Ask HN: How are you handling Gmail ending POP3 and Gmailify?

4 points by moshetanzer 5mo ago ↗ HN

Starting January 2026, Gmail is removing support for POP3 and Gmailify. This means millions of people who rely on Gmail to consolidate emails from other accounts will suddenly lose features like spam protection, inbox categories, and advanced search on their third-party emails.

If you manage multiple email accounts, how are you planning to keep all your emails flowing smoothly to Gmail or elsewhere? Are you switching to forwarding, using other clients, or something else entirely?

Would love to hear how the community is adapting to this change.

4 comments

[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 18.0 ms ] thread

ChrisArchitect 5mo ago ↗

Think alot would be changing to forwarding if they want to maintain a similar setup.

Some previous discussion with mentions of that:

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45439670

moshetanzer 5mo ago ↗

Yeah that is what we also figured. We are using https://forwardmyinbox.com which works quite well.

wkndfn 5mo ago ↗

Came across https://postdirect.net/mailbox, and it just works.

Best part for me is that it only needs write access to Gmail, so I'm not handing it the keys to my Google data.

christpetron 5mo ago ↗

I was using "Check mail from other accounts" to pull from 3 custom domain accounts into a single Gmail inbox. Tried auto-forwarding first. Within two weeks, my emails were landing in spam because the forwarding was tanking my sender reputation (it forwards the spam too). The Gmail mobile IMAP option is mobile-only with separate inboxes, so that was a non-starter.

I ended up building a hosted POP/IMAP bridge that does what Gmail used to do: logs into your external accounts on a schedule, fetches new messages, and forwards them to Gmail via SMTP with proper SPF/DKIM alignment. The key difference from auto-forwarding is pull vs. push. Spam stays on the external server instead of getting forwarded into Gmail.

It's at https://mailbridge.app. Currently collecting waitlist signups, polishing the MVP now. Happy to answer questions about the technical approach (credential encryption, deduplication, deliverability, etc).