Important news for Gmail power users: Google is dropping the feature whereby Gmail can collect mail from other email accounts over POP3.

The company hasn't exactly gone out of its way to call attention to this – like actually telling anybody anything. The news appears in a support note with a sign on the door saying "Learn about upcoming changes to Gmailify & POP in Gmail." The article itself is less euphemistic than its title:

When Google says there are "changes" to Gmailify, that really means that the Gmailify feature will be shut down.

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. We have asked Google to comment.

About 10,000 years ago (in binary), when the future Reg FOSS desk still had a mostly full head of hair, we explained how to get the most out of Gmail, in what, by our reckoning, was the fifth piece we ever penned for this mighty organ. The second feature of the service that we called out was using it to consolidate multiple email accounts into one: collecting email from other services over POP3, which you could manage using the Gmail webmail interface. Its then-massive one gigabyte of free storage was ideal for this, and we used it ourselves to bring our little-used Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL email into the Gmail inbox.

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Well, that's going away this month. You can still access those accounts via the Gmail mobile app, but the Gmail service itself will no longer retrieve them.

As well as simple consolidation, Gmailify offered a simple, familiar interface to email from other providers. One person using this was web pioneer Jamie Zawinski for staff email at his San Francisco nightclub DNA Lounge.

As he indicates in a blog post titled Today in "Google broke email," he's not happy. We don't blame him. He also notes that the company's suggestion to switch to using IMAP doesn't help him.

If you rely on Gmail to access some older email accounts in this way, it might be time to switch to using a local email client, the old-fashioned way. We suggest MZLA Thunderbird: it's free, runs the same on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and it can talk to all manner of email servers, including Microsoft Exchange Server, as well as trusty old Usenet, and chat via XMPP and Matrix. It's another reason why you might still want a local client in the era of webmail. ®