[bound008]

I'm not one to defend google, but it seems that they are only ending support for POP accounts, and retaining support for IMAP/SMTP. Seems like a reasonable deprecation for 2025, although they could have given more than a quarter to let people handle the change.

[bigwheels]

But why do they need to remove the functionality? It's been working fine for around 2 decades.

As a user of the feature, this is supremely annoying. They didn't even send me a warning message it will be discontinued.

[warp]

Google nowadays just seems afraid to store personal data. Google have moved your maps history/timeline to be on-device only, seemingly in response to geofence warrants. They're also deprecating health (Google Fit) APIs, and moving that data to be on-device.

So, removing POP (where they need to download emails to their servers), and only supporting IMAP (where emails stay on the third-party server) via their GMail app, that would be consistent with a policy to store as little personal data as possible. (it could also be completely unrelated :)

[cyberax]

Likely because one of the backend systems that implements this functionality depends on some deprecated service. And nobody cares enough to port the POP checker to use something new.

[DominikPeters]

They have worded things dishonestly to make you think that POP can be replaced by IMAP. The IMAP support is only available in the mobile app (not gmail.com) and isn't a "fetch" that integrates fetched emails to your Gmail inbox. It's kept as a separate inbox.

[sumanep]

You didn´t understand the article. You can use your gmail with POP or IMAP. What you won´t be able to do is to use POP (IMAP was never an option) to download emails from external account into your gmail account.

[NetMageSCW]

That doesn’t make sense if it is POP to third party accounts because they’ve never supported IMAP to third party accounts.