> we occasionally have the difficult choice to discontinue features that require disproportionate maintenance resources.<p>Am I really expected to believe that the billions of dollars the company makes in pure profit can't sustain this feature? Am I really expected to believe the touted productively gains granted by Google's AI can't sustain this feature?
Anyone still using Google for anything other than ads and YouTube post Reader has only themselves to blame.<p>Maybe GCP. It's like saying the tiger had no prior history of violence.
Sodas are no longer free. *<p>Seem Google don't feel the need to market to hackers and early adopters anoymore..<p>* <a href="https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/" rel="nofollow">https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...</a>
[delayed]
I moved all my custom domains to Fastmail five or six years ago and couldn't be happier.<p>My Gmail only exists to catch legacy messages and Google service notifications. I look forward to the day I can completely migrate out of all their products, but some organizations I work with who use Google for various things have made that a slow slog.
I have a domain and a contact email address for that domain that I have exclusively used through GMail, I guess this means I need to figure out a different path forward for that, then?
Since you planned ahead, it should be as simple as getting a new provider and updating the MX record. If you are looking for suggestions, I'm on Fastmail's $50/year plan and quite happy with it.<p><a href="https://www.fastmail.com/how-to/email-for-your-domain/" rel="nofollow">https://www.fastmail.com/how-to/email-for-your-domain/</a>
Good thing they are reminding you to get out of Gmail for real
It's not an easy task! I had mine account since gmail beta, so much stuff is going through it.<p>Two years ago I moved to Fastmail(they're great), and pretty much setting up an alias per site/purpose. While I'm happy to see that gmail receives less & less, I still have about 150 entries in 1password that say @gmail.com... maybe one day...
I switched to migadu which was not too painful for a single account (basically the advice was to put both accounts in thunderbird and then move everything over, thunderbird does the work). For email very happy with the provider, notably also as it allows infinite domains.<p>But I miss a proper calendar which migadu is strangely mostly lacking (basic caldav only). Is fastmail better in this respect? And can you do wildcard emails and send/receive as whichever name you want with fastmail? E.g. I have it set so every email which comes to <i>xyz</i>@domain.com arrives in my single inbox (so not catchall but all with a certain letter combo) and use this to have custom emails for every site.
It's a very easy task. Move your stuff and accounts to a different provider in the pace you prefer, and set gmail to forward to the new provider. Keep your gmail account around as a haunted house for the occasional messages that can only come through that way.<p>Compare it to somebody who eats fast food every day. They can start eating healthy instead, but it doesn't mean that they are never allowed to eat fast food again, or even once per week if so be.
Just do email forwarding and progressively update your accounts?
This was the last straw for me. I'm migrating to Apple Mail and cancelling workspace ASAP.<p>ETA: I said <i>nothing</i> about where I'm planning to host my SMTP server. Apple Mail is a provider-agnostic client-side application.
So you got burned by a centralized proprietary mail service suddenly making user-hostile changes, and your first instinct is to move to another centralized proprietary mail service by a company with a long history of user hostile changes?<p>Truly modern consumer sensibilities are fascinating to me.<p>Personally I do not use any Apple or Google products. There are so many better choices!<p>Anyway, might I suggest services that run standard open source mail daemons that never restrict you, like Migadu.
Not everyone is interested in how the sausage gets made. Most people buy a drill to make holes, not to disassemble to learn how to build their own drill. And yes, I have a Migadu account. But I front many of those email addresses via Gmail.
Ignoring how the sausage is made is how people repeat the same mistakes, over and over, in domains as diverse as government, tech, employment, and automobiles.<p>I get that not everyone has the bandwidth or capability to dig into things on their own, but we live in a hostile environment, and we have to either acknowledge that and plan for it, or touch the hot stove over and over again.
most people buy a drill to make holes, and it immedately starts to make holes in their privacy, security, data retention, ownership of their own data, control of their futures...<p>GP was offering an alternative to your swiss cheese hole alignment self immolation tool
Poster didn't get burned.
Before you do that:
Consider a more open and transparent email platform such as Proton, Fastmail, Runbox, Tuta, basically just reconsider moving from one evil, unaccountable platform to another. As you may find the evil, unaccountable platform may do evil and unaccountable things.
