I moved all my custom domains to Fastmail five or six years ago and couldn't be happier.
My Gmail only exists to catch legacy messages and Google service notifications. I look forward to the day I can completely migrate out of all their products, but some organizations I work with who use Google for various things have made that a slow slog.
Me too. Moving mail to my own domain is one of the best things I've ever done.
To anyone considering it: just do it. Doesn't matter what provider you pick, the important thing is to start receiving mail via your own domain as soon as humanly possible. Once mail is going to your own domain, switching is as easy as updating DNS MX records.
I'll third this. A few years ago I set up both a website (cloudflare) and started using Firefox Relay (proxy email addresses, with a mozmail domain).
I did it to make gmail less sticky and control spam[0]. Then last year I switched to fastmail and it was so easy because I just had to point somewhere else.
Even if you keep Gmail I highly suggest people do this as it's helped with spam and gives me more control. Because I have catchall emails I can even make up an email on the spot, with pen and paper only.
[0] every website gets a unique email and a unique password. Think something like hn@foo.mozmail.com or hn@godelski.com (I don't own those domains, don't try to reach me there). Bitwarden even supports FF Relay!
…but make sure you keep on top of your domain renewals, make sure they can renew automatically, and make sure there is a backup email address that isn't on your domain that can be used to get into your domain registrar account.
(You probably don't need to ask how I know. I am very lucky that there was a grace period after my domain expired, where I spent a few days not realising why I wasn't receiving any email any more.)
Apple is a good choice if someone doesn’t know which company to start with. A lot of Apple customers have iCloud+ but don’t realize email hosting on your own domain is included in the plan. If you’re already paying for it you might as well use it.
I was totally unaware of this. I haven't quite been ready to pull the trigger on something like FastMail or ProtonMail, but I have a few domains kicking around and figure it's worth a shot to try it out. Thanks!
I only use gmail for providing to services. I have a fastmail account that I use for stuff I want. I treat gmail as a PO Box and my fastmail as my private mailbox. It is rare that I actually need to read my gmail other than when services only offer 2FA via email. It makes a huge difference
The moment they turn off automatic forwarding (and I have no doubt they will), my gmail address dies. I'm trying to migrate accounts over whenever possible, but it's quite tedious.
I don't think I could ever go back to running an e-mail server again, given the continually evolving battle with convincing the major e-mail providers that your IP is legit (I'm looking at you AT&T!).
I'm moving everything from Fastmail now but yeah those 10 years were good. Recent updates did the strange things to the UI but working with the identities became better.
Current headline on HN is incorrect - it's not custom domains, it's third-party email addresses, such as @yahoo.com or @outlook.com. Domains and other gmail addresses you own can still be used....
This support article gives more details here, even though it's still clear as mud that they are dropping support for custom domains _unless_ that domain is hosted via Google Workspaces:
Even more confusing, you _will_ be able to still send to a custom domain via the Gmail mobile app? This appears to be an anti-spam move I guess? Though personally, this is a big breakage for me...
The headline is not wrong, its intentionally worded that way to mellow down the message. Its for the people who use their own custom domains to send emails via google without paying for the workspace by verifying the domain ownership (its a extra cost that google bears now for free). The @yahoo.com or @outlook.com are just to give a face to what other custom domains look like.
The whole point is if you have custom domains then pay for the google workspace if you still want to use it. Couldnt find it right away, from what I recollect it used to be $6 or $8 per email address
Yeah, basically this is terminating the trick some people used where they host a domain elsewhere but want to use an free personal GMail address as the "mail client" for it. Google sells their own domain email product, they'd prefer you use that vs. paying someone else.
And let's be honest here: GMail remains the preferred email client for almost everyone, for a lot of boring but very good reasons (mostly down to reliability and spam filtering).
Basically: people who don't like Google and don't use Google won't be affected and won't care. People who pay for Workspace hosting won't be affected, as those domains still work via Send-As. The people complaining here are in category 1, there are a handful of people (I'm one) in category 2 trying to help explain, and unsurprisingly there are very, very few people here in the actually impacted category of "mail client for external domain" users.
