Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching Important news for Gmail power users: Google is dropping the feature whereby Gmail can collect mail from other email accounts over POP3. The company hasn't exactly gone out of its way to call attention to this – like actually telling anybody anything. The news appears in a support note with a sign on the door saying "Learn …
I switched to Thunderbird ages ago and have been very happy with it. One advantage, to my mind, is that all of my email archives live on my local PC, not on Gmail's servers. That's called "privacy."
I have a domain name, that I control, and an email address, that I control, and am very happy with that state of affairs.
The only other mail server it's likely to pass through is the sender's.
The days of emails passing through multiple mail servers are long gone. Emails will of course, like all traffic, pass through multiple routers but you'd have to be very paranoid to worry about someone intercepting that traffic. And anyway encrypted SMTP is a thing although not necessarily implemented properly or completely depending on the servers involved.
> The only other mail server it's likely to pass through is the sender's.
Disagree. As policy, we've been sending time-sensitive emails directly for the last 30 years or so to people who pay for our service, and by now we are very much in the minority: most people assume that anything not using one of the big service providers as a "Smart Host" can be blacklisted.
The difference is that when we send mail directly we can find out when something's jammed and /why/. If we used a Smart Host, even one provided by a specialist like AAISP, there would be no way that we could find out what was going on without 'phoning them or waiting for the timeout.
One or both of us is confused here.
I thought the anonymous poster was referring to the once fairly common practice of open relay email servers. Back in the days before the internet went bad emails could indeed pass through third party servers. Ones that neither the sender or the recipient had any control over. It was probably quite useful when the internet was more fragmented. That practice rapidly died out under a deluge of spam and now (excluding load balancing and similar) the sender's email server will connect directly to the recipient's. At least I'd assume that to be true in 99% of cases. No-one likes an open relay these days.
If you're saying that you send out emails without using your own email server then, yes, that is very possible. Heck - it's not difficult to send an email using Telnet. You'd still need an email server to handle incoming mail in that situation though.
I've been running my mail server for nearly 20 years now and I've never had a problem with blacklisting. I don't believe that anyone is blacklisting servers on the basis that they aren't one of the big players.
I've also been self-hosting for about 20 years. Whatever anti-spam solution Microsoft is using, has been, at random times over the last 2 years, blacklisted me, for "Having an IP address from a range of IPs where bad traffic has originated." So, I dutifully fill out the "remediation" form and admonish them for having a stupid policy.
Mostly, though things just work.
Encrypted SMTP is a thing and has been for a couple of decades proving that it is something that in practice no one really wants.
Fortunately the problem of email passing through multiple routers was addressed by Opportunistic TLS. Well over a decade ago many financial firms agreed to require TLS when transferring email with each other because we were paranoid enough. Doubly so as a devious intermediary could reject the opportunistic TLS.
Alpine still my ✓ mua - having finally worked out how to get it working with chocolatey oauth2 (it is not difficult but a little bit obscure), I realised just how much I missed the pure text, non graphical environment.
As a bonus Alpine still supports pop3. ;)
I can recommend Betterbird for the naive user who has only ever used the GMail web interface. Seems to hold fewer surprises compared with MS tat or Evolution or indeed the latest, greatest Thunderbird banana·ware† (as the Betterbird FAQ puts it. ;)
† if you search this you will get mostly irrelevant links to the Banana Wars. Cannot imagine why. No siree !
Just noting that Gmail users can (if Google hasn't killed that as well) download their gmail archive. I did that a few months ago. I suspect it might be a good idea for most of us to do that regularly. I just added a task to my to do list to do that every other month.
Fun fact: when downloading an email archive from Google, the "content-encoding" for text/plain is ignored and assumed to be UTF-8. Any non-UTF-8 characters are then replaced with U+FEFF (Unicode's "Invalid character" placeholder).
So yes, you can download a Gmail archive, but it's probably going to have email that is corrupted (make that definitely, for older archives).
I am currently working on a project that involves email-archiving, when I finally figured out this was the cause of my bugs the air was blue for about two days. Then when I calmed down, I wrote https://github.com/faceless2/imap-mirror.
Follow up to my post above:
After posting, I decided that I should probably download my Gmail. I quickly found that the note I (possibly) had made to myself on how to do that was missing. My fault I'm sure.
So I tried duck-duck-go. Result: Apparently infinite links on how to download a Gmail app. But ... but ... but ... I already have a Gmail app.
What I should have done was try a "download Gmail archive" search. What I actually did was figure that Gmail settings would tell me how to download a Gmail archive. Bad guess, I think. Fired up the Gmail app. Gmail has a zillion settings. Very flexible Gmail is. After looking at all (I think) of them, I don't see any way to get a Gmail archive download from there. More fumbling. I tried AI. It seemed as confused as I. Finally I somehow stumbled on https://takeout.google.com And indeed, that is the answer. Very straightforward. Clear step by step instructions. Worked perfectly.
So: For anyone as inept with these computing devices as I who wishes to download their Gmail archive, today's answer to all the world's problems looks to be https://takeout.google.com
Now I can move on to either removing 4 inches of fresh snow from the driveway/walkway or figuring out why the financial site I need data from seems to have taken to displaying in an unreadable faint gray. I think I'll go with the snow. More clear cut. While pushing the stuff around I can contemplate whether humanity really needs all this technology that is purportedly making our lives easier. I wonder if the Amish are taking on 86 year old converts?
Follow up to follow up. Snow moved. White on white display cured by enabling incognito mode (Ctrl-shift-n Gee. Why didn't I think of that right off?) According to https://allthings.how/how-to-fix-blank-or-white-screen-when-opening-chrome/ that somehow bypasses some sort of hardware graphics acceleration issue in chrome. Could be. Or maybe it's all magic and incognito mode has better spells than cognito mode.
