Google Is Ending Gmailify and POP Support (pcworld.com) 48
Google will discontinue Gmailify and POP email support in January 2026, forcing users who rely on these features to switch to IMAP. PCWorld reports: These changes only affect future emails. Emails that have already been synchronized in the Gmail account will remain the same. External accounts can still be used in the Gmail app, but only via IMAP. Google also recommends that users with work or education accounts contact their administrators if a Google Workspace migration is needed.
For many Gmail users, these changes will likely mean getting used to the new system. Anyone who previously upgraded their external email accounts with Gmailify or integrated them via POP will have to switch to IMAP by January 2026 at the latest and do without some convenient functions, like spam filters and automatic sorting.
For many Gmail users, these changes will likely mean getting used to the new system. Anyone who previously upgraded their external email accounts with Gmailify or integrated them via POP will have to switch to IMAP by January 2026 at the latest and do without some convenient functions, like spam filters and automatic sorting.
Are people still using POP(3)? (Score:2, Insightful)
IMAP has been around for a few decades at this point.
Re:Are people still using POP(3)? (Score:5, Informative)
Inertia. POP is simple to configure, guaranteed to work, and there's no advantage in IMAP if all you do is fetch a single mailbox folder onto your machine.
Personally I've already switched my gmail fetching tools to IMAP due to being the way for oauth2 (otherwise it still would be using POP).
Re:Are people still using POP(3)? (Score:5, Informative)
there's no advantage in IMAP if all you do is fetch a single mailbox folder onto your machine.
I'd argue that's only true if you have a *single* machine. Once you start wanting your mail two (or more) places, POP's shortcomings become very obvious.
Re: (Score:3)
Gmail being the email client effectively makes it a "single machine" - and this has worked well for over two decades until now.
Re:Are people still using POP(3)? (Score:4, Informative)
there's no advantage in IMAP if all you do is fetch a single mailbox folder onto your machine.
I'd argue that's only true if you have a *single* machine. Once you start wanting your mail two (or more) places, POP's shortcomings become very obvious.
I was talking to a non-computer savvy person just the other day who was complaining that the email she gets on her computer is weirdly not in sync with the email that she gets on her phone.
I haven't gone over there, but POP is the first thing that ..um, popped into my head. She wants me to have a look, because setting up computer stuff is "man stuff" and she is admittedly clueless. She can barely use her iPhone, except she's an expert at Facebook.
Re: (Score:2)
POP used to be good for testing to see if a mail server worked. Log in with telnet, use USER and PASS, do a LIST, and you could tell if all is doing okay.
However, IMAP has replaced it completely. Nothing POP can do that IMAP can't except for being a simple protocol designed for someone to yank all their mail off their mail server onto their local machine, as opposed to viewing it.
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing POP can do that IMAP can't except for being a simple protocol designed for someone to yank all their mail off their mail server onto their local machine, as opposed to viewing it.
Yes, I like being able to pull all my mail to my main machine, filter it into folders and have it, backups too. IMAP for secondary machines like my phone. Since Google keeps most everything, can always go into "All Mail" to find stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
I do all of that on my mail server. It's then accessible over IMAP, or I can fire up Roundcube in a browser. The filters are also managed through Roundcube. The VPS it runs on costs me maybe $12 per month, and that's not even the cheapest option out there.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, having a server can be a good option, just not really worth it for me currently.
Re: (Score:2)
except for being a simple protocol designed for someone to yank all their mail off their mail server onto their local machine
IMAP does this as well. In getmail6 (a CLI tool that downloads email for use with, say, mutt), just swap from SimplePOP3SSLRetriever to SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever. You get all your email downloaded without any difference.
Re: (Score:2)
I was using POP up until a few years ago. I believe Google said this change was going to happen a while back so I switched to IMAP. Just went into Thunderbird to verify ... yep, all Gmail accounts using IMAP.
Re:Are people still using POP(3)? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, but not in the way described in the article. I have a catch-all email address for my domain.
My Gmail is configured to fetch its content via POP3. I used to have auto-forwaed to Gmail, but this got blocked due to the spam delivery over SMTP.
Doing the fetch via POP works around it.
I have been doing this for years. For each entity I do business woth, I use a different email address in my domain.
If they sell my email address or get compromised, I know who it came from.
Recently, the courage campaign sold my email to a whole bunch of other political organizations. My inbox has been filled with spam at the address I used to correspond with them. And I have to manually unsubscribe from each.
