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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>> 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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?"
#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.
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.
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).
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...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Hugely frustrating - they penalize their paying customers. Can't attach Nest devices, can't use the YouTube family plan.
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.
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.
BTW, if anyone works for Google here and can help me to get it back I'll pay you $100.
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.
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
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
Deleted Comment
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).
Dead Comment
Edit: Ohhh. According to other posts it’s about gmail not pulling email from other servers via POP3, not about accessing gmail.
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.
Feels overkill just to achieve the same outcome as we previously had for free, though.
Fortunately, they're all set up to forward to Gmail. Gmail never checks them itself.
Does e-mail forwarding not work in your case?
Your (1) would be worded in the opposite order.
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?"
That said you can get the same thing by setting up an auto-forwarder to your gmail box.
Deleted Comment
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.
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).
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
Deleted Comment
Do not bet against how much small businesses don't want to pay for stuff, you will always lose.
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
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.
Maybe it's time to switch everyone out of gmail and make gmail forward the email to out hosted accounts.
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.
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 :(
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.
POP access of a different account on the web would be the "Check mail from other accounts"
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.
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.
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.
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.