> So I tried duck-duck-go. Result: Apparently infinite links on how to download a Gmail app. But ... but ... but ... I already have a Gmail app.
This is precisely the kind of question that LLMs tend to excel at:
https://grok.com/c/a25666aa-a257-4ad5-88d6-b1af342e1f90?rid=e880d43e-07e0-4396-86a5-bc9de90d2bc6
Qwen and ChatGPT do not seem to offer a link unless you have an account and are logged in, but they offered essentially the same answer.
Same here. It also allows me to operate a DEA scheme filtering messages by the RCPT TO command which unlike header fields can't be faked.
I do have a GMail account though which I use as a backup. Currently it forwards to my own mail server and I only have to use it if I want to reply to something sent to GMail.
I've been toying with the idea of enabling IMAP on the GMail account but haven't bothered yet.
"I do have a GMail account though which I use as a backup. Currently it forwards to my own mail server and I only have to use it if I want to reply to something sent to GMail."
I have one that I set up on a phone with no SIM to be able to access the Play Store (but not from my home wifi). I've never set up anything to retrieve any mail from the account so if there is some spam there, it will just rot. I suppose at some point I might have to retrieve a message sent there, but I'll burn that bridge when I get to it. Any Android app that I can get from other repositories, I will. There's just one that changes too often where I need the new updates for it to work. Not that I ever notice to much of a difference between the old and new versions.
One of the ironies of life is that after a bit of a battle my phone now always alerts me to a new message on my server (the wonders of IMAP) quite reliably. That's always bit of a struggle with Android because of its battery saving strategies. The ironic aspect is that GMail often doesn't notify until/unless the phone moves to wake it up.
Same here. Own my own domain, which I control, own a bunch of email addresses that I control. Use Thunderbird for local archiving. As far as I can tell, iMAP exists for the sole purpose of making data mining easier for the likes of Google.
BTW, encrypted communication for POP3 is either requested after protocol initiation, using the STLS command, if supported, or by POP3S, which connects to the server using Transport Layer Security (TLS) or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) on well-known TCP port number 995.
Where does this conflation of IMAP with Google or with this decision come from? IMAP does none of what you're accusing it of. It exists to make email work more normally when more than one device is in use so that they share state. It's entirely unrelated to this. Google could import mail with IMAP too, but evidently they chose not to write that and dropped the feature rather than change it, meaning they're not even using the protocol you're accusing them of abusing, at least not in the place this article is talking about.
Good point, but almost every piece of advice on t'interweb about IMAP vs POP denigrates POP and says use IMAP. How many people realise all their private stuff is on "Someone else's Server"? I'm paranoid enough to be aware that mails I send to people who have @gmail addresses will more than likely stay on Gmail's servers, so be careful what I say.
Good point, but almost every piece of advice on t'interweb about IMAP vs POP denigrates POP and says use IMAP.
Well they will. It's a newer and better protocol. There are still some advantages to POP or at least some corner cases where its primitive behaviour actually helps (your use case of local only storage is one) but not many and for most use cases those are outweighed by the disadvantages.
IMAP was designed to provide a better way to access email. Particularly one that supports access from multiple devices. If I read an email on my laptop then the email will be marked as read immediately on my phone - something that POP cannot do. Similarly if I send an email on my phone it will appear in the Sent folder of my laptop again immediately - POP3 can't do that. Lastly to get immediate notifications with POP your device has to keep going to the server and requesting a refresh. That takes time and uses bandwidth/CPU so most systems only check perhaps once or twice an hour. With IMAP your device is sat idle. Consuming almost no bandwidth (a few dozen bytes every half an hour) and an equally insignificant and infrequent amount of CPU but will be able to notify you within milliseconds of a new email or any other status change as mentioned above.
But..none of this has anything to do with Google. Both protocols were designed before Google even existed. IMAP was invented in 1986 and POP back in 1984!
Also chiming in from the "Thunderbird with POP3" club here, I do it specifically because it doesn't sync state with the server. If you've downloaded an email with POP3 and delete it from the webmail client, your local copy still exists (likewise, deleting the local copy doesn't delete the remote one). If you delete an email from webmail and your local client is IMAP, it deletes the local copy too (in fact there doesn't seem to be a "local copy" with IMAP, as far as Thunderbird is concerned).
The downside is, there's no concept of "has this specific device POP3'd this specific email before y/n". If you have multiple devices with local clients pulling from the same inbox, only the first to check for emails gets it, and it'll never exist on any other device, as it's already been flagged on the server as "this email has been downloaded, don't ever download it again". So you have the remote copy, and only one local copy, fragmented between whichever device checked first, unless you're doing some major voodoo like automatically syncing the Thunderbird profile folder itself between devices with your preferred flavor of cloud-sync program...
I suppose if that's what you want, then that's the protocol for you. I don't understand why you want that and I know most others don't want that, which is why IMAP is the default for almost everybody. I was glad to leave POP3 behind decades ago because it would do the things you are describing. I had to either handle every email on the device that first saw it or delete every email from multiple computers because they couldn't sync the fact that I don't want to see this message anymore. Because I leave deleted mail in a folder, using IMAP also meant I did have a full archive of old mail rather than each machine's individual subsets of deleted mail.
With IMAP, there is a local file storing the state of your mail folders, but it will, unless you configure otherwise, update itself from the server's state. If your server is deleting things without your permission, it seems like fixing the server so it doesn't do that is the more effective strategy.
Yes, definitely fix the server. So ask Google if you can patch GMail. Or ask yahoo if you can patch theirs. Or ask your mail service provider if you can build your own server version because you don't like the one they maintain.
