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Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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They wake up every day and try to decide how to lose users. From killing things to enshittifying them.
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.
Why not?
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.
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.
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.
That is still an edge case, and doesn't really address why Pop would be required.
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.
Not sure what op meant, but according to TFA, "POP3 requires sending passwords in plaintext."
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:
You are right. I seem to recall viewing these settings about 100 years 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.
It’s probably someone going for promo by removing this feature. Doubt it affects the bottom line much, just reduces complexity.