Google To Kill Gmail's POP3 Mail Fetching (theregister.com) 92
Google is quietly killing Gmail's ability to fetch mail from third-party email accounts using POP3, a long-standing feature that has allowed users to consolidate multiple inboxes into a single Gmail interface. The change takes effect this month and also ends Gmailify, the companion feature that applied Gmail's spam filtering and inbox organization to linked third-party accounts.
Google buried the decision in a support note rather than making any formal announcement. The company's suggested workaround -- switching to IMAP -- doesn't work for all affected users. Users can still access third-party accounts through the Gmail mobile app, but the Gmail service itself will no longer retrieve messages from external providers.
Google buried the decision in a support note rather than making any formal announcement. The company's suggested workaround -- switching to IMAP -- doesn't work for all affected users. Users can still access third-party accounts through the Gmail mobile app, but the Gmail service itself will no longer retrieve messages from external providers.
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What can that achieve? IMAP isn't supported even now (and never was for this workflow, TFA is misleading).
wow ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Haven't even thought about pop3 in decades.
What provider these days supports POP3 but *not* IMAP?
Hard to believe any would remain ... POP3 was mostly obsolete during the (Bill) Clinton administration. <Insert Hillary email joke here>
Keep in mind, one of the authentication mechanisms in the POP3 protocol is .rhosts ....
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Retrieving email from other accounts via IMAP was never supported so there's nothing to kill there.
Re:wow ... (Score:5, Informative)
This is about the feature in Gmail that allows you to setup so that Gmail automatically in the background fetch email from a 3rd party provider using pop3 into your Gmail account. It's not about accessing your Gmail account using POP or IMAP.
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There are still email providers who give only a few hundred MB (or less) of storage space. Rather than doing the slightly difficult task of handing over the new address to providers and making sure the job gets done right, they are relying on POP3 fetching to move the messages into a bigger cloud mailbox. IMAP wouldn't solve the problem that this mail fetching is used for. All it does is give you direct access to a tiny mailbox instead of proxy access.
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Since IMAP is a functional superset of POP3, you can use IMAP just like you use POP3 (to fetch and then maybe delete) if you desire. You may need to do a bit of coding, but that's hardly Google's fault.
Re:wow ... (Score:5, Insightful)
pop3 is easy to invoke over serial, so you can make IOT that use it with arduino easily.
Re:wow ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Though since TFA is about gmail fetching via POP3... if your lightweight embedded app is using gmail, I guarantee that POP3 fetch is not your first (or eighth) problem.
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This doesn't affect them. This is Gmail contacting a POP3 server to pull mail into Gmail.
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One amazing thing about the internet is two different clients can access a single server.
Re: wow ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't want my email corpus sitting on someone else's server. Do not want IMAP.
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E-mail providers probably already have copies of your e-mails even though you deleted them. :(
Re: wow ... (Score:2)
If you mean individual emails on servers all over the world, sure. Guys looking without a warrant can just go fish. Everyplace. In the world.
If you mean my own mail server (which I run), nope.
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GMail has so far provided *both* POP3 and IMAP. They are not equivalent, at all. IMAP stores email on the server and allows your client to sync them locally. If you delete them on the server, the delete is synced too. By contrast, POP3 is a feed. You get the emails, and as you do, they are (usually) deleted from the server. The client "owns" them, no syncing.
So two completely different use cases.
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What provider these days supports POP3 but *not* IMAP?
Two different protocols for two different purposes. Also this has nothing to do with how you access Gmail. Gmail will continue to support fetching mail from its servers via POP3.
Netzero and Juno (Score:2)
Oh no! What will I do about my precious Netzero and Juno email accounts!
These "services" actually only support POP3.
Re:Netzero and Juno (Score:4, Informative)
The relevant part is "the Gmail service itself will no longer retrieve messages from external providers."
This means even if you straight up have IMAP support on your external server (Say, your company / private email server) google wont fetch email from there.