But if you're the guru who runs a private server and rebuilds it from sources and customizes it as you see fit, fine, you IMAP on your private server the way you like it. The other 99.999999 percent of us will have to make do with server behavior as it exists.
Are any of those things deleting your mail on their own just because? Because the only thing I've seen do that is mail set to automatically delete old mail after X days, and the way to fix the server is to go to the settings in the UI and turn it off. Other servers just don't bother. If you're dealing with a provider that turned on and now won't let you disable that feature, maybe switch to any of the ones you named or any self-hosted version, no code changes required, which won't.
Of course POP3 understands which mails *this specific device* has downloaded before. A decent POP3 client, like Thunderbird, associates each message with a unique ID which is also on the server, so it only fetches the ones *that device* doesn't yet have. I run POP3 on multiple clients and it works like a charm. The server doesn't even care if it has been downloaded before; that's a client function.
Minor aside: The old (>20years dead) Eudora Worldmail server implemented an extension wherein the server *did* keep track of whether a message had been downloaded at least once, and the Eudora client, as well as the KMail client, noted it, so you'd download mail and see if it's entirely new or just new to that client. That was essentially an extension based on an IMAP capability.
In general, though, IMAP sucks the big one! In theory, the protocol is capable of doing everything you want. But I've never met a decent implementation of the protocol. Instead, T'bird and everybody else ONLY supports using IMAP as a "sync" protocol, a cheaper version of the Lotus/Microsoft corporate mail model where everything is always on The Server and the client is just a viewport and IT is in control. That is not inherent in the protocol but if you like keeping local copies, then IMAP on T'bird is not your choice. In theory you can copy the sync'd mail to a Local Folder for keepsies but doing that through a filter is not reliable, just hit-or-miss copying some but not all messages.
And Yahoo, heavily enshittified, nowadays limits its IMAP server to seeing only the last 10,000 message; older one are on the web mail site and ironically can be pulled down via POP.
Of course POP3 understands which mails *this specific device* has downloaded before. A decent POP3 client, like Thunderbird, associates each message with a unique ID which is also on the server, so it only fetches the ones *that device* doesn't yet have. I run POP3 on multiple clients and it works like a charm. The server doesn't even care if it has been downloaded before; that's a client function.
All the problems with POP on multiple devices relate to message management. If you always delete emails once you've read them and have a good memory it's fine but a lot of people like to store emails for future reference. POP just doesn't handle that well between multiple devices.
* Deleting an email from one device doesn't delete it from the others.
* Folders are not shared between devices so you have to move a message to the required folder on every device you use and if you get it wrong you've got a mess.
* Sent messages aren't normally visible on any client other than the one that the message was created on (TBird does have a workaround for this however).
There are workarounds to some of these issues for some email clients but there is one solution to these problems on all email clients. It's called IMAP.
"How many people realise all their private stuff is on "Someone else's Server"?"
I hope it's anyone who is choosing to use POP3, because all your private stuff is still on someone else's server. That's how email servers work unless you run them yourself. If you don't trust the someone else, you should be careful what you do with their server whether you use IMAP or POP3 to talk to it. Both protocols can be used to permanently erase mail from the server, but it was there in the first place, so if some server was being untrustworthy and keeping copies, they could do that as easily no matter which protocol was used.
"One advantage, to my mind, is that all of my email archives live on my local PC, not on Gmail's servers. That's called "privacy.""
For many, the only application they know is a web browser and don't understand the principal of "the right tool for the job". Email software is set up for handling email communications, not propagating advertisements. There's also subtleties to privacy laws where unread mail is untouchable, but once you've read an email, if you leave it stored on somebody else's computer, they have more legal access to it. An email could travel through gmail's servers, and many do, but they can't touch it while in transit. Given the number of times Google has been spanked for reading mail, one should take notice that they do it and penalties are just a cost of doing business compared to the value of the data they can harvest. A rich bugger can park in disabled spaces all they like and paying the fine when caught won't be a drop in the bucket. The value for them is an open space right up front rather than having to walk 100m to and from.
You do realise that some governments simply do not obey any laws.
Do you have some example of a government that does not have carve-outs for 'security'?
The UK and the EU have the same kind of carve-outs for security that the Americans have. It's easier, because the UK and the EU countries don't pretend to have the same constitutional restrictions on 'search' as the American have -- the Americans have (and continue to) used the UK and the EU to spy on Americans because it's easier that way.
And we Americans don't benefit from the privacy laws that Europeans have, so the private entities have more access to our material here. Another reason "Leave mail on server and delete after 14 days" with POP makes more sense than relying on IMAP on somebody's server.
"You do realise that governments simply do not obey such laws."
No, I don't. Courts take notice if communications entered into evidence had been accessed by a defendant prior to their interception. I can't be convicted through evidence I had no knowledge of.
There are "real for thee and not for me", certainly. US politicians that earn a salary of $175,000/yr seem to find ways to leverage that into a net worth in the millions (insider trading, bribes, bribes disguised as honoraria, etc). If I were arrested for drink driving, I'd be in a lot of trouble compared to a Senator that killed a passenger while driving drunk.
I only use it on the laptop these days, but I've always had a soft spot for Thunderbird. It has more of the feel of the old Netscape mail/news than FF does of the browser.
Okay, now I just gotta install it on the Mac. And while I'm at the nostalgia trip add an obnoxious rotating sig file.
Sorry, but you people can absolutely not be taken seriously if you keep saying Thunderbird is a "good" e-mail client.
Is it better than Outlook? Yeah.
But it's absolutely a terrible client.
Damn thing even gets confused and starts showing e-mails in the wrong order from time to time. It's the only client I've experienced this with.
Damn thing even gets confused and starts showing e-mails in the wrong order from time to time. It's the only client I've experienced this with.
