Gmail will no longer support pop3 fetching, what next?

Scam · 23 Jan 2026 at 17:17

I understand pop3 is antiquated and blah blah, but honestly Google don't seem to do be doing anything but pulling functionality from all of their products over the last few years :confused:

Have they given up?

I'm a Google Workspace (free) user so have suffered even more with Google Home never working properly and all that jazz too, I seem to be doing nothing but fighting with Google apps recently. Anyhoo..

I have 2x other Gmail addresses and one Yahoo addresses being fetched into my primary (domain) Gmail account via pop3 and can send via SMTP. I understand that the best course of action is to setup forwarding from those accounts and hope for the best? So answer me this;

1. Will I still be able to send from those addreses via SMTP once Google pull the switch?
2. Assuming they were fetched by pop3, old emails are stored on my domain's server right? I won't lose those?
3. Why do Google say they will support IMAP on the mobile apps, but not on the browser?

unwashed potato! · 23 Jan 2026 at 18:52

Tbh I didn't even realise pop3 was still a thing. What's the benefit to still be using pop3 over imap

Dr Jack · 23 Jan 2026 at 19:14

POP3 treats the server like temporary storage, taking things out for local storage. IMAP treats the server as the storage. Depends what you want.

SMTP should still work for sending.

Scam · 24 Jan 2026 at 17:30

unwashed potato! said:
Tbh I didn't even realise pop3 was still a thing. What's the benefit to still be using pop3 over imap

Well you couldn't use IMAP in one Gmail inbox to check another, I believe.

So here'#s the thing... Hotmail stopped supporting pop3 a while back so I did this exact change -- had to make all of my Hotmail emails forward to my Gmail. Problem is, the Hotmail spam filter is terrible and I kept getting emails stuck in the Hotmail spam filter that just never arrived. Very tedious. If I'm forwarding from another 2-3 email addresses now, how do I ensure that doesn't happen?

Dr Jack · 24 Jan 2026 at 17:42

Scam said:
So here'#s the thing... Hotmail stopped supporting pop3 a while back so I did this exact change -- had to make all of my Hotmail emails forward to my Gmail. Problem is, the Hotmail spam filter is terrible and I kept getting emails stuck in the Hotmail spam filter that just never arrived. Very tedious. If I'm forwarding from another 2-3 email addresses now, how do I ensure that doesn't happen?

Can you disable the spam filter? I don't let any of my hosts do spam filtering, I do it on my client -- but I don't use gmail for anything so I don't know whether it supports that.

Alternatively: you might be able to set up a rule to automatically restore everything from the spam folder to the inbox?

Scam · 24 Jan 2026 at 17:45

@Mr Jack yeah good shout. Will get into that tomorrow., it's nearly beer o'clock

Scam · 25 Jan 2026 at 15:38

Mr Jack said:
Can you disable the spam filter? I don't let any of my hosts do spam filtering, I do it on my client -- but I don't use gmail for anything so I don't know whether it supports that.

Alternatively: you might be able to set up a rule to automatically restore everything from the spam folder to the inbox?

Right well this has been fun. Forwarding the Gmail accounts was easy, I've got them nicely labelled when they arrive into my main Gmail inbox so it's clear what address they've been sent to. But for some reason when using the Gmail forwarding feature you could only either 'send to archive' or 'mark as read'. Not both :confused:

That was bothering my OCD, but then I realised I could set a filter in those (forwarding) inboxes that catches everything sent to that address and marks it as read as well. Phew. And I realised that filter could say 'never send to spam' too. Double win.

I also improved my Hotmail forwarding to do a similar thing, mark as read, move to archive. Can't turn the spam filter off though.

Oh and I feel like I've been in tidy up mode, because I found out you can't auto-forward emails on the old Yahoo account I had. The only reason I ever had that account was for my Flickr -- which I haven't used for about 6-7 years. So, both my Yahoo and Flickr accounts have now been deactivated and deleted. Woop, what a productive afternoon lol

jklc · 13 Mar 2026 at 17:37

I had no idea about this until I saw a notification in the gmail app today. I disabled the old POP3 fetching and went through the app to do the IMAP thing that still works. After some poking around the settings the app pops up a suggestion to get started with gmailify :rolleyes: