Gmail drop support for checking other accounts

Another feature killed by Google.

A recent Google support article has quietly announced plans to drop POP3 support from Gmail in January 2026. On the face of it, this is no big deal. For most purposes, POP3 has been pretty much replaced by IMAP anyway, but there’s a more important change buried in the article.

The issue is confused by the fact that Google use the “Gmail” name to refer to two completely different things:

• The Gmail mobile app that lets you read email on your phone and tablet.
• The Gmail web interface that lets you read email in a browser on your computer.

The Gmail mobile app lets you connect to multiple different mailboxes, and will continue to do so, just not with POP3. IMAP is much better for this purpose, as it supports mail folders, and properly supports access from multiple different devices, so the removal of POP3 support here is no big deal. If you use the Gmail app to read mail in a mailbox hosted with Mythic Beasts, it’ll continue to work just fine.

The significant change is this one:

• The option to “Check mail from other accounts” will no longer be available in Gmail on your computer.

“Gmail on your computer” is Google-speak for “the Gmail web interface”. The “Check mail from other accounts” option is a feature that allows you to pull in mail from other mailboxes and drop them straight into your Gmail inbox. It behaves as if you had just forwarded mail from your other address to your Gmail address, but with one crucial difference – it works reliably.

As we discussed in a recent blog article, efforts to make it harder to spoof email have also made it much harder to forward email reliably, and until now, the “check mail from other accounts” feature has been our recommended way to “forward” mail to your Gmail inbox.

Hopefully Google will contact users to tell them about the change, but we are also doing some log analysis and will be contacting customers who appear to be relying on this feature to collect mail from their Mythic Beasts mailboxes.

Customers who are currently using this feature will either need to revert to simply forwarding emails to Gmail — with the associated risk that Gmail may reject some of your legitimate email – or switch to a different webmail platform. And on that last point, we’re working on a refresh of our own webmail platform that we’ll be announcing in the near future.