That is you messing with the sorting by clicking on the headers. In over 20 years of using Thunderbird I never experienced the problem you are describing, at least not without user error (and it is easily correctable).
Thunderbird may not be a good e-mail client, but it is the least bad I've found so far.
> But it's absolutely a terrible client.
I beg to differ.
It is not great. I had smaller, simpler clients that were better to use, 30+ years ago.
But email and messaging has changed. There are multiple protocols, multiple authentication systems, people sending formatted mail by default -- and you can tell the pros from the annoying noise just by if they insist they need formatting -- in various formats.
T'bird does its best to talk to all of them. That's a win. Others do that too. Many of the strong contenders are tied to one OS, though.
T'bird is multiplatform. That's a win. I run 3 OSes in common use and it works on all of them, no hitches, no problems. That's a double win.
I can't offhand think of any rival that can cover both of those.
But then, take them both, and add:
It's not merely freeware but FOSS. That's another win.
I can use it inside a company, on corporate kit (if I am allowed to install my own apps, obvs) and not violate any terms of use. No eval versions, no limited use clause. There are other email clients with free versions, but they are limited. Even Eudora was.
It doesn't need any particular server; it doesn't care. It doesn't need companion apps for contacts or scheduling; it does those too, well enough to be usable. It interoperates with the browser of your choice. It's not tied to Mozilla's browser.
It doesn't even _need_ you to have a chat app. It can do that, too. It natively talks to NNTP, XMPP, and Matrix, well enough to be my default client for all of them.
And with add-ons it can talk to Facebook, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, and everything I ever use except Signal.
Once those things are factored in, there is nothing else left that can compare, and in comparison, I don't care about minor UI issues. The raw functionality combined with the run-anywhere all-FOSS terms mean it's in a league of its own.
But you know what? Over the last decade+, I tried Evolution, Sylpheed, Claws, KMail, Apple Mail.app, Balsa, Geary, Mailspring, eM Client, GNUstep Mail, Deepin's email client, Elementary's email client, and some others. Not Alpine or Mutt because I want a GUI, viewing attachments etc., and I am not a heavy shell user.
For me, only Claws lasted weeks, and I went back to Thunderbird and stayed there.
Because I have config files dating back over a decade, most of the new UI stuff remains turned off as and when it appears, but I don't mind it. I use tweaks to `userchrome.css` to put the menu bar back at the top of the T'bird window on Linux.
So I reject your blaket assertion. You may not like it, but it is *not* a "terrible client." IMHO it's a bloody good one and I prefer it to every other major FOSS or freeware GUI email client on macOS _and_ Linux.
I rarely use Windows, so anything that only or mainly runs on Windows isn't in the running for me.
I agree with Liam FWIW: even if Thunderbird isn't perfect, it provides a useful focal point for developers to collaborate when working out how to talk to commercial services such as Gmail.
Another thing its that its message threading is better-than-half-decent (possibly because of its legacy of being used for Usenet) and its searching facility is similarly fairly good. I mention this in the context of having had to trawl through my Gmail account to find stuff relating to various "legal crap", and I'm well overdue for moving all routine stuff over to a non-Gmail address with local storage.
Agreed! The only real showstopper I had with it was that it did not support Arabic but that was done twenty years ago.
Other than that, it had a terrible habit of converting no break spaces (regular or narrow) to regular 0x20 spaces, which of course breaks things such as phone number formatting and French or Czech writing. I don't know if that got fixed.
I used TheBat! for quite a while but switched to TBird several years ago for some reason. Don't remember why.
My only gripe is that my favourite add-on - Virtual Identity - is no longer supported. There is another add-on that can auto-select TBird identities but you have to create the TBird identity first. This isn't so convenient for my DEA system. Currently one of my laptops is using an old TBird with that add-on, the other is an up to date TBird that I'm trying to accept.
Luckily I don't use email anywhere as much as I used to and create or even reply to only a few people so the newer add-on does seem adequate.
I use AquaMail on my phone. Does a good enough job for notifications and reading.
For my email server I use the quietly excellent VPop3 running on a Windows (w10, lol) box.
I agree that Thunderbird is about as good a client as there is, though its fork Betterbird has some modest advantage. (That's just a recent T'bird ESR with some tweaks that BB's author thinks they should have made, so he makes them. An advantage of open source, and this works on Windows too.)
However, MZLA is a bit flaky organizationally. They had a really beautiful product in T'bird 102, then blew it up bigly in v115, "Supernova", which was released when it was really pre-alpha quality. But the latest v140 range is pretty stable. Not as good as 102 but they messed with the config files so you can't go back.
> That's called "privacy."
Not really. That's called "availability". If your provider is not reachable for whatever reason, you can still access all your emails.
Unless you're using end to end encryption¹ this does not say anything about the privacy of your emails.
¹ If you are: hello Dave, how's the wife?
While ruining your own server seems a poor choice, I'll assume that was a typo :-).
Running your own server could easily be replaced by "paying someone to run a server for you" (which in most cases, eg. if you have other things to do, will be a better option).
Taking a hard dependency on a "free" service comes with risks, and for businesses (in particular) that is a risk.
"Taking a hard dependency on a "free" service comes with risks, and for businesses (in particular) that is a risk."
It's a poor look for anybody in business to have a free email. One's own domain looks far more legitimate. I don't trade with companies that have a gmail account even when they have their own domain for their web site. It there is no address on the web site, I won't trade with them either. In the US, a PO box can be good enough since a valid physical address is required to open a USPS box so that could be subpoenaed if necessary.