This was the last straw for me. I'm migrating to Apple Mail and cancelling workspace ASAP.
ETA: I said nothing about where I'm planning to host my SMTP server. Apple Mail is a provider-agnostic client-side application, like Thunderbird.
ETA2: Those who read TFA carefully will know that, even though this doesn't affect Workspace aliases, it does affect this feature (Send-As SMTP) for workspace accounts.
So you got burned by a centralized proprietary mail service suddenly making user-hostile changes, and your first instinct is to move to another centralized proprietary mail service by a company with a long history of user hostile changes?
Truly modern consumer sensibilities are fascinating to me.
Personally I do not use any Apple or Google products. There are so many better choices!
Anyway, might I suggest services that run standard open source mail daemons that never restrict you, like Migadu.
Not everyone is interested in how the sausage gets made. Most people buy a drill to make holes, not to disassemble to learn how to build their own drill. And yes, I have a Migadu account. But I front many of those email addresses via Gmail.
Ignoring how the sausage is made is how people repeat the same mistakes, over and over, in domains as diverse as government, tech, employment, and automobiles.
I get that not everyone has the bandwidth or capability to dig into things on their own, but we live in a hostile environment, and we have to either acknowledge that and plan for it, or touch the hot stove over and over again.
This is partly why I like to read HN comments. People here go above and beyond in ways I would never bother. Reading other's experiences saves me from going through it myself.
There's no need to test mail services first hand. Just read up and do some rudimentary research.
What phone service? I have not had a cellular plan of any kind in over 6 years and travel the world, have an active social life, and run businesses without issue. Wifi is just fine and everywhere. I do not need to be communicating with people while driving. Prime thinking time.
People make all sorts of excuses, but at the end of the day cell networks and the attention, privacy, and sovereignty losses that come with them, are optional. There are -always- alternative paths if you ask, and I do not mind being "that guy" to ensure those paths exist for others that need them more than me and lack the privilege to demand them.
Also my attention span has not been this high in decades. I take on crazy hard shit now I would have never touched in my doom scrolling fugue state years.
Apple Mail is a client, not a host. It's an old school e-mail program on your computer, which you connect to whatever server your e-mail is. Whether that's your own domain, Gmail, iCloud, Hotmail or Yahoo or anything else.
Before you do that:
Consider a more open and transparent email platform such as Proton, Fastmail, Runbox, Tuta, basically just reconsider moving from one evil, unaccountable platform to another. As you may find the evil, unaccountable platform may do evil and unaccountable things.
I'll say this for Apple Mail (the email service, not the email client): it's dirt cheap and works really well. You can bring up to 5 self-owned domains to it on the $1/mo iCloud+ plan. That price includes 6 users, and up to 3 aliases ("hackernews@example.com") per person. Even when Proton isn't helping the FBI identify protesters[0], their family plan is $24/mo if you pay annually.
I ran my own server for about 25 years. I put in my time and got tired of doing it. I've migrated my own email to Apple's servers mainly because it's the only reasonably priced family host I could find.
Proton is activity enshitifying and has introduced dark patterns to their onboarding process. Suggest you deprecate them from your recommend list until they come clean and step away from this dirty business we’ve been seeing.
As someone who uses their personal Gmail account to forward emails from custom domains to (via MXRoute and other email providers), losing the ability to "Send as" from the given adresses from Gmail means I will have to find an entirely new "home base" for email (and paradoxically start forwarding my peronal Gmail emails these instead?), right?
Similarly to losing Inbox many years ago, this really sucks.
But yes enshittification has hit gmail and workspace in a huge way and seems to be accelerating. I'm also looking for a new home after being a heavy user since 2005
> You can continue to use "Send as" for any Google-hosted identities, including other Gmail addresses or aliases associated with your Google Workspace account. The discontinuation will not impact these addresses, which only applies to third-party, non-Google email accounts.
I have "Send as" accounts that have this configuration:
Mail is sent through: smtp.gmail.com
However the actual email addresses are often custom domains with say both google and cloudflare sfp records with cloudflare handling the incoming emails and forwarding them to gmail with gmail handling outgoing via google's own smtp server directly.
