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.
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 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! :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
#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.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 99.4 ms ] threadIMAP 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.
Writing in as a current POP user. I use it to import email every day.
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.
Outbound emails sent via "Send mail as:" using SMTP remain unaffected.
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.
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.
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.
Then you have a regular Gmail account and get notifications, spam checking, mobile push notifications etc.
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.
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.
it won't even be available in the paid version, right?
why are they being confusing?
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.
That said you can get the same thing by setting up an auto-forwarder to your gmail box.