Gmail's important changes
 

Gmail is discontinuing the feature to fetch emails from third-party accounts. This is a tragedy for me. As an email enthusiast, I have many email accounts, but I'm too lazy to log in to each one every month. So, I used Gmail to fetch them to prevent those accounts from being deleted due to prolonged inactivity. Now that Gmail is removing this feature, I'm saddened for my email accounts. What about you all?

Thunderbird is your friend.

jeffpan, some sympathy to you, even if I do not use it that way. Maybe you want to try as dojyx said. (Thunderbird)

There's another thread about this in the Early Warning section. https://www.emaildiscussions.com/sho...d=1#post642909

Most email services have a quite lengthy inactivity limit (there are exceptions though), if you make a note in your diary to sign in to all of them every X months you'll be fine. Diary can be an old-fashioned book or an electronic one, whatever suits you best ;)

Does using a service like Thunderbird keep you permanently signed in?
If that would be the case, there's an option too to keep your accounts active.

Unless you need to try every service for professional reasons (or as a hobby), I would however advice to restrict number of email accounts. Not restricting to 1 or 2, but I wouldn't go above 10 for sure. Too much hassle to follow up all those different accounts, I experienced in the past. I used to have a lot of accounts too, but I found it too time-consuming. Of course a service like Thunderbird can make it all easier, but especially if you use webmail it becomes too much of a hassle.

Is there a web thunderbird? i know there was one in the past, "mail2world", am I right?

You could use the webmail built into the Vivaldi browser.

I will try that. thanks. thought i have a native vivaldi.net email.

It is not a tragedy for me, but definitely a problem.

There are two options:

1. To use POP Peeper https://www.esumsoft.com/pop-peeper (highly recommended)
2. If you have your own VPS, I have Python script that retrieves data from any POP3 mailbox and pushes these email into pre-defined IMAP folder on any IMAP compatible mailbox including Gmail.
You can run this script in parallel with multiple mailboxes.

You can run this script even on Windows 10/11 PC, but I do not know how to run program periodically on Windows (on Linux it is a cronjob). It means you may need to run it manually.

There was one www.pop3now.com

Later it was shut down.

Missing it very much.

Windows has "Task Scheduler" for running things at particular times (or other forms of trigger, eg certain system events occurring). There's a GUI for setting-up scheduled tasks up & checking their status, and it's also possible though the "SCHTASKS" command (eg from a terminal window or some other program).

I know about Task Scheduler, but it is not good for Python scripts: blinking terminal windows every x minutes (x - scheduling interval)

I did the following:

I installed WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), installed Ubuntu 24.04 and created a cron job for my popfetcher.

If somebody needs it, I can send a code (I think at least Python 3.10 is required for this code, I have Python 3.12, Python 3.8 is not good)

I was not careful enough of copying information and the link or links, but I tried a web search about "changes happening GMail 2025", and found articles with a great much commentary about soon to stop sending SMS codes for verifications and instead requiring the user verify self with a QR code sent to ,... to what, I forgot.

Do you mean that you get a cmd.exe terminal window shown just at the instant that the Python script starts?

That's not a problem (for me) if I want the script to generate output describing (to the user at that instant) what it is doing ... but if your script is only going to log what it does & you wish it not to interrupt a user visually, you need somehow to appear to prevent the terminal window from being displayed (or force it to be outside the visible screen area).

Since 2012, I've used an early version of this for that: https://github.com/stbrenner/SilentCMD
(Despite its help saying it's for running bat/cmd files, it worked for other stuff too. Later versions only work for bat/cmd/py because they look at the type of file they are being asked to run & build an interpreter-specific command to do it. I prefer to specify all of that myself, so for example I could choose which of several versions of an interpreter to use, & just use SilentCMD to suppress the terminal window.) I don't know if it works on Win 10/11 - I'm still using W8.1.

This fork might be better: https://github.com/mikefirefly/SilentCMD



I also use another old Brenner utility which does nothing; useful if some application runs a certain external specified command & you want to disable it. Last time I looked for it (to see if it had been tweaked, I could not find it but I do still have the one I downloaded long ago). To use it I temporarily rename the real external command & put a copy of the donothing.exe in its place. The calling application runs what it thinks is its external command, but nothing happens. I last used this when a Dropbox housekeeping utility started dumping on Windows; just removing the named .exe was no good because Dropbox checked it existed before calling it. (Of course if they'd been thorough & checked its size or hash, my workaround would not have worked.) Other ways to solve this are discussed at:

https://superuser.com/questions/3811...t-does-nothing

Also see: https://tanalin.com/en/projects/do-nothing/
and: https://www.joenord.com/apps/nop/index.html

Another un-needed change!!