A company/council that uses a gmail account gets Google's filter for spam, which is better than nothing. A company/council that handles its own e-mail server is dependent upon the skills of whomsoever set it up, possibly several years previously before leaving, the skills of current employees, and the mixture of untrained numpties using it as its security degrades. It also becomes a distinct hacking target. Like the baby gazelles that lions zero in on.
Having its own domain does not necessarily mean that it runs it. The difference between that and using the likes of gmail is that the domain owner is able to choose to outsource it to a company that treats customers as customers instead of some faceless near monopolist whose idea of "service" more closely matches the dictionary deffinition of "exploit".
All of the above is very true, and all too common to see in small governmental units or small businesses. But rather than deal with the devil that is Google, there are plenty of hosting providers that will handle email for you (including spam filtering, archiving, webmail support, etc. etc.).
I took that route at a previous job. Small business, doing things on the cheap. IT was just one of the hats I wore. I had plenty of experience running email servers for a small ISP, but my skills were stale (I started back when hand-editing .cf files was a thing we actually did at times). It was pretty clear that spending a few bucks a month for someone else to handle email was the economical choice.
And you can have your own domain and still use Google for that with GSuite if you want. It does appear more professional to do so rather than to ask people to send what might be sensitive personal or financial information to mybusiness@gmail.com. They might be running it equally unprofessionally behind the domain name, so just because they've chosen to connect a more normal mail system doesn't prove anything, but if they're operating from a single, likely shared inbox, it does prove a few gaps exist.
"They might be running it equally unprofessionally behind the domain name, so just because they've chosen to connect a more normal mail system doesn't prove anything"
I agree, but it's a statistical thing. Far more scams and dodgy businesses run with a free email account, usually Gmail. There can be equally dodgy companies that do have their own domain, but it's a step up that they've done some of the basics to operating a "real" business. The best cons will have their own domain and a slick website, but there are fewer that will put that much work into the con except at money levels that make me an unlikely target so I don't often see them.
Google's spam filter regularly tags legitimate mail as spam.
That's mail which is properly configured, with all correct headers, conforming to the RFC's.
If you aren't one of the big guys, expect mail to be routinely dropped - especially if you are legitimately trying to use a mail forwarding address to your account.
You can set up rules to make it work for *your* gmail account, but good luck getting someone else to do it to theirs!
They are too big to care - some may say it's intentional to centralise the control of email to some key players.
As for the public sector, a few years ago, I had to email a report to someone at the local community mental health team.
It was only by pure chance that it discovered the email had been silently dropped by the third part mail service they used (it wasn't Google or Microsoft, but it was one of the large dedicated email providers)
Experimenting back and fore, we narrowed it down to one totally legitimate phrase which could be considered "rude" . It contained the word "penis".
It was a Swansea.gov address - for the community health team, yet the word "penis" caused the email to not be refused, but accepted and silently discarded.
I contacted the email provider with exact details, and their server receipt ID etc.) - they refused to do anything because I wasn't their customer, and the social worker was non-technical and didn't want to make a fuss.
And before someone mentions privacy, it was an important report, but not confidential, and didn't mention anyone specific.
I also in a former life witnessed a colleague where I worked delete a corrupted mailqueue completely rather than try to salvage it or identify recipients, justifying it by saying it was too much work to fix, and people would complain if you passed them a half-corrupted message. Better to cover it all up. "If it was important, they'd resend it"
I use Gmail for android stuff. For anything important, because of my experiences ,I'll only ever use my own mailservers, and I'm not being paranoid in doing that
"Google's spam filter regularly tags legitimate mail as spam."
When I'm sending mail to clients with links to the media I've created for them, Gmail often prevents them from fetching that media while only flashing a small message in the upper right corner that they've intercepted the connection. I have to work with new clients that often have a Gmail account since they don't know any better to be able to bypass that one way or another so they can retrieve their files. Google has my domain pegged as spam and there's FA I can do about it. For internet challenged clients that can't be made to learn even with a length of rubber hose, I sometimes have to discontinue doing work for them as I don't have the time to perform constant hand holding for free. Those tend to be the least valuable ones that aren't earning me all that much anyway. If I deliver the files on a thumb drive, I'm technically supposed to collect tax on the whole job while delivering digitally means it's a "service" transaction and not subject to a sales tax. There's also a time constraint so I have to meet the client somewhere in town to hand over the thumb drive. I don't have anybody coming to the house. That means more time spent on the job that only drags down my net.
Yes. I had Gmail set up to send to Proton. Mostly trivial stuff like Masto notifications that went first to my Gmail addy. But they weren't arriving at my Proton account. Somewhere they were being silently dropped. I think that was Proton's fault - my fix was to switch the originating email address directly to my Proton one (effectively downgrading that one to disposable).
Yet another example of 'Other peoples computers' !!!
This is the basic problem with depending on 'other' people to do nice things for you ... eventually they decide to stop being nice !!!
The reason may make sense to them BUT you get no input during the decision making process and often get forgotten at the informing your customers stage as well !!!
Thunderbird is quite usable and you have FULL control of it !!!
:)
When one of their servers DOSed our Internet connection, I tried abuse@ and postmaster@ addresses, both came back with "we receive so many emails that we delete them without reading, please refer to the section of our website that deals with your problem". I tried calling, I got the same message, but verbally and then got cut off... Funny, I couldn't find the part of their website which dealt with one of their servers going rogue and DOSing our line...
Even contacting their Twitter account didn't help. In the end, we had to get a new IP-address. Luckily we were in the process of switching providers and simply accelerated the switch. When I checked back 3 months later, when the contract ran out on the old line, it was still being bombarded by the Google server - according to the ISP, they were trying to stuff 1gbps down the 10mbps line! (The old ISP did offer to set-up their DOS protection, but it would cost us several hundred Euros a month, which we didn't want to pay, as this was Google's problem, not ours...
