Yes, of course, I get what I paid for. But this is Google we are talking about. Even if I were a paying customer, I wouldn't put it past them to remove the feature. And indeed, the POP3 removal is probably not just going away for free accounts, is it ? As a Google customer, paying or not, one is just a cog in the machine, with zero leverage.

Google hasn't even specified a date for the termination of the POP3 fetch in gmail. Their "support note" just says "January 2026". And the only notification I got was reading this slashdot story by chance.

I guess this is why it hasn't even made it to https://killedbygoogle.com/

I did not even know Workspace supported IMAP fetch. Thanks for pointing that out. It would solve the problem. I'm not keen on paying for Google services.

Except gmail does not have the ability to pull from IMAP, AFAIK. Only through POP3. And that's going away.

Thanks for trying. There has to be a solution to this, and I'm determined to find it.

SMTP forwarding has the potential to route email. When forwarding spam, the server thinks you are trying to forward it outside, even if it's all only supposed to end up in one mailbox. The POP3 protocol cannot route e-mail, and thus does not have this problem. The lack of POP3 fetching in Gmail is a huge loss.
It should also be noted that Gmail cannot fetch using IMAP. The IMAP protocol is not designed for it, anyway. And Gmailify is only available for a few hosting providers, not your own domain.

Even Proton mail apparently does not allow POP3 fetching. They offer Proton bridge, but you have to run it yourself. They don't offer it as part of their service. That makes it also unsuitable for me.

It looks like Zoho mail still offers POP3 fetching.
https://www.zoho.com/mail/help/external-pop-accounts-setup.html

Supposedly fastmail as well.

The main issue is whether any of them have a decent webmail interface and/or Android mail client.
My hosting ISP currently offers only Roundcube which is extremely basic, and not a suitable gmail replacement.

Yes. But the catch all gets a fuckton of spam, by definition. And that is what gets you on the RBL. I don't think forwarding to Gmail is going to work, regardless or whether it's done by cloudflare or my ISP, as I previously did.

POP3 fetching got around this. It will be missed. As will gmail.

Correct. And I rely on gmail's built-in filters to get the messages into the desired gmail folder. My clients are gmail's webmail, and Android's gmail app. I don't use IMAP clients. If I did, it would still require messages to be pre-filtered in the mailbox.

IMAP has no server-side filters, unlike gmail. Please see the other thread I opened.

And that's probably the difference, I route absolutely everything, as I use way more than 80, and don't want to manually setup each one. I use a different one for every single entity I register with.

Are you using a catchall e-mail address ?

Thanks. I do want to have access to my e-mails at all times and places. This includes times when I'm traveling, or when my ISP and power go down at home. For the ~99.7% of the time when they are up, I would consider doing this on a low-power system such as Raspberry Pi. I don't see a build of Seamonkey for Raspberry Pi, though. Thunderbird can probably serve the same purpose. I suppose I would still have access to e-mails remotely, just not filtered, if the Thunderbird on Pi is offline.

I have concerns about the search capabilities of these clients. I worked on Mozilla code eons ago, including the S/MIME code. As I recall, the search was very slow, and also not very good. This is something gmail does right. I'm not sure if there are IMAP and/or webmail clients that can properly replicate this.

Wow. I did not know the Seamonkey project was still alive. I am going to have to check it out.

My question about filters stands, though. Where and how do you manage them, when you have clients on multiple devices ?

Asked Gemini - seems like it can work with catchall, but Gemini says this comes with a number of problems, none of which exist with Gmail POP3 fetching. Again, this is an AI reply, so I don't know how much of it is accurate, if any. Here are the issues it pointed out :

Cloudflare’s Layer: Cloudflare checks if the incoming email is authenticated (SPF or DKIM). Since July 2025, Cloudflare will drop unauthenticated mail rather than forward it to protect their own server reputation. They also inject a header called X-Cf-Spamh-Score (1 to 5) based on their heuristic analysis.

Cloudflare uses SRS (Sender Rewriting Scheme) to rewrite the "envelope sender" so the email appears to come from Cloudflare’s infrastructure. This helps pass SPF checks at Gmail. However, Gmail’s AI filters are extremely aggressive toward forwarded mail.

The Risk: If you receive a lot of spam via your catch-all and it lands in your Gmail inbox, marking it as "Spam" in Gmail can inadvertently "train" Google to think that all mail coming from Cloudflare’s forwarding IP is spam.

Shared Reputation: Cloudflare uses a pool of shared IP addresses to forward mail. If another Cloudflare user is receiving or forwarding massive amounts of "bad" mail, those IPs can end up on RBLs (like Spamhaus or Barracuda).

Gmail Blocking: In late 2025 and early 2026, users have reported increased "550 5.7.1" errors where Gmail blocks Cloudflare IPs entirely for "unusual rates of unsolicited mail."

Catch-all Vulnerability: Catch-all addresses are magnets for "dictionary attacks" (spammers guessing common names like admin@, info@, sales@). If your catch-all is flooded, Gmail may temporarily rate-limit your domain or the Cloudflare forwarding server.

Don't "Mark as Spam" in Gmail: If a forwarded email is spam, delete it instead of marking it as spam. Marking it as spam tells Google that the Cloudflare forwarding server is the source of the spam, which can break your forwarding for good.

I was not aware of this. Will it work with the catchall@mydomain address ?
And if so, how is it going to prevent the RBL issue ?

I use the catchall e-mail address with my domain. When I register with someone else, I use somewhat_random_address@mydomain . This all ends up in the catchall POP3 mailbox, which I fetch in gmail. I then set up some filters in gmail for entities I care about, to go in designated gmail folders. I can then access these folders from both the gmail webmail, or gmail app on Android. I'm looking to replicate the same workflow, without gmail.

How would SMTP help ? I'm not aware that you can do filtering that way, especially given the use of the catchall mailbox. I'm not going to manually create separate mailbox for each e-mail address I use. There are literally hundreds.

I also don't get what you mean about filtering "during delivery to my mailbox". AFAIK, it can't be done with a standards-compliant IMAP server, since you can't register server-side filters that way. You can do it client-side with a standards-compliant client. But this is not practical if you use multiple clients on different devices.

This appears to be an Android-only client. How do you access your e-mail from a desktop ? What about filters ?

Thanks. It looks like it will cost $48/year to essentially replicate what gmail does today with 15GB of storage, which I'm getting close to. $120/year for more storage. The free option is unfortunately not practical for me to even try given the sever limitations, particularly the one custom filter.