Gmail Will No Longer Support Checking Emails From Third-Party Accounts via Pop

I use POP and Thunderbird to download all my email and erase it from their servers so they can't later use it for AI training, ad personalization, persona tracking, etc.

If their DMARC alignment relies on SPF only, it will break. But if it relies on DKIM (far more common) or both SPF and DKIM (best practice), forwarding won't cause any issues.

If your email breaks when forwarded, your setup is broken. Tons of people use Cloudflare Email Routing or similar services; you must account for them.

That being said, I forward mail addressed @mydomain.com to my Gmail, and I've had a couple of cases where legit messages landed in spam because it was SPF-aligned only.

https://www.fetchmail.info/

At worst you can write a mail client to do that by logging in, listing mails, mailing them to you and keeping track of what it already sent (sqlite?) They are very well known protocols with plenty of implementations, so probably a LLM can write the code with not much guidance.

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.

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

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.

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.

So it was only available for a small list of services?

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 :)

Aside: I do have a dedicated ip/vm for mailu setup, and will likely switch to using a vanity email as my catch-all instead of gmail soon enough. It's kind of sad how generally bad email has become at this point. Will also likely start playing with a few different self-hosted webmail clients, I'd considered and played with Nextcloud, just not sure how much I care for it or not.