbox, or is there some way to get an incremental dump (i.e. just things that changed since X)

rendx2• 10 months ago

I use imapsync. Yes you can limit it to mails sent or received in a certain timespan.

https://imapsync.lamiral.info/FAQ.d/FAQ.Archiving.txt

mijoharas6• 10 months ago

Hey, first off, thanks.

How do you go about that? The documentation says:

Q. Can imapsync be used to maintain and restore a local offline copy of a mailbox, eg for backup purposes, using Mbox or Maildir format, so that if the server fails, then the mailbox could be reinstated?

R1. No. Imapsync plays with IMAP servers only.

password4321• 10 months ago

I'm guessing imapsync could be used to transfer email into Gmail to replace this POP client feature that is being removed, as long as it can sync into a folder.

krageon2• 10 months ago

https://isync.sourceforge.io/mbsync.html

It's the most performant solution that's also mature. I've used it for years to retrieve all of my email accounts (of which gmail is one) to a folder that I also backup.

mijoharas6• 10 months ago

Is there any way to only get a subset of the mail (i.e. only changes in last week).

I don't think I want all my email on my local machine, but I do think I want it all in the backups.

I couldn't see anything digging in.

jamespo• 10 months ago

Docker image of gmvault which still works for me even though the project is basically abandoned: https://hub.docker.com/r/aubertg/gmvault-docker/

paffdragon4• 10 months ago

On one machine I have offlineimap.py[1] (with mutt), on the other laptop Evolution[2] that archives my mail locally that I can also export and back up regularly.

[1] https://www.offlineimap.org/

[2] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/wikis/home

mijoharas6• 10 months ago

Ok, interesting. I checked the docs of offlineimap (thanks, I hadn't found that one when googling!) and it looks like I could use the `maxage` option for the incremental option (I think I want to create a folder for each week, back it up , and delete it after a while).

Do you have anything set up with evolution to handle things automatically?

carlosjobim3• 10 months ago

An e-mail client? At least that's how I do it, and it's been working well for decades.

mijoharas6• 10 months ago

My problem is I don't want to keep my entire email downloaded, but to periodically back things up.

Do you use your email client to periodically backup? (I would like it automated).

Do you use thunderbird or something else if so?

srb24• 10 months ago

POP is not perfect (could a new version be created - POP4??) but IMAP is not always the solution. For one thing it makes switching mail provider very hard when you haven't got a copy of all your historic emails - with POP you just change settings and away you go. Ms are also always trying to turn off POP access for the Office Outlook program. Hmmmmmm It's almost as if both they and Google run two of the largest subscription email hosting platforms which would both benefit if it's harder for people to change provider... Of course the less you download the more you have to store on their servers and the more you store the more you pay and of course every day brings more emails to store....

yreg• 10 months ago

This is about uploading data to gmail. You continue to be able to download from gmail via pop3.

randomtoast• 10 months ago

Gmail's endgame plan is that virtually everyone in the world is forced to use Gmail or have a very reduced email experience.

vladms• 10 months ago

Good luck with that. I changed to a different provider like 10 months ago and to be honest I do not see big differences.

It was a problem with a couple of other sites that don't allow you to change your user/email, but we can't blame that on Gmail.

Andrew_nenakhov• 10 months ago

Well, I'm that Gmail user who used POP3 fetching from my previous email from day 1 of using Gmail. I guess I'll have to set up IMAP then, at least until the time they'll take it away, too.

NetMageSCW14• 10 months ago

I would replace POP with forwarding unless you are okay with storing your email in multiple services.

xdanger• 10 months ago

Oh no, I have to go and setup my family's emails again. We have a domain and I used to forward to some gmail accounts (few don't want to use multiple email programs/accounts), but so much mail got lost (not even in spam folder) that I just had to switch everyone to pop3 fetch to gmail.com. Now at least email get's there, even if it's 30-60mins late (really annoying for logins/verifications/etc.).

Maybe it's time to switch everyone out of gmail and make gmail forward the email to out hosted accounts.

