Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

: It's January 2026, and Google is finding innovative new ways to make one of its services worse

Gsus4 24 points 9 months ago

They wake up every day and try to decide how to lose users. From killing things to enshittifying them.

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sabreW4K3 20 points 9 months ago

To be fair, they're only talking about being able to fetch other (third party) mail accounts via Gmail. No one in their right mind should be doing this anyway. And only via POP3, IMAP is still supported.

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eleijeep 10 points 9 months ago

No one in their right mind should be doing this anyway

Why not?

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sabreW4K3 5 points 9 months ago

Google are an advertisement company. Their business model is data mining. It should be an inconvenience for them to build a profile on you. Running your third party email via them is the opposite of that.

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a_non_monotonic_function 1 point 9 months ago

It sounds remarkably janky, and a bit of an unusual edge case. Why would someone need this specific pattern?

Eventually this is the sort of thing that isn't worth supporting.

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The_Decryptor 4 points 9 months ago

I used to do it back when gmail first started, I connected it to my previous email account so anything addressed to my old account would get transferred to my new one.

I could probably count the number of emails it ever retrieved on one hand.

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SpikesOtherDog 1 point 9 months ago

Not sure what op meant, but according to TFA, "POP3 requires sending passwords in plaintext."

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eleijeep 4 points 9 months ago

Yes just like HTTP, FTP, SMTP, telnet and all the other pre-TLS protocols that we now run over TLS for exactly this reason.

Google, just like every other modern mail client, supports connecting to POP3 servers over SSL:

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hitmyspot 7 points 9 months ago

I think they calculate what they can change that loses less users than it gains in advertising revenue. Just slowly turning the screws more and more.

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CookieOfFortune 5 points 9 months ago

It’s probably someone going for promo by removing this feature. Doubt it affects the bottom line much, just reduces complexity.

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fubarx 8 points 9 months ago

IIRC, POP3 downloaded all emails to local device. If you have more than one device, the first one gets it all and the second or more see nothing.

IMAP kept the messages on the server so there was one source of truth and multiple devices could access the same emails.

Most email clients support both. There are probably some people still running old POP3 clients, or they set it up one way and never bothered to change.

Not sure why gmail would care. Code's been working for decades. Unless there are security considerations not worth mitigating.

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flowers_galore2 4 points 9 months ago

Good, nothing of value is lost.

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ArsonButCute 0 points 9 months ago

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sabreW4K3 2 points 9 months ago

That's not what the article is about.