The solution they have listed doesn't work, since being able to use your mobile app to check mail, and being able to actually get that mail are two very different things. jwz [jwz.org] (owner of the dnalounge) has an amazing breakdown of the issues this causes.
This is ripping out a feature and replacing it with nothing. It's not just Netzero and Juno, it's any email account you have, there is no good replacement for this.
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"Oh no! What will I do about my precious [Newsgroup] accounts!"
And yet someone did, and history is relived. Email is no different.
I just forward emails (Score:3)
I have a catchall domain going to a gmail address, which then then forwards to my workspace account.
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I tried that in the past. Unfortunately, because all the spam that got forwarded to gmail, my mail server ended up on an RBL.
I ended up having to switch to POP3 fetching. The exact same messages, including all spam, were then accepted by gmail, and properly filtered to the spam folder.
With the removal of POP3 fetching, I will no longer be able to use gmail. I'm looking for an alternative webmail client.
Thunderbird is good on a desktop, but not good on a smartphone. I am already at 12GB out of 15GB of free G
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if you are already hosting your own mail; why not host your own web mail?
https://www.squirrelmail.org/ [squirrelmail.org]
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If you are suggesting that I should run it on one of my own systems at home, I won't be doing that because I live in an area where power outages and ISP outages are not rare. I had a 24 hour Comcast outage just last week end. I don't relish maintaining my own server, also. There is power consumption involved, too.
I suppose I could run it on a third party system provided by the current domain ISP. Or use their own shitty webmail. But the next time the ISP raises their price, it will be a PITA to move the dom
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I am now looking for a suitable webmail service alternative for gmail.
It's early days and I'm not using any of their "advanced" features yet, but I have been experimenting with protonmail and am satisfied so far. Their web client seems pretty good.
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Thanks. It looks like it will cost $48/year to essentially replicate what gmail does today with 15GB of storage, which I'm getting close to. $120/year for more storage. The free option is unfortunately not practical for me to even try given the sever limitations, particularly the one custom filter.
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> I tried that in the past. Unfortunately, because all the spam that got forwarded to gmail, my mail server ended up on an RBL.
Exactly. I don't allow users to forward to Gmail, because the issue isn't even whether or not it *is* spam, it's whether or not Google *thinks* it's spam. Google sure doesn't mind being the biggest spam spewer on the planet, but heaven forbid someone wants to forward their own mail to themselves.
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You don't need an email server, to forward your email to GMail. Just use domain email forwarding from a service like CloudFlare Registrar. No SMTP or POP3 fetching necessary, no RBL issues.
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I was not aware of this. Will it work with the catchall@mydomain address ?
And if so, how is it going to prevent the RBL issue ?
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Asked Gemini - seems like it can work with catchall, but Gemini says this comes with a number of problems, none of which exist with Gmail POP3 fetching. Again, this is an AI reply, so I don't know how much of it is accurate, if any. Here are the issues it pointed out :
Cloudflare’s Layer: Cloudflare checks if the incoming email is authenticated (SPF or DKIM). Since July 2025, Cloudflare will drop unauthenticated mail rather than forward it to protect their own server reputation. They also inject a head
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GMail itself is cracking down on emails that don't comply with DKIM or SPF. https://powerdmarc.com/gmail-e... [powerdmarc.com]
I've been using CloudFlare routing to GMail for nearly a year now, with no issues. I do mark spam as spam, and GMail does what I expect with such emails.
I doubt GMail will start flagging CloudFlare as a spammer, they probably have agreements in place with each other to prevent that from happening.
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Are you using a catchall e-mail address ?
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Yes.
I have domain isaacsoft.com, for which I've set up about 80 addresses on CloudFlare. Most of those are routed to the exact same GMail inbox, tonyisaac@gmail.com, though a few are routed to a family member's inbox. I do not route unknown email addresses @isaacsoft.com, just the 80 that I've specifically set up.
I don't use POP3 to retrieve emails from GMail, though I used to.
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And that's probably the difference, I route absolutely everything, as I use way more than 80, and don't want to manually setup each one. I use a different one for every single entity I register with.
