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Comment by suzzer99 | Hacker News Reader

I finally figured out the confusion here. What a terribly worded article. Could mean two different things:

1) Some kind of third-party account (whatever that is) can no longer check (fetch) emails from Gmail via POP. I have a test suite that uses POP to fetch emails from Gmail, so this concerns me.

2) Gmail itself can no longer fetch emails from other email accounts over POP (a feature I had no idea existed).

I guess it means #2. But it took me a long time to figure that out. You'd think a $trillion company could word things better.

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I‘m using this feature, and I‘ve understood the article right away. Yes it’s #2, a little known but very useful feature that I have no idea how I‘ll replace.

Set your other accounts to forward them to your gmail with ARC headers, which gmail now supports. Used to be forwarding into gmail was almost unusable due to spam false positives, but I've found it to be significantly improved now (albeit not perfect).

I switched to doing this just last week (having been using POP3 previously). It's honestly a lot nicer in IMO, since the emails show up on the gmail side pretty much immediately instead of sometimes being delayed.

The other account (over which I have no administrative control) does not support ARC. Yes I guess I‘ll just forward emails.

Unrelated, but I noticed this in your two comments and it seems to be something you do frequently—you’re using the wrong side of the quotation character as the apostrophe. You’re using ‘ but it should be ’. See the difference: I‘ll VS I’ll.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_single_quotation_mark

no, it should be ' (ASCII 39, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe )

The page you linked to lists both ’ and ', in that order. There’s no point in being (wrongly) pedantic about either, both have strengths and weaknesses (explained in the Wikipedia pages). The point is that if someone cares to use proper typographic characters not immediately visible in the keyboard (which the person I replied to seems to), they probably care to use the right ones. Both ’ and ' are correct, but ‘ is not.

It’s interesting that you say there’s no point in being pedantic but this entire boring subthread started because you were pedantic about punctuation. A character really doesn’t matter.

Please don’t engage in bad faith. My post was very clear about its goal. It’s one thing to wrongly “correct” someone (as the poster above me did) and quite another to notice that someone is taking the care to do something but is making a mistake, and politely point them in the right direction.

Just because you don’t care about something doesn’t make it worthless or boring. If I didn’t think the OP cared I wouldn’t have pointed it out. Above all my point was constructive and took the other person’s interests into account, it was not a pedantic critique.

If you find the matter boring, I encourage you to move along. Prolonging it seems counterproductive.

Yeah the German/English combined iOS keyboard is not working well.

Hmm, I transitioned from Gmail to my own domain years ago, but it's still Gmail. However, I'm still both receiving and sending mail from my old @gmail.com address, using POP. Do you know if that's still possible?

I also have an old Gmail account that I don't use directly anymore. Instead of POP, I set it up to forward everything to my mailbox.org account. It works for me this way for several years now. The only issue is that I don't get the spam forwarded, so you can't see if there are false positives. You can still see it in Gmail if you occasionally log in. For me, since this is a rarely used account, the spam I get is usually indeed spam, so I don't miss it. It might be different for a more active account, though.

Cool thanks, I might set that up as well. And did you just set it up as an alias so you can send email from it as well?

(I don't actually know how often I send email from that address, so maybe I don't even need that, but just in case.)

For sending in Mailbox.org webmail there is a thing called alternative senders where I can add email addresses to send from. I have something similar on my Android K9 app, where it's under Manage identities where I can also add the allowed senders.

I set it up a long time ago this way and I'm unsure of I had to somehow configure Gmail to be able to send from my other account. But I have the same also for @live.com and @zoho.com as I was trying different providers. This allows me to easily reply to forwarded emails with the old email addresses.

Edit: I think you got with the alias, didn't know this is what is called in Google https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en#zippy=%2C...

Google Workspace handles this nicely (for $10/month...). I used to use the to-be-deprecated feature but ran into some occasional issues, so I bit the bullet to go to Workspace.

Feels overkill just to achieve the same outcome as we previously had for free, though.

My understanding is it will be removed from both paid and unpaid versions of Gmail, no?

I use it on my paid workspace account and personal, and I got a notification on the paid workspace account that it will be unavailable.

I guess it applies to the free account too but they just don't bother to state it (yet).

I just had to check how I've set up my Gmail to collect all my e-mail from other accounts.

Fortunately, they're all set up to forward to Gmail. Gmail never checks them itself.

Does e-mail forwarding not work in your case?

It works but is prone to being marked as spam.

Does your other account not provide IMAP?

The other account may provide IMAP but it won't help you because GMail only supports POP (which is now going away). GMail does NOT support IMAP for 3rd party accounts.

The GMail mobile app does support IMAP, but that is different from GMail as a service supporting it. The mobile app having IMAP support does nothing for people who use a web browser.

Its google that never supported fetching mails over imap, not clear if they do now.

It's a shame. I use this functionality to retrieve and delete messages from other mailboxes on a daily basis in order to use Gmail as my primary email interface.

Yeah. The interface isn't bad. Just remember to backup your email somewhere.

I do the opposite. I forward all my gmails to my primary account.

"from third-party accounts" is a better worded version of your (2).

Your (1) would be worded in the opposite order.

The problem is unless you know what "third-party accounts" means, it's ambiguous as to which account is being connected to and which account is doing the connecting over POP. "Gmail will no longer support checking emails from [thing I'm unclear on] over POP."

The whole sentence hinges on knowing that Gmail itself can (or could) become a client and go out to other email accounts and fetch emails over POP. In my mind I'm wondering, "Are they talking about something like where Slack connects to gmail?"

#2 was frequently used as a spam filter for private domain emails that don't want to deal with setting up spam filters on their mail servers. I used this a decade or so ago in one of my online store it was very good at spam filtering and you get to use one webmail client to process all your emails from different domains.

Thank you. I still use POP to download and backup my emails. Terribly worded article.

I've been using (2) for probably 15+ years, combined with tagging it has been great for consolidating multiple email boxes into one feed.

That said you can get the same thing by setting up an auto-forwarder to your gmail box.

I understood the title right away despite never having known about the feature. (I knew about the standard way to use POP with a gmail account.)

Oh? I had no idea it could mean #2 until I saw this comment.

It's number 2. But IMAP still works.

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