POP email into Gmail is going away

Software
1

I see that Gmail is getting rid of the ability to connect POP accounts into your main Gmail account and bring all mail traffic into one mailbox. This has a big effect on me as I have four email addresses where the mail comes into Gmail. I have been doing this for many years.

It gives me a really good archive of all my mail and allows me to respond via any of the email addresses. Is this issue affecting anyone here?

I use Mimestream to access my Gmail mailbox and would like to add the accounts as IMAP into here but that is not available at the moment.

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I’m in the same boat. For many years I have filtered all my email into one Gmail box for ease and it has served as one big archived bucket of mail. Like you I have a bunch of emails that serve different purposes with my business but I don’t need to monitor several different accounts as they all land in the Gmail box. Unfortunately I haven’t had time to plan a solution.

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3

…and recently Microsoft closed the option to use normal SMTP connections for your 365 account.

Normal people don’t understand the impact of these problems, but it’s not good.

4

Agree, the timing seems very short. I did not even know about the change until my hosting company sent an email out.

Google have published a help article which just says ‘starting January 2026’ so no idea when it will stop working… presumably any day now.

5

Are your other accounts capable of forwarding email to your Gmail account? That’s what I do to consolidate my email.

If not, in years past, I used Thunderbird logged into a senior executive’s primary email account AND into a second email server to pick up mail (containing faxes) from that second account and place it into a specific folder in his primary account.

It’s not an ideal solution but all it takes is setting up each account in Thunderbird and creating a rule to move the mail from each account into your primary Gmail account INBOX, or other folder.

I keep Thunderbird running on my Mac just to back up my mail (It uses MBOX files for folders). And use Gmail in Chrome. I set TB to Open at Login but never use it.

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6

Thanks for the response. I will look at forwarding my emails into Gmail. How does this impact on spam? Will Gmail think it is all coming from me and therefore nothing will go to spam folder?

I am sure Gmails spam filters are far better than the hosting company provide.

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7

I managed email for more than 20 years. IMO, Google has the best spam filters in the business.

I don’t know. I have multiple Gmail accounts so spam is usually captured before it is forwarded. But I occasionally see a forwarded message in my Google Workspace spam folder.

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As I understand it, forwarding adds additional fields to the original headers, but leaves the original headers intact. Therefore, any good spam filter understands that an email is forwarded and also knows who the original sender is (at least to the degree that anyone can know). Therefore, in my experience, automated email forwarding does not have any noticeable impact on Spam filtering. Like @WayneG I have seen some forwarded messages occasionally marked as spam, but I always assumed that that was because I’ve been training the filter on my primary account and so it properly filtered spam that my forwarding account missed. As far as I can recall, I have never seen forwarded messages marked as spam which should not have been.

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The issue with forwarding is that not everything makes it through. (This is what I see from running an email forwarding business, see Postdirect Documentation)

Getting back to the topic and problem at hand, I encourage you to check out Postdirect Mailbox Forwarding which is an alternative for the feature Google is killing.

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My pop mails into gmail quite a couple months ago. I’ve moved everything out in to Thunderbird. Since I never do email on anything but one device it was fine and I can swap between unified folders view (all stuff in one giant inbox even the IMAP accounts) and by account views.

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Why did you choose Thunderbird? Would Apple Mail not achieve the same thing?

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Depends on how many messages you maintain in your archives. Apple mail is what I was using. Every couple of years I’d have to export the MBOX files out of apple mail because it would start failing when I had somewhere around 6-10K messages stored. I would export out by years into an MBOX file. I originally stored that in DEVONThink but data loss caused me to abandon that system. I extracted out the remaining data and move it into Thunderbird which became my long term archive. After the last hassle with Apple mail crashing and failing I gave up on Apple mail and just moved into Thunderbird to handle all mail. I retain, use and reference email messages that are 20+ years old.

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13

Gmail will think it’s all coming from your mail server. And they’re likely to mark that server as a source of spam.

They are, and that exacerbates the problem I noted above.

I see this too in my hosting setups, and it’s related to the spam issue above.

Think about this from Google’s point of view.

Say you have a hosting server with an account that gets 50 emails per day. Let’s say 30 of them are spam. Your hosting server sees that it got 50 different emails from 50 different sources, and it can theoretically look for a pattern across all the accounts on the server to block senders and manage spam.

But now you set up a forward and send those emails to Google. Since your hosting server is now the “source” of the email, Google sees a server sending 50 messages per day, over half of which are spam. So it just blocks the server entirely, because your server is sending 60% spam.

I’ve had this happen to me and my customers. Google doesn’t care that you’re forwarding the email at the request of the customer. They care that your server is the source of spam. If you’re really, really lucky, they’ll tell you so that you can address the issue. If you’re not lucky, they’ll accept the email as if nothing is wrong, and just silently throw it away behind the scenes.

Incidentally, this service isn’t subject to the problems above because it’s not forwarding. At least not in the conventional sense. It looks to be pulling your email in POP, and then using the Gmail API to manually add the message to your inbox. Kind of (but not exactly) like if you set up your POP account and your Gmail account in Apple Mail, and dragged messages from one account to the other.

Which, incidentally, is a solution if you have mail software that supports it. For me, I have MailMate. It takes the emails that come into one account and moves all of them to my “main” account. No “forwarding” necessary.

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