If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember the frisson of excitement around the launch of Gmail back in 2004. The idea of getting 1GB of storage space completely free of charge seemed wild — and all of your messages could be got at in a simple web browser tab.
As someone who had become accustomed to deleting emails to save space, and painstakingly moving over message archives manually every time I got a computer upgrade, this sounded fantastic. So did being able to get at my emails from any device I wanted, instantly (that seems less appealing these days, somehow).
Something else Gmail has done really well down the years is act as a hub for other email accounts, letting you import and send messages from other accounts inside the Gmail interface — with all the benefits of powerful search, filtering, and spam flagging tools. Now though, most of that functionality is going away.
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These are features that I’ve relied on for decades inside Gmail, and it’s going to make my email experience much more frustrating and fragmented.
What’s changing
Charting the gradual dismantling of these features inside Gmail is tricky, because the updates have largely come through emails to users and updates to support documentation — there aren’t really any official blog post announcements to point to (it’s not surprising Google wants to keep all of this quiet).
The most recent news is that the ability to send emails from other accounts through Gmail is going away, and will be switched off completely from January 2027. If you currently send your Outlook or Yahoo messages through Gmail, as I do, you’re going to have to find another solution from the start of next year.
A couple of other features are also being killed off in January 2027 as well, though these changes are ones we’ve known about for a while. You’ll no longer be able to import messages from other accounts via the old POP protocol — something I’ve relied on for years to get emails from all of my various accounts into the same place — and you won’t be able to use the Gmailify feature that essentially adds a few Gmail features (like spam protection) to your third-party accounts.
As someone who primarily uses Gmail on the web, and has several email accounts feeding into it, these are significant changes — and I’m not the only one upset about them. My current setup means I can have separate emails for work, app sign-ups, newsletters, and so on, and keep them all in Gmail for searching, filtering, and labeling, and it’s been a simple and reliable setup.
Now I’m going to have to go back to jumping between three or four different email apps to check everything. Different rules, different storage limits, different interfaces. It’s an annoying set of changes, which Google hasn’t really explained — presumably the idea is to keep users focused on Gmail, and to cut costs.
What to do next
You do have a few options for trying to cling on to Gmail as a message hub, though none of them are ideal. You can get your third-party email account to auto-forward messages to Gmail — it means you’ll have them in your Gmail archive for filtering and searching, though there’s no ‘send as’ functionality.
This might cost you too: It’s a paid-for extra for Yahoo Mail for example. That’s particularly galling for me, because Yahoo is one of the accounts I feed into Gmail. I rely on it for newsletters, tickets, store accounts, general admin, and the like, and now I’m not going to be able to get at any of that inside Gmail.
Another option is to set up a desktop email client on Windows or macOS, which feels very old school. Gmail still supports the IMAP standard, and so do most other modern email services: all of your email will be together in one place, but you’re only going to be able to access everything in one place from whatever desktop computer you set this up on.
Lastly, you can still add third-party accounts inside the Gmail app for Android or iOS. However, while this will let you view all your emails in one unified inbox, it won’t actually move anything over to Gmail — if you open up the web app, your other accounts and all the messages inside them won’t be there.
It’s all a bit of a sorry mess, and I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do going forward. What’s certain is that I’m not going to be able to carry on as I have been, and that Gmail is going to be a significantly less useful email hub for me in the future.
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