Google giveth, and Google taketh away. Two long-standing features are being removed from Gmail, and they both relate to how you access messages from other, non-Google email accounts through the Gmail interface.
The features we’re talking about are Gmailify and POP access, and if you rely on them to consolidate multiple email accounts into your Gmail inbox, you’re going to have to find a different approach. While Google hasn’t given any reasons for the changes, it’s likely that it wants to simplify Gmail, as well as encouraging users to spend more time checking their Google inbox rather than any others.
According to Google, these features will be closed to new users from the first quarter of 2026. For existing users, the functionality will remain until “later in 2026.”
Here’s what you need to know, and what you can do next.
Gmailify
Gmailify is a service that Google introduced in February 2016 that enables you to import messages from Outlook or Yahoo accounts, and then add some extra Gmail-specific features on top. It adds spam filtering using Google’s algorithms, and it adds Gmail’s inbox organization rules, so email is automatically organized into tabs like Social and Updates.
The feature uses a form of IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) technology to fetch emails from other accounts and let you interact with them. IMAP is a standard way of syncing emails—it’s what modern desktop email clients use—but Google applied some special tricks to get it working through Gmail on the web and the Gmail mobile apps.
After the shutdown, the perks that Gmailify brought with it are going away, so you won’t get the spam sorting and the category sorting for emails you’ve fetched from other accounts. You can still access third-party accounts through Gmail and IMAP—but without the extra Gmail magic, and only on mobile. For numerous technical reasons, IMAP is hard to implement on the web, and something Google probably doesn’t think is worth the investment.
Accessing other accounts in Gmail on Android or iOS was available before Gmailify arrived, and will continue to be available. From the app, tap your profile avatar (top right), then Add another account. While Gmailify only worked with Outlook and Yahoo accounts, Google’s standard IMAP implementation should work with almost all third-party email platforms.
When using IMAP, the emails from your other accounts will appear in the Gmail interface, and can be read and replied to from there. However, they won’t actually be stored in your Gmail account or count towards your Google storage. Everything gets synced instantly too. So, for example, deleting a Yahoo email in Gmail for Android would also delete it from your Yahoo email inbox.
POP Access
POP (Post Office Protocol) is an old standard for accessing emails that has effectively been replaced by IMAP now. Given its age, it’s no surprise really that Google is retiring the feature in Gmail. However, POP has been a reliable, easy, and effective way of getting messages from third-party accounts into Gmail over the years.
POP has none of the clever syncing that IMAP uses. When Gmail fetches an email via POP, it can leave or delete the original email on the server. If you have several email apps accessing the same account via POP, you can end up with a different inbox in each of them, depending on which apps got to which emails first.
Despite its limitations, POP does have benefits. It downloads emails in full, so you can read them while offline and easily back them up to a drive. And even if you were to close down your other email accounts, your messages would still remain in Gmail (and count towards your Google storage) if you downloaded them to your Gmail inbox using POP. It’s a handy way of dumping messages from a secondary account into Gmail for reference, though if it’s something you rely on, you’re going to have to find an alternative pretty soon.
Google recommends auto-forwarding emails from your other accounts—though you’ll only be able to read messages (replying from Gmail using the original address won’t be an option), and auto-forwarding isn’t something every email provider offers. In the case of Yahoo Mail, for example, forwarding is a paid-for extra.
Your other options are to access your other accounts via IMAP in the Gmail mobile apps, or to go old-school and use a desktop email client (such as Outlook or Apple Mail). This will let you sync multiple accounts, including Gmail, into one interface via IMAP. However, neither of these options will get your other emails into Gmail on the web, which auto-forwarding would do.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: wired.com
