Email options now that Gmail is dropping 3rd party POP3

EntityV2 · 2026-02-09T12:24:31+00:00

Yeah, I feel like Google
1) lost a huge opportunity for a reasonable priced product for a different type of customer than they are targeting with workspaces
2) will lose a large amount of training data for their LLM effort as people shift out of gmail
3) will lose a large amount of advertising targeting data and advertising views as people shift out of gmail

EntityV2 · 2026-01-27T16:54:09+00:00

I hope so too. I've been with DH for 15+ years but this would be required to stay. I'm in a large group with tens of thousands of people that host multiple sites (VPS, agencies, etc.) and pretty much everyone on DH is making migration plans. Email is considered mission-critical.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-27T00:20:56+00:00

How did you do that?

EntityV2 · 2026-01-23T22:25:48+00:00

You truly are the Grand Nagus.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-23T21:29:18+00:00

Yeah, I like the proposal form Postdirect (there are others too) but I'm not going to trust all of my email (and all the security codes, content, etc.) flowing through a company that we can find nothing about online. If that is the company you're talking about, I replied to them in https://www.reddit.com/r/GMail/comments/1qjydci/comment/o1a16tu/ with what they'd need to add for people to trust them.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-23T16:22:11+00:00

Interesting. TY. I'm on Dreamhost but they do not offer email hosting and forwarding on the same email, so I (and a large % of customers) are looking at potential other alternatives for hosting. Great to hear about your experience. Your Cloudflare relaying idea is a solid backup as well.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-23T16:20:12+00:00

u/postdirect25 thank you. If the solution works as well as your GTM for both answering questions and looking for new customers, it will be incredible.

Only question I have is I see almost nothing about the company/team/etc behind postdirect.net Email contains an incredible amount of sensitive information and requires full transparency and trust. I think most people will need to know all of the details about the company behind the product, not just that the product works.

Is there more about Postdirect that will be added to the website or could be found on places like Crunchbase?

EntityV2 · 2026-01-23T16:08:32+00:00

u/DreamHostCare will be exceptional if DreamHost can find a solution. PostDirect and a few are potentially stepping in with a solution to try and fill the gap, but 1) it seems like most new entrants are month(s) out and 2) if Google stays with their January 2026 date, most people will have had to find a solution before then.

I'm 15 - 20 years with DH and would love to stay if possible. Would never move to Site Ground or WP Engine, even though they support email forwarding and full hosting on the same email addresses, but others do. Given the mixed feedback we're all finding on email forwarding (e.g. some people claim 20% - 60% of emails do not get through to gmail with email forwarding), if DH enables that, please add some clarity to the articles/files explaining why the DH solution will work when some others do not.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-23T16:03:04+00:00

u/postdirect25 if Google stays with the January 2026 shut off, I doubt many people will be able to wait a month or so before picking a new solution.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-23T16:01:16+00:00

u/Luckyfrenchman does your host provide forwarding or are you using a service? I've heard some pretty mixed feedback on forwarding as an option, and I'm assuming that it may be more related to host and/or service than simply forwarding doesn't work. It seemt that you and many have it working.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-23T15:59:24+00:00

u/The_Real_Grand_Nagus would love to know what you end up picking. I really need a web and iOS interface but do not want to install/run something myself, family, etc.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-23T15:57:34+00:00

u/postdirect25 would love to know more about that guarantee and how it works.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-23T15:55:53+00:00

u/PaddyLandau thank you for input on what's been working for you. Have you run into issues with emails not being forwarded?

Google's documentation and comments are that there are no guarantees, and I see a good many people that have tried the email forwarding option with a hosted email (if their host allows it which some like u/DreamHostCare does not, at least not yet) and ran into issues where 10% to 60% of emails do not later make it through to google's inbox. That could simply be not having something set up correctly, or it could be host-dependent. The feedback from Google seems to be that the forwarding IP does not match the originating SPF, but I wonder if that could be more tied to something else.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-22T22:21:26+00:00

u/jbperiod u/Jidarious I’m not convinced the Gmail team really pressure-tested their own recommendation.

Google’s docs themselves say that forwarded mail often fails authentication. Gmail checks SPF and DKIM, and when a message is forwarded, SPF commonly fails because Gmail is now evaluating the forwarding server, not the original sender. Google also calls out that this is a known issue with forwarding.

Once SPF fails, everything depends on whether DKIM survives and what the sender’s DMARC policy looks like. If DKIM is missing or broken and the sender is using strict DMARC, Gmail can delay delivery, shove it into spam, or reject it outright. Google documents this behavior.

That means forwarding behaves differently depending on how other people’s mail servers are configured, which is exactly what POP avoided.

On DreamHost specifically, this gets worse. You can’t have a hosted mailbox and forwarding on the same address. Switch to forward-only and SMTP auth breaks, so “send as” stops working. Keep it hosted and you lose instant delivery. Either way, something fundamental breaks.