With workspace you can add your own custom domains anyway... This seems unrelated.
> This change does not affect Google Workspace aliases or other Gmail addresses you own.
This will probably grenade the plans for many small businesses, right now.
Certainly seems intended to drive Workspace subscriptions, but I wonder how many of those users will sign up for Office instead.
This doesn't apply to Google Workspace addresses that most small businesses will be using.
Related from Oct 2025:<p><i>Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45439670">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45439670</a>
Brutal. How are other platforms solving this without disproportionate resources?
Calling it now: they will reverse this decision by December after they realize how many gmail customers they are losing.
It's weird that they are actively discouraging us from using external mail inside gmail. Like, you would think they <i>want</i> us sucking down all our scannable data into their system and staying inside the wall.
I'd imagine the adoption of DMARC, SPF, DKIM, etc. have just functionally killed the feature.
Yes, that was my first thought. It's wild to me that GMail would support sending as yahoo.com, outlook.com, etc. in the first place. Google makes lots of questionable decisions and shuts down lots of products uncessarily, but this is not a strange or unwarranted move.
It's not wild at all. It's just behaving like any other MUA but with an extra step. You have to give GMail your SMTP submission credentials for the sending server of the target domain, then prove ownership of the specific address you want to send as. SPF/DKIM/DMARC works fine, as GMail is just submitting your message on your behalf the way any MUA would.
Looks like it's still allowed in app. Probably a way to cut down spam and push people to the app.
Further clarification here: <a href="https://support.google.com/mail/answer/17101213" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/mail/answer/17101213</a><p>It seems like they're removing POP/IMAP support from the web client?
Moving to Fastmail was almost entirely painless, although you may end up with 1-2 pieces of spam a day.
This doesn’t affect me, but it certainly influences me. I’ve been holding off from leaving Gmail for years. They try to force you into their Gmail app on iOS, it’s the only way to get push emails from them. OK fine. So I switch from Apple Mail to Gmail. I write a relatively long email full of research to send to my great uncle who is a professor at a nearby university who I greatly respect. I type it up on the desktop, go to the app, add another sentence wishing him well and send it. Come to find out since my phone is in dark mode it changed the text from black to white. That’s Google‘s idea of dark mode. So I have to send another long email removing that text formatting and apologizing. Dark mode is something that Apple and Microsoft and everyone else can get. And they don’t let you change the app to light mode, it only tracks the phone. Their web dark mode is also terrible. Apple and Microsoft have no such issues. Even smaller players like Proton get these things right.
Maybe focus on delivering quality and value instead of trying to extract more out of your existing customers.<p>Google is pathetic and has been for a long time for anyone paying attention to all their quirks, terrible UIs, and canceled products. I have a Gmail beta account from the earliest days. That 1GB was nice 23 years ago but it’s time for me to finally do the work and get off of Gmail.
> This change does not affect Google Workspace aliases or other Gmail addresses you own.<p>I bet most people complaining about this change don’t even know this feature exists.<p>Right now you can forge email from any email address you can verify ownership.<p>Most of those emails will end up in a spam folder.<p>This doesn’t affect email addresses that Google controls DMARC records for.
Isn't this just using SMTP through whatever mail server you have connected to Gmail?<p>Either way, this is likely going to stop me from using Gmail as my mail aggregator, I've used this feature for nearly a decade to send and receive from 6 different addresses, Gmail recognizes the to address and automatically sets the from address to the correct account.<p>Is Thunderbird still decent nowadays? What's a decent mobile + desktop replacement?
><i>Right now you can forge email from any email address you can verify ownership.</i><p>how can you "forge" something if you verify ownership? when you own something, it's not "forging" to use it.<p>i think the point you're trying to get at is that the mail might fail dmarc requirements?
> Right now you can forge email from any email address you can verify ownership<p>I find this sentence confusing. Do you mean “forge” in a technical sense of “this email came from a server unassociated with the domain”? I don’t really get it. I’ve know this feature existed in Gmail for 15+ years and have made regular use of it. Plus I’ve used it to help older relatives keep an old address alive.
What an odd choice of inflammatory language for a feature that uses standard email headers. It doesn't forge anything since it clearly says it was sent from the GMail account on behalf of the other email address in the headers.