ThePowerOfFuet• 10 months ago

Migadu.

lagniappe• 10 months ago

Migadu.

tracker15• 10 months ago

I've been using mail forwarding with my cloudflare domains without issue in gmail since google domains sold... you may want to consider that, delivery has been very good. As another alternative, if you self-host an MTA, you can relay through SendGrid, which also has had really good outbound deliverability, I've used this for a hobby site/app that has a built in MTA.

sunnybeetroot• 10 months ago

Is my understanding correct that if you stop paying for your domain, someone else will register it and get access to all your accounts?

noirscape• 10 months ago

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".)

Axing this feature (title is slightly misleading - you can't do the same thing over IMAP with the Gmail service; external mail fetch is dead) is an attempt to get people to stop using vanity domains so they're locked in/tied to the Gmail ecosystem.

Pretty awful and I wonder how wise of a business decision this is, given Google is one of the companies who's getting side-eyed in Europe due to being an American big tech company with ties to the US government. Wouldn't be surprised if a good number of people will just abandon the big G's mail service as a result. Regular people (so not tech people) are more aware about this sort of thing than they were before, and Gmail specifically has been getting the stinkeye because of how obvious it is. This will only end up confirming those fears.

NetMageSCW14• 10 months ago

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

sumanep8• 10 months ago

Yahoo doesn't allow forwarding anymore

sumanep8• 10 months ago

You can't do the same thing with imap.

CTOSian• 10 months ago

I am using the gmail web-app to access emails from eg yahoo and outlook, well if they pull off the plug of this feature (gmail mobile app only) no big deal - sod off gmail (web app again) there is zoho that you can do this with a very small cost (abt £1/mo IIRC)

cess112• 10 months ago

I think most readers here could afford a domain name and email accounts with some local or otherwise small provider, that's a much better option.

NetMageSCW14• 10 months ago

That’s a terrible idea - putting your email at risk with a small local provider is asking for future trouble.

cess112• 10 months ago

Not really, no.

anty3• 10 months ago

Is there any solution that does not require me to run my own email server?

I have a 2GB email server. I use POP to regularly import the mails into Gmail. This deletes the mails on my limited-storage-server.

I already pay for Google storage. I do not want to pay (more) for another email server just so I can keep all my emails forever.

Forwarding mails does not work, because Gmail quietly drops mails. They don't even put them into the spam folder.

My webhoster told me I could pay for Google Workspace. There you apparently can use your own domain. But then I have a third service I have to pay.

Jolter• 10 months ago

Did you rule out using IMAP?

anty3• 10 months ago

With IMAP i need to run a mail server that stores my mails forever, right? I want to "import" a copy into Gmail and delete it on the original server.

NetMageSCW14• 10 months ago

Forwarding is the right solution, but it needs to be at a lower level than a regular user style email forward - more like a DNS delivery change.

noduerme3• 10 months ago

FUCK THIS. This is disgusting.

I've been using Thunderbird for 10 years as the way I normally download my gmail. I have no interest in using IMAP, I store everything locally.

I suppose the idea is that they can make more money if you don't delete after you download your mail, then you have to pay them for storage?! Is that what this is about??

Because there have to be a small handful of people in the world still using POP to access gmail. Feels fucking personal.

StopDisinfo9102• 10 months ago

The article is about Gmail checking third party account through POP and not about checking Gmail using POP which remains supported.

noduerme3• 10 months ago

Ah. Thanks. Since I don't have any kind of multiple account setup with Gmail, it really wasn't clear on a first read of the article that it wouldn't apply to all POP access. Sigh of relief...? Sirens going off? I run my own mail server, but I use gmail as a backstop - i.e. if a hosting provider needed to verify me, that would go to my gmail account. I should probably radically reconsider that now before it's too late, because I really don't like the way this is trending.

NetMageSCW14• 10 months ago

I hope so but the article is incredibly unclear about that since it suggest an alternative is to configure IMAP on your third party account as an option.

hackernewds2• 10 months ago

Bit of an overreaction since your use case isn't being affected at all. Rather they are making no money off it, and continue to support it.

noduerme3• 10 months ago

That was not very clear from the article, but yeah. Understood. I don't even know wtf "third party accounts" are. Nowhere does it say that they will continue to support :995 access. They should mention that somewhere.

Hnrobert42• 10 months ago

This seems to affect only checking 3rd party email addresses using POP. I think you can still use TB with POP to get your mail that goes straight to Gmail.

sylware• 10 months ago

And a few months ago, they did, literaly, block noscript/basic (x)html browsers for their dominant search engine (right before that they were white-listing a few of those browsers).