Google like/worse than Microsoft? Back in the day (I'm retired) we likened Windows to a large multi-story carpark:-
Most people use it. You know it will cost money and getting out will be more difficult and expensive than you thought - It will be dingy with an underlying sense of danger, and everywhere has a faint smell of piss...
Thank you, I'm here all week >>====>
This is GMail connecting to other people, not running the service themselves. If the other people don't operate POP3S, then they can't use it. I'm not sure what the people using this feature are connecting to, but older services still recommending POP3 probably didn't set up and run a POP3S path. However we judge Google's decision, we can't propose something as a solution if Google couldn't use it in practice.
I suspect that from their point of view it is a feature they need to maintain, and that very few people use. Why bother? It's even risky for them to work on something like that. Everybody at Google is measured by how much impact they have. The one who has the least impact in a team gets a "Not Enough Impact" rating, loses their bonus, and is on track for getting fired. And if the feature you work on is used by less than millions of users and has nothing to do with AI, it's likely to be you.
That said, the number of people who both know how to set up and use POP3 correctly and are using Gmail is indeed likely to be tiny.
>” That said, the number of people who both know how to set up and use POP3 correctly and are using Gmail is indeed likely to be tiny.”
Does that really matter given there have been setup wizards for POP3 shipping with desktop clients since whenever. So Google should already have such a wizard and lots of data on the configurations actually used by many mail providers…
> POP3 requires sending passwords in plaintext. ... POP3S (using SSL over port 995) is available.
Not sure when POP3S arrived, but Request for Comments: 2595 Using TLS with IMAP, POP3 and ACAP arrived in June 1999. This is the era when HTTPS was proposed, and that took decades (and draconian pressure from browsers) to be widely used.
"Why is Google doing this now?"
Branding. Eliminating POP from alternate mail servers will make those servers just that much more inconvenient to use. So some people will give up those servers (and non-GMail domains) and move back to GMail. Also, Google sells Workspace (and other services) that will provide this. The key word here is "sells". So, no fair going out and rolling your own.
The reason I have a Gmail account it just to test email and backup email address. The two reasons I have a Gmail account is to test email circuits, emergency email address, and use Android devices. Amongst the many reasons to use Gmail, at least when it it first started was simply to test my private email server, anti-spam software, and make sure "the sheep" could continue to function. I've had a private email server for "yonks", used Netscape when it was a combined browser/email client, and now Thunderbird. I never trusted Gmail enough to use it for a serious service.
POP3 support and plaintext passwords should not be an issue, since almost all will have support for RFC 2595 `STLS` POPS3 command or will have to switched to POP3S on port 995 for always on SSL/TLS support. POP3 is a light weight protocol that it shouldn't be a performance issue, and not likely to need maintenance, since it hasn't changed since TLS support. So I don't understand why they feel the need to remove something that works.
Having support for IMAP and POP3 are nice to have just-in-case you need it. Clearly Gmail is regressing again.
RFC 1730 (which has been replaced b RFC 2060 two years later, itself then superseded by RFC 3501 after another 6 years, and then 18 years later by RFC 9051).
POP3 has been obsolete for over two decades, IMAP4 has worked well for at least that long.
POP3 was never a good choice for email delivery to a user's mail box, no-one has a good justification for complaining other than "I had a hack that worked: nothing is as permanent as a temporary fix": El Reg scraping the barrel here finding someone complaining about this.
Your argument can never end. They think the example in the article was a niche use case with few users. What from the article indicates otherwise, since that's an opinion? The only thing likely to convince one of you that the problem is bigger or smaller than expected is statistics on user count and purposes, and the article indeed lacks those because Google is the only one who could provide the former and hasn't done so. Until then, you'll end up arguing over the one anecdote from the article or your own assumptions to try to decide how important this feature was to those who used it.
Firstly, let's ignore the word "obsolete" because POP3 here and it works.
Secondly, POP3 allows a client to download email from a mailbox. The fact that that client happens to be another mailbox is not important.
Thirdly if you read JWZ's blog post, you'll see it's not just a simple workflow for one person, it's for a business. The other way of doing it is mail forwarding... but SPF/DKIM/DMARC pushed by the big mail providers breaks email forwarding.
So really Google have broken useful functionality which is being used in the present day... again.
> Yes, and the linked article.
Then I fear you didn't understand them. This has almost nothing to do with POP versus IMAP, Google is removing the ability for Gmail to pull mails from your other account(s) into a consolidated Gmail inbox. It happens that they used POP for that (IMAP isn't ideal because it won't auto-delete the fetched mail) but that's incidental
Google isn't shutting down POP, it's shutting down Gmailify.
Go read the latest IMAP4 RFC! Both downloading a message from the mailbox and then deleting from the mailbox are both supported,
As is listing all the messages. So iterate through, download and delete.
I'm not aware of any email client's that do this directly: because having a local copy (remove dependency on server copy) is usually regarded as sufficient (you have a copy even if removed from the server by something else).
POP3 - it's the default.
IMAP4 - you have to download, delete, and purge.
It's not a feature I use - but I have my own mail servers, I don't trust ANYBODY else to store my email.
I'm in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act is unfortunately still law here. Anything you leave on somebody else's computer can be obtained with just a subpoena if it's been there for 180 days or longer, no warrant needed, much lower standard.
I've not had a problem forwarding emails to Gmail.
But then I don't think you mean that: you mean re-sending (SMTP level) to your Gmail account which is not the same thing as forward in an email client (or even Gmail itself).
That (SMTP) forwarding very much depends on the tolerance of the mailbox, and of the user: I do this for my domain emails, but not to Gmail (and I expect it would fail for other mass email hosts like outlook.com) simply because of their very low tolerance to "abuse"). Pick a different host to forward to, that is better suited to more niche requirements.