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Makes sense. CloudFlare does offer a catch-all.
Catch-all address
Enable the catch-all address to set an action for all other email addresses in user.com.
Catch-all rule only applies on the zone-level domain, you can’t create catch-all rule for each of your subdomain.
Re: I just forward emails (Score:2)
Yes. But the catch all gets a fuckton of spam, by definition. And that is what gets you on the RBL. I don't think forwarding to Gmail is going to work, regardless or whether it's done by cloudflare or my ISP, as I previously did.
POP3 fetching got around this. It will be missed. As will gmail.
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I wish I had a better answer for you! I don't know if there's a solution. My solution took a lot of sweat and stress to figure out, so I don't envy you.
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Thanks for trying. There has to be a solution to this, and I'm determined to find it.
SMTP forwarding has the potential to route email. When forwarding spam, the server thinks you are trying to forward it outside, even if it's all only supposed to end up in one mailbox. The POP3 protocol cannot route e-mail, and thus does not have this problem. The lack of POP3 fetching in Gmail is a huge loss.
It should also be noted that Gmail cannot fetch using IMAP. The IMAP protocol is not designed for it, anyway. And Gm
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Can't you use IMAP?
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IMAP has no server-side filters, unlike gmail. Please see the other thread I opened.
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You are pulling mail into Gmail from a POP3 server, right?
Not pulling mail from Gmail via POP3?
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Correct. And I rely on gmail's built-in filters to get the messages into the desired gmail folder. My clients are gmail's webmail, and Android's gmail app. I don't use IMAP clients. If I did, it would still require messages to be pre-filtered in the mailbox.
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Then I don't think this is an issue. If you pull from IMAP it still filters email I think.
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Except gmail does not have the ability to pull from IMAP, AFAIK. Only through POP3. And that's going away.
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You are right, it's Workspace only. Hmm, that sucks.
You get what you pay for I guess. The hazards of using a free service.
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Yes, of course, I get what I paid for. But this is Google we are talking about. Even if I were a paying customer, I wouldn't put it past them to remove the feature. And indeed, the POP3 removal is probably not just going away for free accounts, is it ? As a Google customer, paying or not, one is just a cog in the machine, with zero leverage.
Google hasn't even specified a date for the termination of the POP3 fetch in gmail. Their "support note" just says "January 2026". And the only notification I got was re
POP3 was great in 1996 (Score:2)
Back when you had a computer that wasn't online all the time.
It stopped being so great in 1997 when everyone in your house had a computer that was online all the time.
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Re: POP3 was great in 1996 (Score:3)
I setup a spare computer to pull my emails down via POP3 as a sort of backup, it's a trick I first heard of during Weinergate, when Ms. Weiner had a laptop backup all her emails in the background.
https://komonews.com/news/nati... [komonews.com]
To address the obligatory... (Score:2)
I work many temp/freelance gigs. When entering a new one I'll be at for 2 weeks, I can sit down at my assigned workstation and...
a:| enter my pop3 info into an email client and pull in new emails.
b:| enter my imap info into an email client and pull in 200,000 emails going back 15 years (and three new ones)
c:| use the browser interface which everyone on the pl
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(b) is a failure on your part. Who keeps 200K emails in a single folder? Most IMAP clients can be told to only pull from certain folders, and to limit the number of messages they pull to the n newest messages. If you go with POP3, you either have your email scattered over multiple devices, or you have to tell your POP3 server not to delete the messages after you download them... in which case you might as well just use IMAP.
The Gmail feature seemed like a WTF to me, because didn't it require you to han
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If you manage your own domain, you can set specific POP3 credentials for any mailbox of your choice, in my case, the catchall mailbox. There is no TOS that applies in this case about giving your POP3 password to google for the purpose of fetching.
IMAP lacks server-side filtering at the protocol level. If you use multiple IMAP clients on several devices, that is a major issue.