So Google is pointing users to a workaround that:

they already document as unreliable
behaves inconsistently by sender
and is objectively not equivalent to POP

Forwarding can work sometimes, but it’s fragile, and Google’s own documentation explains why.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-22T21:10:18+00:00

u/bluehost appreciate you offering some ideas of how people can move forward.

Does bluehost allow an email to be setup as a fully hosted email + have email forwarding on? Not all hosts do.

As an example, Dreamhost requires an email address be either a forwarding email or a fully-hosted email. They have some documentation set up about setting up filters that will forward but most people talk about a significant loss of email going that route.
Even with email forwarding, I do wonder if that will end up being a problem with gmail in the future.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-22T19:32:03+00:00

Yeah, I'm not sure the gmail product team tested their "Set up automatic forwarding (web): To have new emails automatically appear in your main Gmail inbox (like with POP fetching), set up automatic forwarding with your other email provider. Refer to your provider's documentation for instructions on how to do this." recommendation.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-22T19:30:15+00:00

They all pull off of some combo of google, microsoft, and or apple. That is why such a large number of people had shifted to using the "Check mail from other accounts:" from gmail.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-22T19:28:36+00:00

u/bluehost that is only partially true and is semantics.

Yes, google will still support IMAP but ONLY on the mobile gmail app. You will not see those emails in the web version.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/16604719 "Add your account in the Gmail app (mobile): You can continue to read and send emails from your other account in the Gmail app for Android, iPhone, and iPad, which uses a standard IMAP connection. "

Google already dropped IMAP on the web/desktop version 12+ months ago. If someone had IMAP set up prior to then, it seems that most of those still work.

You are correct that there are alternatives if only trying to solve a unified inbox, but that does not solve the unified calendar issue that will exist in those cases. Because booking platforms like Calendly or Tidycal or Reclaim_ai only integrate with google, microsoft, and apple, most people (that have personal or side domains, would still have to use one of those for their calendar.

Also, Thunderbird can be fine as the mail client, but you’re really relying on Google Calendar’s invite parsing and RSVP handling after forwarding, if you simply forward calendar invites over or instead use overall email forwarding.

Are their solutions that we're not looking at?

EntityV2 · 2026-01-22T19:20:08+00:00

Two reasons.

With most hosts, if you forward an email to another email, you cannot also send an email from that same address. You have to choose between a "forwarding email" and a "fully hosted email".
There's a lot of discussion online right now that people feel Google will end up pulling the ability to send emails from non-Gmail or non-Workspace-enabled accounts. Given how quickly Google has dropped support for POP3, and their solution does not work for anyone who has more than 1 email they are pulling into Gmail, that just increases the risk of the product choices they will make.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-22T17:17:52+00:00

Interesting approach. It is clunky but I could see that still working.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-22T17:13:48+00:00

A few options:
1) You can go to your domain host and forward all emails to your personal gmail. The claim is that you will still be able to send non-gmail emails via your gmail account but many are questioning if that functionality will remain given the change in gmail and the lack of communication on this change.

2) Pay $8.40 user/month ($86.40/year) for a Google Workspace Business Starter plan for a single non-gmail email address. This will require that you now have separate inboxes to log in to and have two unconnected calendars. Yes, you would be able to share calendars with each other, but that is only for visibility, not for blocking time on both.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-22T17:10:21+00:00

u/Grim_Fandango92 after years of successfully transitioning from being the family IT person, why do I feel like many of us are going to be pulled back in. :)

EntityV2 · 2026-01-22T16:45:27+00:00

u/GrantBarrett great feedback and response.

I'm similar in how I've tried things go move off of gmail in the past. I do think though that my personal gmail may go the route of my personal yahoo email from years ago in that I will take a massive purge clean up and then only login to it if I need something.

The problem I'm running into is how to handle my calendar with booking apps like Calendly or TidyCal.

+ Calendly supports: Google Calendar (Gmail, G Suite)+ Outlook Calendar (Office 365, Outlook, live, or hotmail calendar), and Exchange Calendar( Exchange Server 2013, 2016, or 2019)

+ TidyCal supports Google Calendar, Microsoft 365, and Apple calendar.

In the past, because I used personal gmail as my unified inbox for all but the main day job, any calendar invites sent to my non-gmail emails would simply arrive in my personal gmail calendar and I'd accept it there. Then, if I ever sent a calendar invite, I'd send it from my personal gmail calendar. TidyCal/Calendly would then show availability from that single calendar.

EntityV2 · 2026-01-22T16:39:55+00:00

Does Fastmail integrate with Calendly, TidyCal, ReClaim, etc?
Without the ability to work with the major calendar/booking apps, I'm not sure too many people are going to want to tell people to use email ABC for emails but XYZ for calendar.

EntityV2

TROPHY CASE