They aren't remotely clear if this use case is considered a third-party, non-Google email account or a Google-hosted identity since the outgoing smtp server being used is still a google server.
It's crazy that they don't actually explain what "any Google-hosted identities" means.
Hmm I'm confused. I have my own domain that is totally not hosted on google. However, I use Google's SMTP to send mail as that domain (specifically the one email address that is enabled on my custom domain).
For that I'm authenticating to the SMTP with my google account, and I somehow proved to google i own the email a couple billion years ago when we all had pet dinosaurs.
Are they discontinuing that or something else?
And Q2: if this is what they're discontinuing, are there any other email solutions that would support something like this? I.e. incoming email to my server I control 100% but offering smtp relay?
I'm similarly confused/upset, but it really does sound like they're discontinuing sending via SMTP:
> The “Send as” feature will no longer be available. This feature allows you to send email from a third-party address, such as @hotmail.com, @yahoo.com, and others, using your primary Gmail account.
I have a domain and a contact email address for that domain that I have exclusively used through GMail, I guess this means I need to figure out a different path forward for that, then?
Since you planned ahead, it should be as simple as getting a new provider and updating the MX record. If you are looking for suggestions, I'm on Fastmail's $50/year plan and quite happy with it.
It's not an easy task! I had mine account since gmail beta, so much stuff is going through it.
Two years ago I moved to Fastmail(they're great), and pretty much setting up an alias per site/purpose. While I'm happy to see that gmail receives less & less, I still have about 150 entries in 1password that say @gmail.com... maybe one day...
I switched to migadu which was not too painful for a single account (basically the advice was to put both accounts in thunderbird and then move everything over, thunderbird does the work). For email very happy with the provider, notably also as it allows infinite domains.
But I miss a proper calendar which migadu is strangely mostly lacking (basic caldav only). Is fastmail better in this respect? And can you do wildcard emails and send/receive as whichever name you want with fastmail? E.g. I have it set so every email which comes to xyz@domain.com arrives in my single inbox (so not catchall but all with a certain letter combo) and use this to have custom emails for every site.
I know! I got my own domain and it probably took me over a year to be confident that no important email was getting to me though my gmail handle I had been using since 2004
It's a very easy task. Move your stuff and accounts to a different provider in the pace you prefer, and set gmail to forward to the new provider. Keep your gmail account around as a haunted house for the occasional messages that can only come through that way.
Compare it to somebody who eats fast food every day. They can start eating healthy instead, but it doesn't mean that they are never allowed to eat fast food again, or even once per week if so be.
Whelp. I’ve been using Gmail since it was invite only. Sending as my personal domain was grandfathered in. This is going to be my push to leave for another service. I wonder if they understand or intend that?
Regarding the outrage in this thread: Am I missing something? DMARC/SPF/DKIM enforcement makes third-party relaying fragile and likely to cause deliverability failures. Discontinuing it seems like progress towards reducing abuse. Where am I wrong on this?
1. want their email on their own domain (for professionalism and portability)
2. Want to use Gmail (it is actually a pretty nice service to use)
3. Don't want to use Google Workspace (either because of how cobbled google features are on workspace, because they don't want to migrate google accounts, or because of it's cost)
Google just killed the ability to meet those three requirements. There's lots of people facing either a) showing the world a gmail.com address, b) switching to a different mail solution or c) paying for workspace and accepting it's flaws. It's totally fair for people to be mad about that.
If the "new" infrastructure doesn't support a common and reasonable use case, then perhaps it needs more work.
This is really frustrating along with them removing POP for external accounts. I have an old email account that I had configured to have my Gmail account pull in emails from, and I can reply from that email using this feature, and now their only suggestion is to set up forwarding on the old email account to Gmail but that is way less reliable, and even then I wouldn't be able to reply. It's confusing because like, I'd figure they'd want more data, not less.
This is really obnoxious. I've used this feature for a couple of decades so that my email is not beholden to Google in case I decide to stop using them someday. I guess that day is coming sooner than I had thought.
> we occasionally have the difficult choice to discontinue features that require disproportionate maintenance resources.
