Gmail discontinues convenience features for external emails | News

Apple sometimes has a reputation for being too quick to shed old habits and to get rid of functions that are important to many users. However, Google is in no way inferior to this – on the contrary: the company has repeatedly discontinued services, features and offers quite unexpectedly in the past – without necessarily thinking about alternatives for users. Now it concerns the popular email service Gmail: Anyone who uses the platform to bundle incoming emails from other providers has been encountering one or two problems since the beginning of the year.

Gmailify deleted without replacement
There are good reasons for Gmail users to integrate external mail accounts: Users don’t have to set up multiple apps or accounts, and they also benefit from the functions that come with Gmailify. Thanks to Gmailify, the mailboxes from other providers act like Gmail accounts: the in-house spam filter is used and the categories to divide messages into categories are also used. Labels and an improved search are also on board. However, these convenience features are a thing of the past: Google discontinued Gmailify on January 1st of this year. If Gmail users access external mailboxes, they have to forego all of the above-mentioned functions. These are reserved exclusively for emails that arrive via Gmail.

IMAP instead of POP3
This is not the only change that affects external emails that are integrated into Gmail: Google is also canceling their retrieval via the (functionally very limited) POP3 protocol. To access messages from other providers, an IMAP connection is required. Those affected should therefore make sure that this protocol is activated by the provider – the Gmail service itself uses it by default anyway. By the way, the two changes don’t come as a complete surprise this time: Google announced the end of support for these features in October 2025.