Re: (Score:2)
100% the same setup here too. I've had a "catch all" email address that Gmail polls and fetches, then sorts based on the destination email address. Without this now, and due to other shit Google has been doing, I don't see a reason to keep Gmail as my email client anymore. There are plenty of feature-parity-enough web based email clients in the world now, I don't need them anymore.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I finally dumped Gmail this year after seeing the ways Alphabet is participating in Project 2025. I'd rather not have all my correspondence where those guys are scanning it. Should have done it years ago, $5/mo is not very much for something so essential.
Re: (Score:2)
the ways Alphabet is participating in Project 2025
What are those?
Re: (Score:3)
The first thing I noticed almost immediately in February was that Google News was filled with whitehouse.gov missives on a daily basis. I'd seen them showcased there only a handful of times in the prior decade, but beginning in February, every time I open Google News, there's almost guaranteed to be something from whitehouse.gov there. Google execs making a point to appear at all the right rallies.
What I'm more worried about, of course, are the things they don't let you see. But they've done enough signalli
Re: (Score:2)
Then there's that "Gulf of America" joke, which Google went out of their way to release public statements that they would quickly alter their maps to align with that culture-war nonsense.
I just checked MapQuest, they still have the traditional name Gulf of Mexico, and I'm guessing every other map does as well.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I mean, do you expect them to come out and publicly say something like, "We're giving the government all your emails and data to calculate a social credit score"?
Do you expect this government won't ask for that?
Do you expect Alphabet to decline?
Re: (Score:2)
I mean, do you expect them to come out and publicly say something like, "We're giving the government all your emails and data to calculate a social credit score"?
Do you expect this government won't ask for that?
Do you expect Alphabet to decline?
Yes, I expect Alphabet would decline. I worked there for 15 years and understand the culture and motivations pretty well. Culturally, doing something like that would cut against the grain, hard. Pragmatically, they wouldn't like to oppose the administration but they'd get a lot more PR mileage out of leaking the request and publicly declaring their opposition than it would cost them.
Re: (Score:2)
So, while no one else is able to stop the authoritarian takeover, Big Tech will make a bold stand, sacrificing their cash and Most Favored Industry status for their altruistic principles.
If that doesn't sound absurd on its face, you've internalized some of your employer's propaganda. It's not just aimed at customers; it's aimed at you, and your coworkers. They let you and your friends have your little culture, beliefs, and morals. But when the dictator's call comes, you and your friends won't be the ones ma
Re: (Score:2)
I use Cloudflare to forward email from my domain to Gmail. It has the advantage of Cloudflare not being blocked by any of the spam lists because so many people use it, and it's free. I know, Cloudflare reads all my spam, my data is going to be hacked any minute now, but it works reliably and the price is right.
Re: (Score:2)
I run my Gmail with imaps and haven't had any reason to use pop3s.
I hope that everyone at least use the secure version and not the clear text version.
That way I can see my mails wherever I am - phone, computer or (the horror) web.
POP is still the best for some reasons. (Score:5, Informative)
Unlike IMAP, POP allows you to maintain a local copy of your mail, a copy that is isolated from the server.
For many reasons, people prefer that to IMAP or Exchange, which will delete mail from your local cache if it is removed from the server, and accessing that cache independent from the server is also a challenge.
Thankfully, this isn't Gmail dropping POP support for their users. We will still be able to get emails into Thunderbird or Outlook using POP. What is going away is configuring Gmail to use POP to pull emails from other accounts into the Gmail inbox.
Re:POP is still the best for some reasons. (Score:5, Informative)
I can easily save IMAP mail in local folders using Thunderbird
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with IMAP is the synchronisation. Firstly, delete a email by accident (or someone else does) in one instance of Thunderbird, and the other copies will be deleted too. Secondly, your host system (Google here) has a complete record of every email you care about. With POP, you can log into the mail host and clear out all your emails periodically without affecting everything.
TL/DR: With IMAP, all your email history is dependent on someone else's computer.
Re: (Score:2)
If you set your email client to copy/move all incoming emails to a local folder, you have everything on your PC.
Re: (Score:2)
Thankfully, this isn't Gmail dropping POP support for their users. We will still be able to get emails into Thunderbird or Outlook using POP. What is going away is configuring Gmail to use POP to pull emails from other accounts into the Gmail inbox.
Thanks for clarifying.
Re: (Score:2)
What is going away is configuring Gmail to use POP to pull emails from other accounts into the Gmail inbox.
I honestly wonder if most people didn't know this feature existed. It's so useful to consolidate email systems. I do it myself with a Linux box at home which uses fetchmail to get emails from a variety of different accounts and providers and then provides me external access via IMAP.
Re: (Score:2)
In KMail I have the "download messages for offline use" option, accessing cached messages offline isn't an issue.