Am I really expected to believe that the billions of dollars the company makes in pure profit can't sustain this feature? Am I really expected to believe the touted productively gains granted by Google's AI can't sustain this feature?
The flip side of this is that GMail's Send-As feature has seen virtually no maintenance whatsoever. It's buggy-as and I expect most people (like myself) have been putting up with it out of inertia because switching email clients is a pain.
Keeping the good, bad, and evil aside for a moment, is it possible that the very reason this company makes billions consistently is because they ruthlessly (or stupidly as per "us") drop things they don't want to do, don't need to do, irrespective of whether we think those would have been profitable, or even very nice of them?
> third-party email addresses, such as @yahoo.com or @outlook.com.
Unfortunate choice of examples as it doesn’t make it clear whether it applies just to other free web email providers or also to e.g. my own custom domains.
I am not technical. What does this mean for one who migrated to Proton but has their old Gmail account forward to a new Proton address? I am guessing that's unaffected and it's just outbound from Gmail as a third-party email domain?
This only impacts Gmail web interface, according to [1]. You can use a desktop email client and continue to receive and send email from your custom domain.
"Web access changes: As previously announced, you can no longer add or sync your third-party email account in Gmail on the web. Alternative access: To access your third-party email account, you can use a dedicated mail app, a desktop mail client, or the Gmail mobile app."
That is basically just saying "the gmail app can be a smtp/imap client for a 3rd party mail provider". It's not really using gmail as when the gmail app is operating in this mode there's a tone of gmail features you don't get.
I think mainly your mail won't go into the sent folder and be searchable. You can work around that by CCing your domain.
What other features will you not get? The mail composer in Gmail is pretty sucky anyway. For example when you are replying on a long thread it is very hard to see the message you are replying to.
That should not be impacted, in fact thats the whole point. tldr; Google is trying to monetize everything, if you have a use case for using personal custom domains then move to google workspace
Honestly i'd love to migrate off of google, but its been a pain. My family is a heavy user of google calendar so I either have to migrate them off or I have to keep my google calendar account.
I tried fastmail but honestly its not as easy to use as gmail.
Has anyone pulled off a migration like this? how did you do it?
Doubtful. It will reduce some user count, but most people won’t care. And they probably spend more supporting the feature than they gain from the Gmail users that actually use the feature.
It's weird that they are actively discouraging us from using external mail inside gmail. Like, you would think they want us sucking down all our scannable data into their system and staying inside the wall.
Yes, that was my first thought. It's wild to me that GMail would support sending as yahoo.com, outlook.com, etc. in the first place. Google makes lots of questionable decisions and shuts down lots of products uncessarily, but this is not a strange or unwarranted move.
It's not wild at all. It's just behaving like any other MUA but with an extra step. You have to give GMail your SMTP submission credentials for the sending server of the target domain, then prove ownership of the specific address you want to send as. SPF/DKIM/DMARC works fine, as GMail is just submitting your message on your behalf the way any MUA would.
It is useful for anyone who has a personal domain from which they'd like to send/receive without needing to migrate off Google entirely. My registrar gives a few email addresses with SMTP support. Then I use GMail's send-as to remain in gmail but still use my name@mydomain.com mailbox.
We are a small web development company. I'd say that about 20% of our clients used this feature because gmail WAS their email client. They did't want to use a device-based mail client.
I am happy we will no longer have to support this. Losing the POP access a couple years ago got about half of them to move, and this will kill it off.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
I've been searching for email provider that's not purelymail, fastmail really seems to be the best reputable option.
(Looking to switch off purelymail because the new design blows and I'm really unsure about the new owner. Can't put my finger on it, but I just dont trust the guy.)
Unless you have insider knowledge, this seems incredibly unlikely. Do you really think most GMail users even understand what this functionality is, much less use it? Google is many things, but they're not suicidal. I'm sure they did the math of the ongoing cost of supporting this functionality, versus whatever revenue people who care about it (and are still paying nothing) might bring in and realized its a cost savings for them. Losing 0.3% of all users is likely in their interests.
