Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/05/gmail_dropping_pop3/?td=rt-3a

16 Comments

  1. “Why is Google doing this now? Opinions vary but some market onlookers suspect it is related to the fact that POP3 requires sending passwords in plaintext. We have asked Google to comment.”

    This seems like a pretty decent reason in 2025.

  2. > You can still access those accounts via the Gmail mobile app, but the Gmail service itself will no longer retrieve them.

    Doesn’t sound like much to get excited about, then.

  3. EfficiencyIVPickAx on

    My college email account I can no longer access is forwarded to my Gmail… This is going to perma-lock me out of several legacy services I used to log into a bunch of places. They are breaking my 25 year old Gmail account.

  4. POP3 or POP3S? Disabling insecure pop3 on 110 is 100% fine.

    Edit: this is a total nothing burger for most of the world after reading the article.

  5. mailmehiermaar on

    With pop3 you can use gmail as a client for your own domain name without paying google. They want to stop that.

  6. DB-CooperOnTheBeach on

    Because why not. They kill everything. Soom they’ll drop support for http/https

  7. KangarooDowntown4640 on

    Email in general could really use some more modern standards. I’ve recently been working on software to parse replies from email chains and it’s like the Wild West out there. There’s no indication at all of where signatures start or end, no hard rules for where quoted content starts or ends, etc.. each email client does things its own way. The number of wacky edge case rules software like Gmail and Outlook must have to make it all look right is something I don’t want to think about. It’s a fucking mess dude

  8. This describes one way to use POP3. What about other methods? With Microsoft Outlook, I send multiple email addresses to one mailbox by using POP3. Will that go away. If it does, is there a good way to combine multiple email addresses into one inbox?