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)