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Comment by xp84 | Hacker News Reader

Hypothesis: This feature is actually a very serviceable way for a small business or individual to have a branded email address on very cheap email hosting, while getting Gmail features for free. Google wants such people to be paying for Google Workspace if they don't want to be advertising the Gmail brand on their address.

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I have an email forwarder on my personal domain that forwards to my gmail address, and gmail lets me send email as if it were coming from that address. Seems like it's the same result, and they're not blocking that.

They've been gradually making it more difficult (you now have to use a backdoor route with a machine access token if you want to register a new sending address).

Gmail quietly drops forwarded mails sometimes. They don't put them into the spam directory, either.

Doesn't Google Workspace start at $7 per month? I can't see a business user going to those lengths to save $1 or $2 per month.

I know businesses that use Gmail and have all their staff make username.businessname@gmail.com addresses.

Do not bet against how much small businesses don't want to pay for stuff, you will always lose.

The bigger cost of Google Workspace is the administrative overhead.

The admin panel for Google Workspace is extremely powerful. Hundreds/thousands of settings. Great for medium/large businesses with a dedicated IT person. A huge headache for small businesses.

I think a minimum of being able to shut down an account when you fire someone and delete the data is worth having manageability, but small businesses will do anything, even additional staff administrative overhead, to avoid paying a subscription.

You can't both realize that getting people to pay you even a tiny but recurring subscription is how you get a fat and easy life, and at the same time fail to realize that paying anyone else even a tiny but recurring subscription is how you give someone else a fat and easy life at the expense of your own.

The majority of small businesses aren’t subscription based services. I was assuming we were talking about companies like your local coffee shop.

Same companies are also mortally offended by the very idea of having to pay salaries and (gasp!) taxes; asking them to also pay for tools feels like adding an insult to injury!

I always find the admin panel hugely restrictive. It's missing basic features like "just let me impersonate this user now".

The number of times our support staff have to walk someone through the process of doing something when the ability to impersonate a user would just let them do it far quicker.

> Nobody deserves even a modicum of privacy. Let's make it 0 friction to inspect what they're doing at all times.

Features cut both ways. Am I respectful of my work equipment? Yes. Would it be net good for my boss to automatically get a report of everything on my screen everyday, not particularly. So could we not have the largest platforms make it even easier than it already is to be creepy AF?

Impersonation is not what you seem to think it is.

Every system I design has this "impersonation" feature, and none of them have any capability for surveilling usage. It's just a way for me to see what my customers are seeing. Helps me understand their problems, bugs in my system, etc.

I have direct access to all the prod databases and lots of tools for inspection/auditing. This isn't for that. It's for helping people by seeing/using the system through their eyes.

It ideally doesn't need to be a privacy-invading thing, but rather a way for administrators troubleshoot issues a bit easier without having to get on a screensharing call. I think maybe what makes it difficult is that Gmail might be used as the key to authenticate into other accounts (like for shadow IT).

And in the ideal case, even this action that a Google Workspace administrator logged in as someone else would be automatically written into an audit trail.

It's funny how many assume impersonation is all about privacy, when it's really about empathy: letting you see the situation through the eyes of the person you're trying to help, instead of just responding I don't have that problem in my setup or when using a god account.

I have had multiple people scream at me on the phone for daring to suggest that a new person working needs their own email account and it will cost about £4 ($5.30~) a month

you work for the wrong people

If only life could be so easy that we could all avoid working for the "wrong people".

Going from $0? That isn't surprising.

Yeah... but Workspace has other problems. The only thing Workspace gives you is a more direct way to pay Google until they freeze your account.

Per user/domain.

I'm retrieving POP emails from multiple domains. To migrate to Google Workspace I'd need to pay like $40 per month... and a couple of those inboxes rarely receive any emails.

Very cheap email hosting still generally comes with IMAP I think? Which gmail is still supporting. EG Namecheap $1/mo email comes with IMAP.

How is google mail still supporting a "fetch" via IMAP of mails stored in a third party service? What are the settings to poke on mail.google.com for this?

The announcement clearly says that "Check mail from other accounts" will disappear. They say it's about POP, but if the entire feature disappears, then it's not just about POP.

Iam not sure about that - the wording is weird

> Starting January 2026, Gmail will no longer provide support for the following:

> POP: Unlike IMAP connections, with POP, emails are downloaded, and you decide how often you want to download new emails.

IMAP, which is MUCH better at doing the same thing, is still supported.

It is not supported. You can only add an IMAP mailbox on the mobile app and not on gmail.com. The IMAP account is then displayed as an inbox completely separate from your gmail inbox. There is no pull and no integration.

Ah, I see, I think you're right. I misread the Google doc.

> while getting Gmail features for free

Maybe initially. But if you use Gmail for third party email storage (which is what the POP feature is really about) after some time you'll have to pay for Google One for more storage.

They did the same with free version of Google Workspace. It's just no longer free.

Exactly. To Google, wanting to use a domain other than Gmail is a strong signal that they can probably shake you down for a few bucks a month. Sure it’s just $7 for most of these people and they probably only have 1-2 accounts. But multiplied by how many million people they saw using this feature it could be worth it to Google. Plus also ending the infra cost of fetching.

For those of us who were just using the feature to aggregate mail from other email addresses like an old Yahoo account or something, I doubt Google cares about it, they even probably kind of liked it that you’re viewing their ads instead of the other guys, but they probably don’t matter enough.

I would happily pay to get something else than the enshitified Gmail experience

POP has been a problematic protocol since 2000 or so.

Perhaps for main email-management use, but it perfectly fits the model of yanking a single stream of email from server A to load into server B - without resorting to forwarding, which is problematic because the middlemen don’t want the spam that gets forwarded to reflect poorly upon their IP reputation.

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