Im sorry Jeff :(

You should voice your opinion with them!!

support@google.com (Thats the same ppl as gmail right?)

Several big things about this are extremely annoying to me.

1. I use Gmailify at the moment in order to sync two different Gmail accounts so one is a complete backup. I prefer having an online backup so it would be easily accessible no matter where I am located.
2. I use POP with Gomailify (a different service than Gmailify) for some domain email, which I believe is currently required by Gomailify. Currently, Gomailify won't start working until they detect the first POP attempt from Gmail. Gomailify also forwards my domain email, so hopefully they will work out a new system so POP is not required.
3. I also use POP to bring other domain emails into the web version of Gmail as that is currently the only way to "check mail from other accounts." Apparently, they are suggesting we will be able to add IMAP accounts to the Gmail app, but will that email then show in webmail Gmail? I imagine so. I will have to test that out.
4. I suppose we could just forward our emails from other accounts to Gmail, but there are several problems with forwarding. It probably would not count as "activity" on the other accounts to make sure you don't lose access due to inactivity. Also, there are problems from time to time with Gmail deciding an account is a spammer and blocking it if too much spam is being forwarded.

It strikes me as very odd that Gmail no longer wants people to use Gmail as their central email interface where email from other accounts is read and acted on.

This is true. Forwarding is not a solution in many cases.
- It does not qualify as an "activity" for extending "inactivity period"
- If forwarding failed for any reason, you do not know this

Regarding Gmailify: it has limited capabilities for filtering. Even these capabilities will be removed according to Google announcement.

Its interesting Google just blocked thier search engine from older browsers a few days ago......

Im really surprised they allowed older browsers as long as they did... They seem to be quite determined to spy on people as much as they can!!

Google seems to be embracing and approving of forwarding now based on their help docs. Maybe now that SPF and DKIM are being enforced they find forwarding is not a problem. When I forward to Gmail from other accounts I keep the originals in the Inbox and periodically I skim them to make sure I haven't missed anything important. Frankly, I have found forwarding very reliable and much faster than either POP or IMAP.

Any alternative solution/provider?

FYI as of this morning my Gmail account on the web (not the phone app) still shows the option to check mail from other accounts using POP3. I didn't go through the whole setup process, but I started it for an email address I have outside of Gmail and it looks like it would work.

Replacement to Gmail POP3 Fetcher: https://postdirect.net/mailbox

$15/year

It fetches emails via POP3 and forwards them to Gmail or any other email address.

Still better than alternatives.

Another option is Fastmail that can be used as a POP3 fetcher and then to forward to another email address.

Another option: https://magicforward.email/

Gomailify has rolled out their new system using a Google API to link to your Gmail account, meaning even better performance and no use of POP3 fetching or forwarding. You need to sign in using OAUTH. You still get SMTP for sending, a new dashboard, unlimited aliases and domains, and fast customer service for $12 per year. They grandfathered in existing customers and are adding a free month to existing subscriptions. Very slick. https://www.gomailify.com/

Thanks for this info, I was trying to figure out what to do about this situation. The company that hosts my domain can do forwarding to gmail, but I didn't know if doing so byspassed their spam filtering (like for example, does it forward the email FIRST before running it though filters etc).

But the other issue I was worried about was when composing an email and wanting to send from the domain email address instead of @gmail.com

When How another GMail address on same Google account?
 

I thought I saw some online articles on this, and thought too a mention occurred on these forums, but I still am finding nothing current. Will or DOES Google allow account holder to create an additional GMail address or two on the same Google account?

Understand, I do not mean "Plus-addressing"; and I do not mean "@googlemail.com" instead of "@gmail.com". I mean, new address or alias for real.

You can now change your Gmail address to a new one and you keep the old one as an alias. https://support.google.com/accounts/...l_keyword&rd=1

Thanks, so according to the message there, it is not yet available to everybody, but is being made available for some people.

Another option for POP3 synching is https://mailtogmail.com/ I can't figure out what the pricing is from their site. Gomailify works well for domain emails, but MailtoGmail should work with other mail services.