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Comment by mxuribe | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is a little about storage costs? I mean, at their scale, i imagine the core cost of the actual storage by itself is pretty negligible...but maybe combined with other infra. (beyond storage) that needs to be considered in the total costs related to storing and managing POP pulls...maybe their data shows that it simply wasn't worth it to them to keep said functionality around? But, your comment did make me chuckle a little! :-)

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They already have a quota and billing framework in place for email storage. If it was about storage costs, I'd expect them to address it through that.

Makes sense.

The number of people who actually use this feature to fetch mail into their Gmail account in the year 2025 has got to be pretty damn near zero.

Yeah, i agree...which adds to my guess that its not *just* about storage...but something else above/beyond storage. In other words, maybe whatever infra is in place to do the fetching, storing, etc...is way more costly than the storage and way too costly to justify for the crazy low numbers that i would agree would still be using POP in this day and age and via gmail.

You might be onto something here. Perhaps other mail services have a habit of banning the Google mailfetcher and it takes effort to get it unbanned.

> Perhaps other mail services have a habit of banning the Google mailfetcher and it takes effort to get it unbanned.

Yeah, that's a perfectly reasonable theory right there!

I know a lot of people who use it, in fact I'm one of them.

I have an @gmail.com account with about 20 years of stuff associated with it, from purchases to YouTube subscriptions, from calendars to GCP accounts.

However, I use a vanity email (me@somedomain.example) that everyone I know uses to get hold of me. Until about 10 years ago I could just forward emails but that slowly became unworkable as more and more stuff just broke due to SPF etc. So, I've been using POP pickup (and accepting the 5-30 minute delay) ever since.

As I understand it, I can't move all my gmail.com data into a GWork profile easily, and POP has worked for years. This is very frustrating.

"A number" much closer to zero than the the number of Gmail DAUs.

Working with a client that has thousands of customers using this setup. Common? Perhaps not, but definitely not near zero.

Many people are fiercly attached to the Gmail interface, but refuse to pay for Google Workspace, or even manage multiple email accounts in a desktop client.

Maybe it causes too many issues? POP is pretty unpredictable when multiple clients access the same server.

Yeah, that would be a good point...like, maybe its not just about cost, but more trouble than its worth. On another comment i made here, i wondered if its not just storage costs, but costs or *annoyance* of running infra. that oversees the fetching, the storage, yada, yada...al for POP, whose users leveraging said functionality are crazy low.

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