Gogol has been on the super evil guys side for a while. The US admin has been trying to "anti-trust" them for years, without any results to make them behave: because its need to have a technical part. With enforced, minimal, simple and good enough to do the job technical protocols/file formats. Usually, a small subset of what it is already running IRL would be defined as those protocols/file formats. For the web, that would be noscript/basic (x)html (remember when most of the web was running perfectly fine with basic html forms?)

All that to allow alternative small implementations to be real-life alternatives.

I could buy on amazon with lynx browser hardly a few years back, now I cannot (well I have not tried in a while), the agenda of the devil is followed perfectly.

anentropic• 10 months ago

That sinking feeling...

I have no idea if I'm using this. I set something up like 20 years ago when migrating from a self-hosted email to Gmail. But I think maybe at least one of my addresses might still be a POP mailbox.

chanux• 10 months ago

They would surely send an e-mail with the specifics if you are affected, right?

bborud• 10 months ago

I have a Google Workspace for my family. Mostly for email. Has anyone had a similar setup and moved in to Protonmail?

shauntest12321• 10 months ago

Forward Email for me.

paride57452• 10 months ago

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.

kelvinjps10• 10 months ago

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

mempko2• 10 months ago

Yes it does, they have an official software called the bridge which allows you to connect a 3rd party email client.

ianhawes• 10 months ago

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

NetMageSCW14• 10 months ago

How does gmail using POP to retrieve messages to your account from your account with another service facilitate spam and how can the bad actor take advantage of that?

sumanep8• 10 months ago

That does not make sense

newscracker• 10 months ago

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.

paride57452• 10 months ago

The point is that Google is harming paying customers, and as a paying customer Proton respects me more and it is based in Europe, which is a big plus for me.

deadbabe• 10 months ago

Why not just use Gmail api?

matheusmoreira3• 10 months ago

I'm having a really good experience with Proton. I even interacted with them here on HN once, they cleared up some uncertainties by posting technical OpenPGP information that wasn't covered in their documentation.

daitangio• 10 months ago

I set up my personal mail server https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver and I have wrote about it here https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-on-docker

I am GMail-free from 2020 and I am a lot happier.

I keep my GMail account, but I use just as failsafe or as seconday account. In the meantime, I have very little trouble managing my mail-server.

ddtaylor• 10 months ago

Wow this is awesome!

enigma101• 10 months ago

that's a bit rich from google to not support the essential protocol of email

NetMageSCW14• 10 months ago

Are there other email services that support scheduled POP transfer of email from other accounts?

michaelbryzek• 10 months ago

Thanks for mentioning Google Takeout - was not aware of that service and found it very useful

schnable3• 10 months ago

It's amusing to me that big friendly Google that started out giving massive amounts of storage away for free (effectively unlimited at the time) has been on a kick to roll that back.

bunderbunder• 10 months ago

Their advertising used to be so wildly profitable that they just straight-up had money to burn. That business model has been getting less and less sustainable as their advertising profits continue to erode.

matheusmoreira3• 10 months ago

Stop using gmail. I bought a Proton Mail subscription. Truly one of the best things I've ever done.

mcpar-land• 10 months ago

especially if you have a custom domain with google workspace (or whatever it's named now). my switch to pointing my domain from google to proton was totally painless, you can migrate all your old emails, etc.

i imagine if you just have an @gmail.com it might be a little more annoying what with having to do forwarding, but still worth it.

ImJamal• 10 months ago

Proton doesn't support pop either?

matheusmoreira3• 10 months ago

I didn't need it. Alternatives like fastmail should be good in that case.

pier254• 10 months ago

Well fuck. I've been using this feature since I started using Gmail in 2007 or so.

DamnInteresting• 10 months ago

I'm in the same boat, watching Google preparing to capsize it. I'm a paying customer, and they keep making my life more difficult.

nla• 10 months ago

The Google enshitification continues unabated.

neves• 10 months ago

Everytime someone tells me about the advantages of decentralization, I ask them to explain me why e-mail, the decentralization protocol per excellence, now is centralized in a handful of companies.

chrisfinazzo2• 10 months ago

Why are people surprised by this? (No, really)

IMAP "defeated" POP long ago if you wanted to use a third-party client but still access mail from anywhere.

