I switched to Thunderbird ages ago and have been very happy with it. One advantage, to my mind, is that all of my email archives live on my local PC, not on Gmail's servers. That's called "privacy."

I have a domain name, that I control, and an email address, that I control, and am very happy with that state of affairs.

The extinction of "personal computing" continues . . .

all of my email archives live on my local PC, not on Gmail's servers. That's called "privacy."

Only if that email didn't pass through other service providers to reach your archives.

That's the way to do it. But "an email address" - just the one?

Alpine still my ✓ mua - having finally worked out how to get it working with chocolatey oauth2 (it is not difficult but a little bit obscure), I realised just how much I missed the pure text, non graphical environment.

As a bonus Alpine still supports pop3. ;)

I can recommend Betterbird for the naive user who has only ever used the GMail web interface. Seems to hold fewer surprises compared with MS tat or Evolution or indeed the latest, greatest Thunderbird banana·ware † (as the Betterbird FAQ puts it. ;)

† if you search this you will get mostly irrelevant links to the Banana Wars. Cannot imagine why. No siree !

Just noting that Gmail users can (if Google hasn't killed that as well) download their gmail archive. I did that a few months ago. I suspect it might be a good idea for most of us to do that regularly. I just added a task to my to do list to do that every other month.

Then this is the perennial risk you face.

Although given how rapidly Google is accelerating to being useless for everything, this could be seen as a small mercy in a few years time.

While ruining your own server seems a poor choice, I'll assume that was a typo :-).

Running your own server could easily be replaced by "paying someone to run a server for you" (which in most cases, eg. if you have other things to do, will be a better option).

Taking a hard dependency on a "free" service comes with risks, and for businesses (in particular) that is a risk.

Yet another example of 'Other peoples computers' !!!

This is the basic problem with depending on 'other' people to do nice things for you ... eventually they decide to stop being nice !!!

The reason may make sense to them BUT you get no input during the decision making process and often get forgotten at the informing your customers stage as well !!!

Thunderbird is quite usable and you have FULL control of it !!!

:)

One more step on the "you have no privacy, get over it" march.

Sorry, Eric Schmit, but we are going to cling to our privacy in any way possible whether you like it or not.

Fuck you and all your kind.

Will you? Can't say that if you use Googlermail. I speak as one who does not use gmail.

Support note is fine in FireFox here. uBlock Origin maybe helps.

> Support note is fine in FireFox here. uBlock Origin maybe helps.

Interesting. I have UBO, of course.

No Google tech notes have displayed for a year or two... interesting to learn it's just me.

Don't tell me that Google is adopting the Apple 'no comment ... no communication at all' stance with 'El Reg' !!!

:)

Also fine for me using FF - might be some other extension creating problems? I've had trouble over the years with some of them in some sites (Dark Reader was particularly peculiar in many cases)

The time is coming when I run out of US cloud services to dump, and I haven't really been trying, they just keep pissing on their own products.

"Why is Google doing this now? Opinions vary but some market onlookers suspect it is related to the fact that POP3 requires sending passwords in plaintext."

POP3S (using SSL over port 995) is available. I'm sure if Google had asked their own search engine they would have found it.

Surprising, though. I'd have thought Google would want as much email consolidation into Gmail as possible, to feed to their AIs as training data?

This is GMail connecting to other people, not running the service themselves. If the other people don't operate POP3S, then they can't use it. I'm not sure what the people using this feature are connecting to, but older services still recommending POP3 probably didn't set up and run a POP3S path. However we judge Google's decision, we can't propose something as a solution if Google couldn't use it in practice.

I suspect that from their point of view it is a feature they need to maintain, and that very few people use. Why bother? It's even risky for them to work on something like that. Everybody at Google is measured by how much impact they have. The one who has the least impact in a team gets a "Not Enough Impact" rating, loses their bonus, and is on track for getting fired. And if the feature you work on is used by less than millions of users and has nothing to do with AI, it's likely to be you.

That said, the number of people who both know how to set up and use POP3 correctly and are using Gmail is indeed likely to be tiny.

Probably 'Gemini' got it wrong again !!!

:)

The reason I have a Gmail account it just to test email and backup email address. The two reasons I have a Gmail account is to test email circuits, emergency email address, and use Android devices. Amongst the many reasons to use Gmail, at least when it it first started was simply to test my private email server, anti-spam software, and make sure "the sheep" could continue to function. I've had a private email server for "yonks", used Netscape when it was a combined browser/email client, and now Thunderbird. I never trusted Gmail enough to use it for a serious service.

POP3 support and plaintext passwords should not be an issue, since almost all will have support for RFC 2595 `STLS` POPS3 command or will have to switched to POP3S on port 995 for always on SSL/TLS support. POP3 is a light weight protocol that it shouldn't be a performance issue, and not likely to need maintenance, since it hasn't changed since TLS support. So I don't understand why they feel the need to remove something that works.

Having support for IMAP and POP3 are nice to have just-in-case you need it. Clearly Gmail is regressing again.

RFC 1730 (which has been replaced b RFC 2060 two years later, itself then superseded by RFC 3501 after another 6 years, and then 18 years later by RFC 9051).

POP3 has been obsolete for over two decades, IMAP4 has worked well for at least that long.

POP3 was never a good choice for email delivery to a user's mail box, no-one has a good justification for complaining other than "I had a hack that worked: nothing is as permanent as a temporary fix": El Reg scraping the barrel here finding someone complaining about this.

El Reg scraping the barrel here finding someone complaining about this.

They're not. Did you even RTFA?

Your argument can never end. They think the example in the article was a niche use case with few users. What from the article indicates otherwise, since that's an opinion? The only thing likely to convince one of you that the problem is bigger or smaller than expected is statistics on user count and purposes, and the article indeed lacks those because Google is the only one who could provide the former and hasn't done so. Until then, you'll end up arguing over the one anecdote from the article or your own assumptions to try to decide how important this feature was to those who used it.

> Did you even RTFA?

Yes, and the linked article.

And noting how obsolete POP3 applies to both using POP3 to deliver to a mailbox, and to connect a client to that mailbox. Just that the former was never an intended use case

Firstly, let's ignore the word "obsolete" because POP3 here and it works.

Secondly, POP3 allows a client to download email from a mailbox. The fact that that client happens to be another mailbox is not important.

Thirdly if you read JWZ's blog post, you'll see it's not just a simple workflow for one person, it's for a business. The other way of doing it is mail forwarding... but SPF/DKIM/DMARC pushed by the big mail providers breaks email forwarding.

So really Google have broken useful functionality which is being used in the present day... again.

Obsolete? No way. I don’t want to go view my email as stored on the server; I want to download it to MY system where I can keep control of it.

IMAP does download email from the server and let you control it. You have the choice not to and only use the server's copy, but no mail client does that by default. Your argument works against webmail, but not against IMAP.

Gmail retrieving via POP3 was essential for one reason; Google makes it almost impossible to forward mail to them without blocking the sending server as a spam source.

One more nail in the interoperability coffin.

Not that they'll make that public, mind you...

Of course they'll make it public. It'll be right there on page 47 of their revised terms and conditions in Egyptian hieroglyphs printed in 3 point type.