Goodbye POP3, I won't miss idiots POPping their mail on one device,(and not having the box checked, leave copy on server) and never seeing it on another device. Then screaming to IT that something is broke. My heart aches for those who depend on google's free services for important processes /s. I use gmail, and some storage, but nothing would really be lost to me if they closed up shop tomorrow, sure i'd have to register a new address with all my contacts and services that use that address as a login(stupid idea), but that's the trade off against running(or ruining) my own mailserver.
.. not many server implements more sophisticated authentication methods.
That's why iMAP and POP are now usually used over TLS to protect autehntication as well.
Secuiry is not the reason, Google is removing the service for other reasons - some business reasons on their own.
As yet there's no native Thunderbird app for iphone. So I use Outlook.com on my iPhone with TB add-ons on my PC to sync my calendar (TB Sync with Provider for Exchange Active sync -it's beyond my skills to know why it needs two apps to do one job).I guess anyone who doesn't sync a calendar between a (Windows ?)PC and iPhone won't have this problem (do 'nux machines' versions of TB do this better? I should try to add mine to the mix and see).
Beyond that, though reluctant to keep using Microsoft’s Outlook.com for my phone calendar, it's all worked beautifully for me. (YMMV- version changes in TB can screw up Active sync and/or TBSync and it relies on the devs having the time and will to keep everything updated- always the problem with relying on FOSS)
WHY?????
Apple's Mail app comes with the phone, as does the Calendar app. The Mail app supports IMAP and POP, the Calendar app supports CalDAV, no need for Exchange crap unless you're stuck connecting to an Exchange server - which the Apple apps also support.
It's beyond me why anybody ever thought it was a good idea to put mail and calendars in the same app, they're not the same thing at all.
To an awful lot of people they are an integrated system. This long predates Outlook. Your calendar, email and address book are your organiser software. Whether they go together logically is questionable, even to me and I am a user, but to plenty of people like me they go together emotionally. They feel like they belong together. Which is why TB gained the Lightning add-on that then became integrated.. TL:DR answer. People consider these should go together. I consider these should go together.
I consider keeping one's email traffic either on provider's web-mail servers (Gmail or any similar) or on mobile devices operated on behalf of their owners (Apple or Google) as an extremely imprudent thing to do. To those that hold a different opinion, this comment is not likely to be of any value or interest - kindly ignore what follows.
The way I read the article, Google is terminating the ability to fetch traffic from third-party mail services, but there seems to be no indication that they are suspending POP3/SMTP access by mail-client programs running on user's PC. If that is correct, Gmail is actually one of the most reliable and privacy oriented email services around.
Under controlled conditions it will allow creation of an anonymous e-mail address (no secondary email, no telephone number). TOTP can be enabled for such address/account, and using so enabled authentication the account can be enabled for POP3/SMTP access. Faketime and GnuPG version 1.4x on an air-gapped computer can be used to create 4096bit RSA private/public key pair, with no identifying information other than the e-mail address. The public key may either be uploaded to keys.openpgp.org, or it can be passed out-of-email-channel to the correspondents. Thunderbird or similar can be used to read/write encrypted mail on a networked PC. For maximum security, a mail directory on a removable medium can be used by client program such as ALPINE, simultaneously operating on a networked PC to send/receive traffic and on an air-gapped PC to handle encryption/decryption using GnuPG 1.4x. Gmail mail servers have probably highest up-time in the industry, and the account will accept incoming SMTP traffic regardless of how is the client connected to the Internet - including public WiFi hot-spots.
So, whats not to love about Gmail?
I get an amusing response from his blog:
403 Bots Forbidden
NO ROBOTS
IF YOU ARE NOT A ROBOT, UPGRADE YOUR OUTDATED SYSTEM SO THAT YOU STOP LOOKING LIKE A BOTNET OR A BULK DOWNLOADER.
THIS IS FOR SELF-DEFENSE. YOUR RETROCOMPUTING FETISH IS COLLATERAL DAMAGE. MY SYMPATHIES.
It's a fair call. Big chunks of the WWW I can't see from my 2011 system.
But amused. He can't use POP (1984) anymore. That is for self-defense. His retrocomputing fetish is collateral damage. No doubt Google sympathizes.
If you want to use Google's services with your own domain addresses, you could, *gasp* pay for their actual service that allows you to do so.
He's basically upset that his employees can no longer use Google's services to run his business how he used to do it.
Surely if the business is worth anything, he can afford the $50/year/employee fee that Google charges for Workspace or G-Suite or whatever they call it these days.
Except he doesn't want to use G-Suite for his company email.
A few of his employees want to use GMail as an email client to access their company email as that is how they know to use email. He is not using Google's email services.
Am I the only person to read this and think "good"?
I run an email service and I'm sick of clueless users adding a perfectly good account to gmail in that way, then complaining when it doesn't behave properly.
Add the account to the gmail app on your phone if you feel that you have to, but don't get gmail servers to collect directly.
My servers support IMAP(s) and POP3(s) natively and if you can't handle those there's a webmail interface as well. No need to pull anything through a third party.
I'm skeptical of any sure-fire ways of being safe online. The domain registration business fell into the hands of hunters long ago. The major companies on the web sell fake products and/or ads for fake products and censor the hell out of even rational conversations. The whole thing reeks like late night TV in the 1970s except that Pocket Fisherman seemed to work as advertised. It's all lowest common denominator.
This kerfuffle reminded me ~20 years ago of an emeritus academic whose incoming email traffic was prodigious - vastly exceeding his local storage allocation.
His archiving solution was to successively open gmail accounts and manually copy his "work" email into the current gmail account until the gmail gratis quota was reached.
