Starting January 2026, Gmail will no longer provide support for the following features:
Gmailify: This feature allows you to get special features like spam protection or inbox organization applied to your third-party email account. Learn more about Gmailify.
Check mail from other accounts: Fetching emails from third-party accounts into your Gmail account, with POP, will no longer be supported.
This deprecation apparently hasn’t happened yet—Gmail still lets me add a POP mail account—but it’s likely coming soon. I have long forwarded my email to Gmail, with no significant SPF issues, but some people have complex email setups that involve Gmail fetching email from other accounts. If you created such an email system long ago, you’ll need to find another solution. If you simply use Gmail as your email provider, this change won’t affect you.
Admittedly, I don’t have any 3rd party accounts configured in my Gmail account. I don’t want Google reading my email from my non-Google accounts to target me with their ads. My Gmail is my throwaway account for signing up for things that I know will probably spam me. I use a personal iCloud account and generally use Hide My Email with that.
I haven’t used the POP protocol for years. In fact, I’ve used other clients to check my Gmail using IMAP.
I understand that most people don’t even know about these features, much less use them (I once did), but switching away from Gmail as my primary mail service - I’m so happy I did so a few years ago. For all of the griping here about how Apple has supposedly lost their way, I think Google keeps outdoing them.
Sigh… This is going to affect me. I’m still using Mailplane to collect all my mail with Gmail fetching my various POP accounts. Will gratefully receive suggestions here.
Yep, this is now old news, and given the state of email forwarding for anyone but the great and good, it’s probably going to have casualties. I have switched to using getmail6 to collect all my email, including from Gmail, and push that to iCloud where I aggregate it, rather than having Gmail collect from various accounts I have that still use POP, which forwarded to iCloud. I do this on my “server” Mac Mini. In principle, you could do the exact same thing with a copy of macOS Mail and some filtering rules; you just need an unattended Mac somewhere.
As to poor JWZ, I think his best option actually is to do SRS rewriting on his forwarding addresses, as the linked Google guidelines suggest. Google isn’t enforcing SPF policy, not even for hard fail, as far as I can test. But SPF will be broken by forwarding unless the envelope sender is rewritten (that’s what SRS does), and even when SRS is done, it will break DMARC alignment for SPF. This is why forwarding is such a mess; only DKIM signature survival makes for perfect forwarding, and tragically it often doesn’t (especially with mailing lists, but also for other common reasons, like message scanning or re-encoding). Google is now also suggesting you implement ARC, which means they can pin a reputation of some kind on the forwarder. It’s all pretty yucky, really. From the people who thought burning the village to the ground was the best way to save it …
This is such a pain! I have used Gmail as an aggregator for years. For all the complaints about Google I have found Gmail works perfectly for me—I particularly appreciate the detailed settings you can access through the web interface. A few years ago I was beginning to experience problems with mail forwarding from my principal ISP, SiteGround, which hosts two personal domains, pegley.com and kevanpegley.com. I was losing a lot of incoming emails through bouncing, and SiteGround reckoned it was because forwarded emails can easily be interpreted as spam. Ironically the sender I was having most problems with was TidBITS! So I switched to Gmail fetching, which resolved the issue. The only downside is the delay, since Gmail only checks email from other accounts every few minutes. Other than that inconvenience the system has worked perfectly.
Now it’s been stopped. Which means I’ll have to revert to forwarding, and all the problems I had before. Or, I guess, set up my Mail app to connect to more accounts, and forget about Gmail consolidation completely.
Unless anyone has any better ideas?
This is annoying, to say the least. I have some old e-mail accounts (as do some family members) that support POP3 but do not support e-mail forwarding. For many years, the best solution has been to simply pull those e-mails into Gmail via POP3. What is the best option now for receiving e-mails sent to old e-mail accounts that only support POP3 (no forwarding, no IMAP)?
I have been using Apple Mail to collect incoming email from my three gmail accounts and from my personal domain, which I moved to fastmail late 2024 after a disaster with SiteGround similar to what you experienced. I find it much easier to have all my incoming mail on one server, and very rarely go to Gmail’s webmail server.
I moved SiteGround to fastmail because SiteGround’s spam server started not only flagging important incoming mail as spam but telling an important client that my email server had been closed. I strongly recommend you move your email out of SiteGround because your experience with them sounds very much like mine.
Because with POP3, mail is downloaded and then removed from the server (or, in some cases, it can be left on the server subject to what are typically low storage capacities). So if the mail is downloaded to a local mail client (whether on an iPhone or a Mac), it is then removed from the mail server and not available for download on other devices. Moreover, changes made on one device (e.g., flagging an e-mail or applying a label) are not synced. Those were innovations available with IMAP.
I’m familiar with desktop e-mail programs, and I’ve been using them for decades. I currently use Thunderbird, eM Client, and Outlook (for work). I can easily enough add the old POP3 e-mail accounts to Thunderbird to save those e-mails, but it’s just a lot less convenient.
The real challenge is not for me but for older relatives who just use Gmail and now need a way to manage e-mails going to their old ISP-based e-mail address.
How about a rule that moves the message from the POP3 account, after it’s downloaded, to an IMAP account? Then all the other clients just need to be hooked up to that IMAP account to see all new email and sync changes.
Thanks for the comment Jeff. The problem I have is that my two domains, plus my wife’s, are all registered and hosted by SiteGround, and my wife’s website is hosted by them too. The thought of migrating everything to another provider fills me with dread. And I have to say, apart from the false spamming scenario, they’ve been pretty solid on the website front, and they have better user control panels than any other host I’ve used—there have been a few over the years.
So I think I’ll stick with collecting email direct from Apple Mail—at least for the major accounts. I’m not actually sure why I have so many email accounts!
It seems to work just fine—and why wouldn’t it? Just makes the Mail interface a bit too crowded for my liking—though Apple do a pretty good job of using folders and allowing the user to arrange stuff in their own way
It wasn’t easy, but I didn’t have any choice when they started bouncing from a major paying client. You can move your email elsewhere but leave your web site hoisted at SiteGround. That’s what I did and I haven’t identified any problems from that. However, I draw the line at not just bouncing an occasional email but trying to convince my client I had gone out of business.
Another blow for common standards.