I relied on gmail's web interface filters. This allowed me to seamlessly move my domain to other ISPs, when one quadrupled their price
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Sure, if you manage your own domain, that's fine. But I bet a lot of people used the feature to pop mail off their ISP's server using their ISP-assigned email.
IMAP lacks server-side filtering at the protocol level. If you use multiple IMAP clients on several devices, that is a major issue.
How so? And what sort of filtering did you have in mind? Anti-spam filtering and sorting of email into folders should be done at SMTP time or during delivery to your mailbox.
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I use the catchall e-mail address with my domain. When I register with someone else, I use somewhat_random_address@mydomain . This all ends up in the catchall POP3 mailbox, which I fetch in gmail. I then set up some filters in gmail for entities I care about, to go in designated gmail folders. I can then access these folders from both the gmail webmail, or gmail app on Android. I'm looking to replicate the same workflow, without gmail.
How would SMTP help ? I'm not aware that you can do filtering that way, e
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Well, spam and malware filtering is best done at SMTP time with something like a milter [mailmunge.org].
Sorting into folders is usually done by your local delivery agent such as procmail or a program based on Email::Filter. Here I'm assuming you run your own mail server, but even if you don't, setting up a little Raspberry Pi with a USB hard drive to pull in all your email to a central IMAP server and then use that as your IMAP server lets you achieve this quite easily.
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(b) is a failure on your part. Who keeps 200K emails in a single folder?
All of my folders are on my computer, where they're organized nice and tidy.
I have no idea how they're organized on gmail since I haven't looked at the web interface in at least five years. I don't need to, as that's kind of what an email client is for. I grew out of hotmail when I stopped checking my email at the public library. Just saying
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Looks to be in one big pile in your inbox.
It took 72 hours to download all my mail via IMAP that was collected in my 15 year old gmail account. Mind you, in 2024 I was close to limits, so I used the web interface behind https://mail.google.com/ [google.com] to do some severe cleaning. And it also showed up in that interface as everything being reduced back to around 7 GByte.
For years I use my gmail account to forward incoming mail to another IMAP mail server ad that worked fine, About 10 to 20 new messages showed up tha
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Can you comment more on the cleaning you managed to do? As it fills, it seems harder to nearly impossible to sanely use the web UI to get rid of things-like, can’t even get a list of all the senders/sort by them awful garbage.
Enshitification never stops. End of gmail for me (Score:5, Interesting)
This is another reminder to never rely on any service or software made by Google, as they can be killed at any time, without any warning. Thanks to msmatch for reporting the story.
While POP3 is an ancient protocol, when used over TLS, it is still a viable protocol to use, even now. And I have been relying on this gmail POP3 fetching feature for years.
I have my own domain, and use the catchall address. At first, I had it forwarded to gmail via SMTP. Unfortunately, because all the spam that got forwarded to gmail, my mail server ended up on an RBL.
I ended up having to switch to POP3 fetching. The exact same messages, including all spam, were then accepted by gmail, and properly filtered to the spam folder.
With the removal of POP3 fetching, I will no longer be able to use gmail. I'm looking for an alternative webmail client. My own domain hosting ISP's webmail hosting is not very good.
Thunderbird is good on a desktop, but not good on a smartphone. I am already at 12GB out of 15GB of free Google storage, nearly all of it used for e-mails. My current phone does not have much storage left. Unfortunately, the storage is not expandable, also due to enshitification.
Re:Enshitification never stops. End of gmail for m (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, this may be about money for Google. POP3 fetching allows someone to effectively use their own domain with gmail, for free. Google obviously can't have that. They want to sell their paid services.
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I've been designing, building, and running email systems since before POP existed. I still deploy it on all servers, in parallel with IMAP. (And let me pause to note that I still miss Mark Crispin: his insights, his design sensibilities, his coding skills, everything that made him a highly valuable contributor to the Internet.) There are still valid use
Re:Enshitification never stops. End of gmail for m (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed, and I made the mistake of relying on gmail's free and excellent webmail filters. I will now go the extra mile to de-google, even if it costs a little bit more money, due to the completely useless support Google offers. I did a free trial for storage earlier this year. There were major bugs with the Google drive Windows client. One of the bugs was the inability for me to report a bug through the drive client after an error. Support kept telling me to report the bug through the drive software. I could never get anywhere. After I cancelled the service, I got an email telling me to fill a survey through - you guessed it - the drive software itself.