Remove from server is still an issue, but again "archive" plugins exist. (that is NOT user friendly, I'll grant you that).
Thunderbird has both these options too. AFAIK the "full cache" is called "synchronization"
I use IMAP because I have my main machine with offline cache and all the archiving bells and whistles, and then I want access on my phone, with synchronized /READ flags. POP can't do that
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah.
I just POP them all to my local system. And then read/delete or juust delete them as I see fit. I don't want the remote server to know which ones I just delete, when I read messages or how I manage them.
Too much spam coming from GMail. If they figure out who's mail I read, they'll just tack that From: address onto everything.
Re: (Score:3)
Unlike IMAP, POP allows you to maintain a local copy of your mail
That is in no way unlike IMAP. Nothing about IMAP prevents local caching/copies. Thunderbird will do it.
Re: (Score:3)
IMAP has been around for a few decades at this point.
IPv4 has been around even longer!
Re: (Score:3)
IMAP has been around for a few decades at this point.
That's like saying "Are people still using computers? Tablets have been around for a few decades!" They are different things with different purposes. Yes I use POP3 and I also use IMAP. POP is useful for transferring emails from one system to another, IMAP is useful for accessing emails from a system without transferring them.
The two protocols were never in competition and neither was a replacement for the other, they had different purposes.
Spam (Score:3)
Why does the article say you will lose spam filtering?
Gmail does spam filtering for all my IMAP accounts. And when something slips by Google, but my client marks it as spam, I can (manually drag, or automatically) move it into the Gmail spam folder. And Gmail tracks messages in and out of the spam folder to refine it's spam filtering. IOW, Gnail totally supports spam filtering over IMAP.
You know, there are also shit-tons of spam that you never see in Gmail. It doesn't even go into your spam folder. They just blackhole it before anyone ever sees it. (Remember that Google sees all the email in the universe and can trivially detect mass spams.) What you see in your Gmail spam folder is just what made it through that pre-screening.
That's ok, I left gmail (Score:2)
Google decided that I was a minor, the idiots. And they didn't need to do so. So I've switched from Google to Duck-duck-go, and abandoned my gmail account. (I didn't want to even log in enough to delete it.)
I suppose I'll eventually need to find some other way to sign up for sites that demand that kind of id. For now I'll just use the existing gmail account for that, since most sites no longer work from an ordinary email account.
But they barely support IMAP? (Score:2)
You can not get GMail to work with a standard IMAP connection anyway, you need google specific extensions, and Google service integration just to the authenticate.
Inaccurate headline. Not ending POP (Score:4, Informative)
The headline is misleading. Gmail will continue to have POP support but *not for fetching mail from non-google accounts*. You can continue to retrieve your gmail from a client i.e. Thunderbird & similar, using POP3.
Re: (Score:2)
This is what I'm wondering as well. IMAP isn't an option, just POP3.
If I want to use my Gmail account as an 'email client', my only option to connect to an external email address is via POP3, at least in Canada.
Is this the case elsewhere? I don't see IMAP as an option with the 'Check email from another account' option in the settings. Their 'Learn More' button says:
====
Add another email account on your computer
In a web browser, at mail.google.com, you can add:
Another Gmail account.
A non-Gmail account like Y
thats nice how about security... implement DANE (Score:2)
how about security gmail team ?
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6698 [rfc-editor.org]
microsoft are eating your lunch in europe gov etc
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/how-smtp-dane-works [microsoft.com]
exim supports it and so does postfix get with the times.... the Not invented here is getting tiresome just do it
regards
John Jones
Sounds taken from DCC (Score:1)
This sounds like the messages from the crazy AI in Dungeon Crawler Carl
People still using Gmail? (Score:2)
I demand a refund! (Score:2)
Still fetchmail/pop, is there an IMAP equivalent? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Fetchmail should still work through POP3. What's being disabled is fetching non-Gmail emails into Gmail with POP3. From the FAQ section on the Google page [google.com]:
I use mpop for copying all of my email to my computer, so I think that should still keep working.
Hopefully all those users will just switch (Score:2)
At first my reaction was, like many, "who uses pop anyway", good riddance. Then I realized this was for getting mail IN to Google, and then I thought, well who would have another account OFF Google and then want get their mail back ON anyway? That's like escaping from your kidnapper, going to the grocery store to get food, then taking yourself and your groceries BACK to the kidnapper's house.
Email going to an account Google doesn't control, and people actually give it to Google to read, record, process, a
It's as if ... (Score:2)
I haven't used POP3 since Netcom (Score:2)