Email marketers are facing major changes related to Gmail, specifically the fact that Gmail is ending support for its automatic mail-fetching feature, which relies on the POP protocol. This change could significantly impact how you manage multiple inboxes in one place. What this change means and how it impacts your work with Stripo. It's time to find out.
What is the POP feature?
POP stands for Post Office Protocol and is a standard for receiving emails. At its core, it allows you to download emails to your device, after which they are deleted from the server unless you specify otherwise.
However, in our case, we're more interested in the fact that Gmail used this protocol for its POP "Check mail from other accounts" feature, which allows users to check emails from other accounts. Simply put, you could receive emails from third-party services like Yahoo, Outlook, and others directly into your Gmail account. This allowed you to regularly connect to your other mailboxes via this protocol and receive emails from them to your Gmail inbox.
What exactly are Google and Gmail changing?
Now about the changes. The following two features will disappear from Gmail:
- Gmailify, which connected familiar Gmail functionality (spam filter, categories, etc.) to third-party inboxes connected via IMAP (like Yahoo, Outlook, etc.);
- the Checkmail feature via the POP protocol will be completely removed.
This decision may seem strange; if everything works, why bother? But there are reasons for everything, namely:
- the archaic nature of the POP protocol, which poorly supports new authentication methods and can transmit data unencrypted, leading to a growing security problem for users;
- the simple presence of the more modern IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), which supports data encryption, metadata, and is better adapted for use with mobile devices and modern email clients.
How does it affect you as a Gmail user?
While these changes affect all users, the impact is different for each:
- personal Gmail accounts: The “Check mail from other accounts” (POP3 Fetching) and Gmailify features are being fully removed from the web interface;
- Google Workspace accounts: Access to less secure apps via POP3 is being disabled in favor of OAuth (Modern Authentication). If your external mail server doesn't support OAuth, Gmail will no longer be able to fetch those emails.
Now, let's talk about what will change for you as a Gmail user. The main thing to note is that POP remains available for accessing Gmail accounts using third-party email clients. This access is not being taken away from you.
However, the most important change that impacts you as marketers is that:
- Gmail will no longer be able to fetch (pull) emails from third-party servers into your Gmail inbox. However, you can still use third-party email clients (like Outlook or Apple Mail) to read your Gmail, provided they use modern authentication;
- the Checkmail feature (or its full "Check mail from other accounts" name) will no longer be available from the menu (web version), nor will its full functionality be available;
- emails you imported via POP before this change will remain in your Gmail, including all associated attributes, such as labels, search history, and so on;
- new emails received by these third-party email clients will no longer be fetched into your Gmail via POP.
So, behind the dreaded and lengthy notifications, it's simply that you can no longer make Gmail your central hub for all emails you receive from all your email clients.
And as a final summary of the impact of all the changes Google is making, let's quickly go over what you'll be able to do after these updates:
- set up Server-Side Forwarding for your third-party provider (e.g., Yahoo, Godaddy) using its settings that you can set it to “Forward” mail to Gmail, which will help you replace the old POP fetching;
- use SMTP for “Send Mail As” so you can still reply to emails using your business address within Gmail (as only the incoming method has changed);
- switch to IMAP on mobile to manage multiple accounts directly via the Gmail app, as the app still supports multi-account syncing.
What changes for Stripo?
All these changes could significantly disrupt your usual email marketing workflow, and we've received many questions about how these changes affect Stripo users. We'd like to reassure you that all the changes Google is making within POP will not affect Stripo's work with Gmail. All your template exports to Gmail will continue to work flawlessly, and there won't be any issues, as these changes only affect email fetching from third-party accounts to Gmail.
However, we should note that since email fetching will no longer work, if your tests and template exports involve email client accounts linked to Gmail via POP, they won't be fetched due to these changes, and you'll need to slightly adjust your workflows.
Wrapping up
As you can see, Google's changes related to POP forwarding, while may seem inconvenient for marketers, aren't exactly a disaster. On the contrary, this is a logical step from Google, which is committed to ensuring the security of its recipients' data and the ease of use of its email service on modern devices, ensuring the most convenient experience possible. And the most reassuring thing is that as a Stripo user, you can rest assured that the end of POP email fetching will not affect your Stripo experience.
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