This is the reason I will never pay for any Google service or software. And I am writing this as a former Google employee.
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Eh, maybe? More likely Google doesn't want to support a needless-for-99.9% feature. And they're probably tired of people complaining that "Google is hacking me on Port 993!!!!! My firewall says so!"
(Yeah, I was once told my company was hacking another company, because someone there was using our published tier2 NTP server.)
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It might be about money but related to what's spent with the infrastructure needed to check every few minutes the pop3 accounts people configured even 20 years ago or so, while they login to gmail every once in a while, potentially nearly never (hence their move to delete inactive accounts, but still after years of inactivity, and even so I think they can't bring themselves to do it). Sure, it might not be so huge in Google's great scheme of things but such corporations are great at nickel and diming (while
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Running fetchmail or Thunderbird need me to keep my own system running, along with power and internet connectivity. I am looking for something done by the provider. The existing setup with ISP-hosted domain and gmail POP3 fetching serves those needs. gmail cannot fetch via IMAP, at least not the free gmail.
Forwarding via SMTP is not viable due to the catchall address causing my domain hosting ISP's mail server to end up on an RBL, which was a great inconvenience, not just to me, but the ISP's other customer
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The "provider" that's already running the rest of your servers can also run fetchmail or Thunderbird. Or you can use any VPS like even the free Oracle ones.
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Thunderbird is good on a desktop, but not good on a smartphone.
It's not. I switched to FairEmail a few years ago and have been pretty happy
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This appears to be an Android-only client. How do you access your e-mail from a desktop ? What about filters ?
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This appears to be an Android-only client
Yeah, that's just what I use on my phone (and it's pretty good. Better than Thunderbird anyway).
For desktop I've used SeaMonkey for like the past 20 years (on mac, pc, and linux, with all versions being identical. Small, runs on anything, has everything Thunderbird has because it is Thunderbird just with the original UI)
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Wow. I did not know the Seamonkey project was still alive. I am going to have to check it out.
My question about filters stands, though. Where and how do you manage them, when you have clients on multiple devices ?
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Where and how do you manage them, when you have clients on multiple devices ?
I leave everything on the server except for my home machine w/seamonkey which then filters/organizes. Since gmail (and others) saves everything that's gone through the smtp, all sent email is reeled in to my home machine/filed appropriately too. I don't really need to carry every email I ever received/sent around with me. Usually a "I'll look that up when I get home", suffices. Occasionally I'll copy the seamonkey db to my laptop when I have to go out of town for extended periods.
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Thanks. I do want to have access to my e-mails at all times and places. This includes times when I'm traveling, or when my ISP and power go down at home. For the ~99.7% of the time when they are up, I would consider doing this on a low-power system such as Raspberry Pi. I don't see a build of Seamonkey for Raspberry Pi, though. Thunderbird can probably serve the same purpose. I suppose I would still have access to e-mails remotely, just not filtered, if the Thunderbird on Pi is offline.
I have concerns about
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Thanks. I do want to have access to my e-mails at all times and places. This includes times when I'm traveling, or when my ISP and power go down at home. For the ~99.7% of the time when they are up, I would consider doing this on a low-power system such as Raspberry Pi. I don't see a build of Seamonkey for Raspberry Pi, though.
Last I heard, the official word on seamoney for pi was "just use firefox/thunderbird". RE: internet outages, while I can't speak towards the current Thunderbird, if there's one thing that's very nice about seamonkey, when I do want to move my mail/filters/etc between machines, it's a matter of copying a folder from a thumb drive, and that's it. No cloud syncing or other nonsense (my internet was out for over a week last spring and it would have been a NIGHTMARE if I relied on cloud/web)
As I recall, the search was very slow, and also not very good. This is something gmail does right. I'm not sure if there are IMAP and/or webmail clients that can properly replicate this.
