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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The linked page says that Gmail is discontinuing support for the old Post Office Protocol in favor of IMAP. Nobody has used POP much in years. Decades, maybe.

IMAP can check for mail without downloading. But apparently Gmail doesn't support that.

You can do this the other way round. Use a local email client such as Thunderbird on desktop or FastMail on Android to check Gmail and any other email accounts you have.

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No, they're discontinuing POP 'import' (so mail ends up stored in Gmail) configured in the web app and available everywhere, in favour of IMAP client access from the mobile clients only.

Fine for some people, not at all equivalent for others. (I'm disinterested, fwiw, haven't used Gmail other than an alumni forwarding address for years.) It's not just a protocol change.

You can use pop still, just not to see external emails in gmail web (and you cant use imap either to do that)

> Nobody has used POP much in years

Writing in as a current POP user. I use it to import email every day.

I use POP to maintain control over my data.

This.

I use POP and Thunderbird to download all my email and erase it from their servers so they can't later use it for AI training, ad personalization, persona tracking, etc.

Unfortunately deleting your email probably doesn't "erase it from their servers". This was the substance of one of the old google location history lawsuits, where "erase my history" only erased your device's access to it. They retain a possibly transformed copy for training etc.

You don’t have an ability to “erase it from their servers”. There is no way to be sure they actually delete anything when you erase it, they could just be hiding the access.

Speaking as someone who worked in a large company before (although perhaps not Google-sized), and several smaller ones, they are very motivated to reduce storage costs whenever possible. Sure they could be "just hiding the access" immediately after you request them to delete, but that storage will likely be overwritten soon by something else.

> they are very motivated to reduce storage costs whenever possible

On the other hand, they are also very motivated to have a large mass of data to train their AI.

Which of the two motivations wins, is debatable. Today I'd bet on AI.

Training off data you published for public consumption, e.g. pretty much user-generated content on social media, or anything publicly accessible on the web, is one thing. Training off private conversations is a whole different thing. I doubt any major company is doing the latter. Would be a PR and legal firestorm. Which doesn't serve the interests of companies training AI models either.

Would you really put it past them? Gmail is after all a free service.

> Nobody has used POP much in years. Decades, maybe.

I use it in preference to IMAP, to reduce attack surface; to get my emails off the server and down onto my laptop as quickly as possible.

I don't like the idea of leaving all my email on a server.

The deprecation is about the webmail version of Gmail. You can’t check other accounts while using the web version of Gmail.

It's a little unclear whether you will still be able to use pop3 on the mobile app or not.

I think you can, but those emails are only going to exist on your phone, though. They aren't imported into your Gmail account itself.

Yeah, that's fine for my needs. Just hoping it will continue to work that way.

TIL what POP meant after three decades. Thanks!

only the phone app supports imap. the web app does not, it used to support pop

Gdiehdis29739237

I don’t think that is a good way to express it. The gmail service supported POP and any gmail client (e.g. my iOS Mail app) could then get that email. It isn’t about only the web client.

Huh, apparently I still have a POP3 email setup in Gmail, my old ISP provided email. Mildly annoying that it's going away, but I never use that email anyway so I guess it's not a big deal for me.

The linked page don't say that. Pop will still be supportedand imap was never an option for adding external accounts in gmail webmail

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