If you’ve been using Gmail to manage all your email accounts—like receiving mail from Yahoo, Outlook, or even your own domain—there’s some news you definitely need to pay attention to. Google recently announced that starting January 2027,Gradually discontinuing some of Gmail’s integration features for third-party email accounts, including “send from other addresses,” web-based POP retrieval, and Gmailify, which gives third-party mailboxes Gmail’s spam filtering and categorization features.
Image source:Android Police
Gmail will discontinue third-party mailbox sending in January 2027: POP mail retrieval and Gmailify will also end simultaneously.
Below is a summary table of this change:
| Item | content |
|---|---|
| Effective time | Starting from January 2027 |
| Affected functions | Third-party mailbox “Send mail as”, web-based POP access, Gmailify |
| Affected entities | Yahoo, Outlook, personal custom domains, and other non-Google-hosted mailboxes |
| It can still be used. | Add a third-party account in the Gmail App using IMAP to send and receive mail. |
| unaffected | Gmail-to-Gmail aliases, Google Workspace domains and aliases |
Some users may not be clear about what “ship to another address” means.
Gmail allows users to set another email address as the primary sending address for this Gmail account (of course, verification must be completed during setup), for example:
The logged-in Gmail account is: rocky@gmail.com
When sending emails with this Gmail, you can change the sender to use the following other email addresses:
contact@rockyhsu.com
rocky@yahoo.com
rocky@outlook.com
When the recipient receives the email, the sender will be the email address set by the user, not rocky@gmail.com.
This feature can be found in “Settings” > “See all settings” > “Accounts and Import”:
Starting from January 2027, this method of using a primary Gmail account to send emails on behalf of third-party addresses will no longer be supported, and the impact won’t be limited to the web version—the Gmail Android, iPhone, and iPad apps will also be affected.
Web-based POP lets users receive mail from Yahoo, Outlook, or other email services in Gmail. Gmail periodically connects via POP to pull new emails into your Gmail inbox, so users don’t need to log in to each mailbox manually.
Google will stop continuously fetching third-party emails via POP on the web version and will also remove the related account setup options. According to officials, new configurations will be restricted before January 2027, with existing users entering a transition period. By January 2027, this feature will be fully removed.
It is worth noting that the mobile app can still add Yahoo, Outlook, or other non-Google accounts. These accounts exist as independent identities, and users can read emails by switching between accounts, as well as send emails directly from that account.
Gmailify is a Google service that gives third-party email accounts access to some Gmail features. After users connect a Yahoo or Outlook account to Gmail, they can have Gmail apply spam protection, inbox categorization, more comprehensive mobile notifications, and advanced search.
After Gmailify is discontinued, third-party accounts won’t disappear immediately, and your emails won’t all be lost either; it’s just that Gmail will no longer treat external mailboxes as native Gmail accounts.
As for why Google suddenly canceled these three features, Google stated that in order to keep Gmail “safe, smart, and easy to use,” the company must discontinue features that require a “disproportionate amount of maintenance resources.”
Source: KOCPC Chinese