You may want to give
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Thanks. I have never tried Vivaldi. No support folder seems like a big issue for me. I have never used things like "labels" in gmail. Just plain-old filters, that are mostly based on "to: xxx@mydomain" and move messages to a specific folder.
Speaking of which, I don't know if any other mail hosting provider has a way to migrate these gmail filters.
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IMAP is superior to POP3 anyway, if only because it allows all your devices to access the same email inbox.
What makes you think POP3 doesn't allow "all your devices to access the same email inbox"?
I use POP3 exclusively and access the same inbox from different laptops and from my phone all the time. All that's required is a simple email client configuration which leaves messages on the server.
I do have to go in and clean them out occasionally so there's a bit of maintenance involved, but it's not a big deal.
Re:Gmail IMAP (Score:5, Insightful)
I do this exact same thing and they can pry POP3 from my cold dead hands.
IMAP is for people who want to leave all their email on someone else's mail server and be subject to their tools for searching/archiving/storage.
POP3 is for people who want to have full control of their email. I have more than 25 years of emails stored locally - every email I have ever sent or received. I have no interest in syncing that to some remote server via IMAP. Nor do I want my local storage to be "secondary" where I have to go through extra steps to download them and archive them. POP3 is perfect - download everything, leave it on the server for 30 days just in case.
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People who support it are just aiding the push for regressing personal computers to 'dumb terminal' status.
Back when email was received by the family computer at home in the study I would have agreed with you. But email is a form of communication, one that is expected to be received on a variety of sources. YOU WANT A DUMB TERMINAL for this. Heck I fetch all my emails to a central server via POP3 and SMTP forwarding and then host IMAP there.
It's 2025. If you can't read the email I sent you on your phone, your PC, your iPad, and your friend's computer via a web browser then you are still living in the 90s. Dumb t
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I mean, you can use IMAP as a POP3 replacement if you want. IMAP is a strict functional superset of POP3. Gmail won't use it that way, but we've already established that you don't use Gmail as a POP3-to-POP3 passthru so you shouldn't care about TFA.
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IMAP requires you to keep *all* your email in the GMail inbox. If you delete it from GMail, it deletes it from Thunderbird. POP3 doesn't leave your email on GMail.
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Though, since TFA is about Gmail fetching from a non-gmail account via POP3, not fetching from Gmail via POP3, nothing will change for your use case. Unless you are using Gmail as a POP3-to-POP3 passthru, in which case gods help you, because they're the only ones who have a chance.
POP3 usage isn't what you think... (Score:2)
Back when I did email protocols in the Windows division, we learned a weird thing about POP3: it was super popular in Japan.
Why? Because a bunch of email providers would only support fancier protocols like IMAP for the paid accounts. The free accounts were relegated to the POP3 protocol for fetching email.
So, wat du? (Score:2)
Any links to help me figure out both the problem and the potential solutions? Leaving my email on Google's servers and using their web interface is a no-go for me.
Use IMAP enabled mail providers (Score:2)
Why would you use a mail provider that doesn't support IMAP? Is this 1992?
I use Yahoo to read my Gmail (Score:2)
Because Yahoo is less invasive
all i care about (Score:2)
All I care about is whether I can retrieve my email FROM gmail using pop3. For my purposes, imap sucks because its basic theory is that mail stays on the server. Nope, not for me. It's not mail if I can't hold it in my hand and put it in the drawer. If it lives only on the server, that's like the post office letting me come in occasionally to read my mail. Working around that with imap is a giant pain in the ass.
I use AOL (Score:2)
Because they want to keep your email (Score:2)
...so that they can do new searches on what should be your private content. I mean, they might find you don't worship the Demented Don, and send the g-ICE-tapo after you.
Pay for my own hosting.