Justin MasonOh crap. Gmail is deprecating support for picking up mail from a remote server using POP3 polling in January 😠Given that I switched to this mode due to reliability problems with direct delivery via mail forwarding, this really sucks...
Nelson Minar@jmason Good god why would they turn that off.
Dan Sugalski@nelson @jmason Because the code is getting old, it's a massive pain in the ass to keep running, and more and more remote servers have... questionable POP services.
Basically it's a lot of neverending support work on the back end with (frankly because of C-suite level bad decisions on staffing) fewer resources available to continue producing a neverending stream of band-aids.
@wordshaper @jmason bitrot I guess, ugh. Between this kind of integration failure and the difficulty of getting email delivered at all through spam filters, SMTP has long since stopped being a proper peer to peer system of equals and has been dominated by a hegemony. I recently switched to Google Apps for Your Domain just to get my email delivered.
@nelson @jmason Yep, absolutely bitrot. We have this habit of building systems, making them really solid, then de-staffing the project. A few years later things break, people notice, and we have to decide whether it's worth re-staffing the project or just killing it.
Also spammers. One of the other ginormous reason we can't have Nice Things is spammers. (I think, though have no direct knowledge, that this is also one of the reasons for us sunsetting third-party POP polling)
jwz@wordshaper @nelson @jmason "Because some people might be using this feature insecurely, we are removing the feature entirely without providing any alternative, secure or otherwise" is, while not a *surprising* move by Google, still a *deeply infuriating* one. https://mastodon.social/@jwz/115804789003343393
TiTiNoNero 
@jwz @nelson @jmason oh, I 100% won’t defend the timing, the time horizon, or the messaging. We’re handling this in our normal way, which is to say badly.
Given all the hassles and technical nightmares I’m not surprised we decided to kill this off, but we could and should have managed this very differently.
@wordshaper Do you know if they are actually turning off POP3 fetch on Jan 1, or if they're just removing the UI checkbox or something? Do I really only have 48 hours to solve this problem?
@jwz I honestly don't know what they're doing, and everyone I know to ask isn't around because of the holidays. Prod freeze ends midnight Jan 1 (so when Jan 1 rolls over to Jan 2) so that's the earliest it's likely to happen, but extremely cold comfort there.
I went looking for whoever wrote that *extremely* time-vague announcement for details (*when* in january? It's a whole month) but also no luck, given everyone's out for the holidays.
So... yeah. Check the origin POP accounts to be safe.
Simon@wordshaper @jwz The really annoying thing about this is that I (and others) would pay actual $$/year for the POP3 fetch service to continue just as it is.