I probably saved the equivalent a few of his remaining years by pointing him the direction of an imap tool that would copy the new email in his local account to his current gmail dumpster. The tool wasn't fetchmail but I imagine it is just the sort thing it would excel at.
Since then disk store has become so cheap and plentiful and no one would bother with such shenanigans.
The emailed me on Sept 30
"Dear administrator,
You’re receiving this communication because we are removing support for the POP Checkmail on Gmail Web feature. There are one or more users in your organization who have used this feature within 30 days leading up to September 23, 2025.
The POP Checkmail feature on Gmail Web allows users to sync third-party (3P) emails into Gmail. This is different from the one-time import of third-party messages.
Starting January 2026, this feature will no longer be available and users will not be able to check third-party messages on the Gmail web application. They can continue using Gmail mobile applications (Android/iOS) to sync third-party messages using IMAP.
What you need to do
No action is required from you for this change to take effect. If you need to migrate or import data, you can do so by using the data migration service. Please refer to this documentation for more details.
Please review the attachment for a list of impacted users.
We’re here to help
For more information, you can review this help center content.
Thanks for choosing Google Workspace.
– The Google Workspace Team
Now if someone ported e.g. sendmail/Postfix on to our phones, We'd have direct no third party messaging
Fix email address list handling and we'd have all the social media features too!
Totally under our own control. We can put in the filters etc. Not censored by unaccountable third parties,
You can do that. It's not really that hard to run the software on a phone. What's hard is running the software in a way that isn't a huge pain for everyone involved.
Your phone moves from one network to another regularly. People need the address of the server to send mail to it. That means you'll need to do extra work to keep associating your name with the new address of your phone, except that most of the networks you'll be on won't give you a public address because NAT, so having a DDNS system will just let anyone track your general location but they still can't send you mail. It also means that, when your phone runs out of battery or you're in a place with bad signal or you need to turn on airplane mode, then email can't be delivered to you and will time out on the sender's system.
For many years I've kept a full duplicate copy of my email archive both locally and on Gmail, using POP3 mail retrieval by Gmail. As well as providing offsite backup, the Gmail copy is accessible online from anywhere, it has good search tools, it offers the best spam filtering, and automatic labeling and forwarding rules for incoming email. The downside of course is loss of privacy, as Google is well-known to mine your email archive.
Now that Google is ending the POP3 mail retrieval for what seems to be rather spurious reasons, the next best alternative seems to be using an IMAP email client like Thunderbird. With Thunderbird linked to the Gmail account, it is easy to drag and drop a copy of all incoming email from the other servers to the Gmail account. This preserves the offsite backup and the online archive and search tools. The latter features of spam filtering and automated rules for incoming email will be lost, because emails added via IMAP are not considered "incoming" by Gmail. Local archiving in parallel by Thunderbird is still included.
Warning: it might seem tempting to use the obvious alternative of simply auto-forwarding/redirecting all email from your other servers to Gmail instead of Gmail retrieving it via POP3, if your other email servers have that capability. But there a problem: if your incoming email stream includes spam (and who's doesn't?) this will sooner or later result in your email address being blacklisted as a spammer by dumb anti-spam software that only considers the fact that you were "sending" spam to Gmail. This can originate from either Google or your own email server's spam-checking of outgoing email, but once your email has been blacklisted, this information is auto-shared by all the anti-spam software. Been there, done that. That's why I was forced to change to POP3 retrieval by Gmail in the first place.
This post has been deleted by its author
Thunderbird also talks to Gmail.
I don't understand using webmail clients. They're OK at a pinch, when there's nothing else about, but like most modern Webthings they're inefficient (so very klunky to use) and, as with everything Web, you never quite know what the browser is doing with your data.
I access Gmail via IMAP using heirloom-mailx
I was trying to figure out if this would affect me or not, as all my accounts end up in my one main Gmail account and I set it up a decade ago. It turns out I'm safe. What I have is my own domain with a web host, which offers various services including a wildcard email forwarder. So any email address at my domain gets sent on to my Gmail in seconds, even if I've just made it up.
Every dubious sign-up gets it's own email so I can tell who passed my email on to spammers. The only downside is that replying is sent from my actual email instead, unless I specifically set up the alias in Gmail.
That's the system I've used for decades - yourcompany@mydomain whenever I sign up anywhere. So I have just one mailbox but hundreds of email addresses that deliver via catch-all redirection.
Roundcube web mail at Mythic Beasts makes it the work of seconds to add an "identity" so hitting Reply makes that email appear to come from yourcompany@mydomain. Then in addition I have Thunderbird installed on my desktop and use that to take an occasional local copy of the whole mailbox, best of both worlds.
When it comes to security, my attitude is which is most likely - Mythic Beasts are taken off-line and all backups destroyed or my local hard drive dies or my laptop is stolen? POP3 seems to be a case of all your eggs in one basket.
I have multiple GMail accounts, with the oldest one going back to the days when it was invitation only. And that is the only one that I ever used POP3 on, as at that time, there was no IMAP option. Converted this to retrieval via IMAP more than a decade ago. All other accounts, I only ever used via IMAP.
And I did not, ever, used GMail via it's web interface, beside once in a great while in a pinch. Always using a proper email client, first Eudora, then when that one kind of died, switching to Thunderbird. Or the GMail app on Android, on my phones and on my tablets.
So none of these changes does effect me in any way...
? I don't understand the big deal. I don't use the GMail web interface for anything; I have email clients on different platforms that fetch the email from my gmail account as well as other accounts.
Why would I want to give a web service access to all my data, especially an American Data Hoovering Conglomerate like a Microsoft, Google, or Amazon hosted service?
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