By definition, this doesn't work in a POP environment, but that's increasingly an outdated mindset.

For historical reasons (intertia, and being early enough that I was able to acquire a "firstname.lastname" address), I don't plan to leave Gmail unless things really go south. My personal domain (Fastmail) is used for other things and I've never anything other than Mail.app and their own web interface.

tracker15• 10 months ago

This is about importing email from your non-gmail account INTO your gmail account. POP is simply the easiest way to do this, and just from GMail's own IMAP interface, it's pretty clear that IMAP is NOT reliable for this task...

The details in TFA are that you can add an external IMAP account to the gmail client app in Android. This does nothing for the gmail web ui, meaning you need something else for your external email.

Wouldn't mind exploring something akin to a web-based, self-hosted Thunderbird mail client giving a server hosted web UI for multiple email and nntp services. If if synced to desktop/mobile apps and/or had a decent mobile web UX, that would be gravy.

chrisfinazzo2• 10 months ago

I see the appeal of using Gmail to manage all of your mail, including the fact that you can still send through external SMTP servers, but it's just not for me.

Native clients continue to improve, and the mismatch between how I handle Gmail on iOS vs (for example) Fastmail shows that they're so wedded to this particular mindset that it's unlikely to ever be fully solved.

I look at people like my Dad -- early 70's, who spent most of his career as the "desktop infrastructure" manager at a midsize insurer -- who still wants to have Outlook available because he likes how Outlook does mail. It's just how his mind works. IMAP exists, but it's an implementation detail that's separate from the specific client features they add.

    Wouldn't mind exploring something akin to a web-based, self-hosted Thunderbird mail client giving a server hosted web UI for multiple email and nntp services.

Self hosting your own mailserver is almost always a bad idea unless you're really a dyed-in-the-wool mail nerd - I worked for one at a small startup one summer during college, but they're a rare breed.

mlhpdx• 10 months ago

I'm so glad I bit the bullet and wrote my own email service.

arbuge• 10 months ago

Lots of comments here suggesting forwarding emails from the external account to Gmail as a workaround for this.

This isn't a complete workaround though. In particular, the option to delete the email from your server after retrieving it will not be replaceable. At least cPanel doesn't seem to offer the option to delete automatically after forwarding, and you could argue it shouldn't - with a push, you never know if the other end actually got it, unlike with a pull.

wiseleo• 10 months ago

I've been using this feature (POP3 fetch from external accounts, send as external accounts) for over 10 years. It's unfortunate that it will break soon. :(

wkat4242• 10 months ago

Funny, at the same time Microsoft is making it mandatory to do just that if you want to use outlook with another provider.

trueismywork• 10 months ago

What's the motivation?

tracker15• 10 months ago

I've been experimenting with a few different email options, still relying heavily on my gmail account... but I can say, I'd look into a dedicated host running mailu which is pretty much a docker compose file and configuration that lets you spin up a mail server really quickly and relatively easily. You have to configure a bunch of DNS records accordingly but it tends to work well enough. I've had delivery issues with outlook.com email, but not hotmail or office465, and delivery to gmail has also worked without issue.

I need to get off my ass and just create an inbox on my mail server to use instead of the blind/wildcard mail forwarding I currently have. It was a useful feature before google domains set off, and I setup my domains on cloudflare for it, bit really should just self-host it all with a good hourly backup/rsync out.

mrWiz2• 10 months ago

Right now I'm using a grandfathered-in free Google Workspace account to send/receive email from a custom domain. I'd like to transfer my email to another provider (Zoho, maybe?) to avoid getting rug-pulled by Google down the road. I'm assuming that if I transfer my email and domain (via IMAP, probably) I'll need to make new Google account for non-email related things (Docs, Drive, Youtube, etc). Does anyone know if this assumption is valid?

monocularvision• 10 months ago

I have had this same question for a while now.

hcaz• 10 months ago

Protonmail is a good alternative if its imap restrictions are not a problem for you

mrWiz2• 10 months ago

I'd prefer to have full IMAP support without needing a specialized app, otherwise Proton seems like a better choice than Zoho, which is definitely overkill for my needs.

[edit] I just found purelymail, which seems like a good fit.

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

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