This doesn’t affect me, but it certainly influences me. I’ve been holding off from leaving Gmail for years. They try to force you into their Gmail app on iOS, it’s the only way to get push emails from them. OK fine. So I switch from Apple Mail to Gmail. I write a relatively long email full of research to send to my great uncle who is a professor at a nearby university who I greatly respect. I type it up on the desktop, go to the app, add another sentence wishing him well and send it. Come to find out since my phone is in dark mode it changed the text from black to white. That’s Google‘s idea of dark mode. So I have to send it again removing that text formatting and apologizing. Dark mode is something that Apple and Microsoft and everyone else can get right. It’s a presentation layer problem, not text formatting. And they don’t let you change the app to light mode, it only tracks the phone. Their web dark mode is also terrible. Apple and Microsoft have no such issues. Even smaller players like Proton get these things right.
Maybe focus on delivering quality and value instead of trying to extract more out of your existing customers.
Google is pathetic and has been for a long time for anyone paying attention to all their quirks, terrible UIs, and canceled products. I have a Gmail beta account from the earliest days. That 1GB was nice 23 years ago but it’s time for me to finally do the work and get off of Gmail. I have email accounts at most providers; Microsoft, Proton, Apple etc, and no one else has these sorts of issues.
Because ownership can change. I can still use Gmail to send email from my old university address that I lost access to 15+ years ago. This should not be possible.
Isn't this just using SMTP through whatever mail server you have connected to Gmail?
Either way, this is likely going to stop me from using Gmail as my mail aggregator, I've used this feature for nearly a decade to send and receive from 6 different addresses, Gmail recognizes the to address and automatically sets the from address to the correct account.
Is Thunderbird still decent nowadays? What's a decent mobile + desktop replacement?
> Right now you can forge email from any email address you can verify ownership
I find this sentence confusing. Do you mean “forge” in a technical sense of “this email came from a server unassociated with the domain”? I don’t really get it. I’ve know this feature existed in Gmail for 15+ years and have made regular use of it. Plus I’ve used it to help older relatives keep an old address alive.
What an odd choice of inflammatory language for a feature that uses standard email headers. It doesn't forge anything since it clearly says it was sent from the GMail account on behalf of the other email address in the headers.
I moved all my custom domains to Fastmail five or six years ago and couldn't be happier.
My Gmail only exists to catch legacy messages and Google service notifications. I look forward to the day I can completely migrate out of all their products, but some organizations I work with who use Google for various things have made that a slow slog.
Me too. Moving mail to my own domain is one of the best things I've ever done.
To anyone considering it: just do it. Doesn't matter what provider you pick, the important thing is to start receiving mail via your own domain as soon as humanly possible. Once mail is going to your own domain, switching is as easy as updating DNS MX records.
I'll third this. A few years ago I set up both a website (cloudflare) and started using Firefox Relay (proxy email addresses, with a mozmail domain).
I did it to make gmail less sticky and control spam[0]. Then last year I switched to fastmail and it was so easy because I just had to point somewhere else.
Even if you keep Gmail I highly suggest people do this as it's helped with spam and gives me more control. Because I have catchall emails I can even make up an email on the spot, with pen and paper only.
[0] every website gets a unique email and a unique password. Think something like hn@foo.mozmail.com or hn@godelski.com (I don't own those domains, don't try to reach me there). Bitwarden even supports FF Relay!
…but make sure you keep on top of your domain renewals, make sure they can renew automatically, and make sure there is a backup email address that isn't on your domain that can be used to get into your domain registrar account.
(You probably don't need to ask how I know. I am very lucky that there was a grace period after my domain expired, where I spent a few days not realising why I wasn't receiving any email any more.)
Apple is a good choice if someone doesn’t know which company to start with. A lot of Apple customers have iCloud+ but don’t realize email hosting on your own domain is included in the plan. If you’re already paying for it you might as well use it.
I was totally unaware of this. I haven't quite been ready to pull the trigger on something like FastMail or ProtonMail, but I have a few domains kicking around and figure it's worth a shot to try it out. Thanks!
