Gmail stopping support for POP3 email

Google have suddenly and quietly announced that:

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

• Gmailify: This feature allows you to get special features like spam protection or inbox organization applied to your third-party email account.
• Check mail from other accounts: Fetching emails from third-party accounts into your Gmail account, with POP, will no longer be supported."

In case this is already technobabble, let's break down the main ways you can send and receive emails:

• IMAP allows you to connect to an email account from a mail programme (Mac Mail, Outlook etc. as well as Gmail) but crucially the emails remain on a server and you see a synchronised version, they aren't just downloaded onto your device or computer. 
• POP3 allows you download and remove emails from a server either onto a device or computer if you use an app like Outlook or Thunderbird, or into an online mail programme like Gmail.
• SMTP is the protocol used to send emails, including when replying from an account whose incoming mail was collected via POP3.

This change will be huge for many people, including ourselves. For years we've used Gmail to pick up emails sent to our @iteracy.com addresses - not to mention mailboxes at other domains - and to send emails from those addresses. It's convenient to view all emails in one place and the Gmail app works across all devices, so for us it was a no brainer. The emails were stored in Gmail so they were available wherever we logged into the app, didn't take up extra disk space on our server, and the Gmail spam filter and search option made email management very easy.

To be clear: any email that has been picked up by POP3 before now will remain in Gmail accounts, no historic emails will be lost or deleted. This change only applies to future emails downloaded with POP3, whenever Google starts enforcing the new rules. Also, Gmail mobile will still support viewing other email accounts via IMAP.

Google says that the option to do a one-time import of emails from another account still exists, and there is a data migration service available for work and school accounts.

It's not entirely clear why Google has decided to take this step. Their documentation cites "modernization" but other reports suggest the reason is to improve security; POP3 has existed since the 1980s and lacks modern encryption standards, so removing it avoids vulnerabilities in email handling. However there are ways to use POP3 securely so this isn't a full explanation.

It's also not to save disk space, because there is an alternative which still ends up with all emails being delivered to Gmail. If you have access to set up a forwarder for an email address, you can set it to forward to your Google or Gmail address. The email arrives in your inbox as normal and you can reply from the custom (non Google) email address using SMTP.

Google have said this will be rolled out from this month, January 2026, but it's not clear exactly when and how this will be applied. We've decided to take pre-emptive action rather than risk any interruption to emails. We set up forwarders for our @iteracy.com addresses to our Gmail addresses and then deleted the POP3 accounts in Gmail. It seems to work fine, and as a benefit the emails are forwarded straight away (POP3 accounts in Google used to be checked intermittently, sometimes only once an hour unless manually triggered).

In the past we've helped some of our clients set up their emails as POP3 accounts in Gmail, and we'll be contacting them to advise them how to swap over to the forwarding service.