Google shutting down Gmailify after nearly 10 years

Google announced Gmailify in February 2016 and is now ending support for its system to upgrade third-party email accounts.

The aim of Gmailify was to provide Gmail features to people with Yahoo, AOL, or Outlook/Hotmail accounts. You could keep that email address while benefiting from Gmail spam protection, inbox organization (Social/Updates/Promotions), and search. On mobile, Gmailify also improved notifications.

Google is alerting users that they “won’t be able to use Gmailify” anymore, with warnings appearing in the app. This deprecation is “starting January 2026.”

Gmail is also ending support for “Check mail from other accounts” using POP (Post Office Protocol). 

You can still use Gmail for Android or iOS to check email from third-party accounts (Outlook, Yahoo, etc.) using IMAP, but without any extra features. Instructions are available here.

On the web, Google points users to automatic forwarding as an alternative:

To have new emails automatically appear in your main Gmail inbox (like with POP fetching), set up automatic forwarding with your other email provider. Refer to your provider’s documentation for instructions on how to do this.

Emails that have already been imported before the deprecation remain available.

As Gmail looks towards the future, Google likely wants to focus resources on building features for the majority of users where it has end-to-end control over the experience. The last notable Gmailify occurrence was an outage in 2023.

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