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Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching (www.theregister.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/tech@programming.dev
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[–] 23 points 9 months ago (12 children)

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

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  • [–] [S] 20 points 9 months ago (9 children)

    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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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago (8 children)

    No one in their right mind should be doing this anyway

    Why not?

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  • [–] [S] 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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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

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

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 child)

    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:

    WDLrB05Knrl5Z0M.png

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (3 children)

    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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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    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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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    That is still an edge case, and doesn't really address why Pop would be required.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    That's the point of the feature though. POP3 moves emails, it's really a transfer protocol rather than an access protocol.

    I assume Google is killing it since they assume they're effectively in-charge of email outside of things like company Outlook accounts. They've got no need to worry about people migrating to gmail, since everybody starts out on it now.

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