Apple's been a rock-solid email host for me. imapsync (https://imapsync.lamiral.info/) made the migration very easy. https://blah.cloud/miscellaneous/migrating-google-workspaces...
I only use gmail for providing to services. I have a fastmail account that I use for stuff I want. I treat gmail as a PO Box and my fastmail as my private mailbox. It is rare that I actually need to read my gmail other than when services only offer 2FA via email. It makes a huge difference
How are you dealing with Fastmail's very low storage limits? Or are you paying for more (in which case, this isn't really an equivalent comparison).
I pay just for individual with its 60GB, it really hasn't been an issue.
The moment they turn off automatic forwarding (and I have no doubt they will), my gmail address dies. I'm trying to migrate accounts over whenever possible, but it's quite tedious.
From a different angle, I moved from hosting my own e-mail server to having it all served in Fastmail, and I couldn't be happier as well!
How's delivery? I ran a mail server when I was a kid, and I'm not sure I have the patience to do it again
I don't think I could ever go back to running an e-mail server again, given the continually evolving battle with convincing the major e-mail providers that your IP is legit (I'm looking at you AT&T!).
Same, for years. Going to move soon to a EU provider though. If anyone has recommendation, happy to listen!
I can think of mailbox.org and posteo.de . I use mailbox.org with custom domai for two years now and it works as intended from mail side.
I'm moving everything from Fastmail now but yeah those 10 years were good. Recent updates did the strange things to the UI but working with the identities became better.
Current headline on HN is incorrect - it's not custom domains, it's third-party email addresses, such as @yahoo.com or @outlook.com. Domains and other gmail addresses you own can still be used....
This support article gives more details here, even though it's still clear as mud that they are dropping support for custom domains _unless_ that domain is hosted via Google Workspaces:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/17101213
Even more confusing, you _will_ be able to still send to a custom domain via the Gmail mobile app? This appears to be an anti-spam move I guess? Though personally, this is a big breakage for me...
Where does it say that domains you own can be used? I'm looking around and nothing clearly states it afaict.
> This change does not affect Google Workspace aliases or other Gmail addresses you own.
to me, implies that you need to set up Google Workspace for that domain before it'll work.
The headline is not wrong, its intentionally worded that way to mellow down the message. Its for the people who use their own custom domains to send emails via google without paying for the workspace by verifying the domain ownership (its a extra cost that google bears now for free). The @yahoo.com or @outlook.com are just to give a face to what other custom domains look like.
The whole point is if you have custom domains then pay for the google workspace if you still want to use it. Couldnt find it right away, from what I recollect it used to be $6 or $8 per email address
I don't think folks read the source link. Most responses are a plug for Fastmail.
Yeah, basically this is terminating the trick some people used where they host a domain elsewhere but want to use an free personal GMail address as the "mail client" for it. Google sells their own domain email product, they'd prefer you use that vs. paying someone else.
And let's be honest here: GMail remains the preferred email client for almost everyone, for a lot of boring but very good reasons (mostly down to reliability and spam filtering).
Basically: people who don't like Google and don't use Google won't be affected and won't care. People who pay for Workspace hosting won't be affected, as those domains still work via Send-As. The people complaining here are in category 1, there are a handful of people (I'm one) in category 2 trying to help explain, and unsurprisingly there are very, very few people here in the actually impacted category of "mail client for external domain" users.
This was the last straw for me. I'm migrating to Apple Mail and cancelling workspace ASAP.
ETA: I said nothing about where I'm planning to host my SMTP server. Apple Mail is a provider-agnostic client-side application, like Thunderbird.
ETA2: Those who read TFA carefully will know that, even though this doesn't affect Workspace aliases, it does affect this feature (Send-As SMTP) for workspace accounts.
So you got burned by a centralized proprietary mail service suddenly making user-hostile changes, and your first instinct is to move to another centralized proprietary mail service by a company with a long history of user hostile changes?
Truly modern consumer sensibilities are fascinating to me.
Personally I do not use any Apple or Google products. There are so many better choices!
Anyway, might I suggest services that run standard open source mail daemons that never restrict you, like Migadu.
Not everyone is interested in how the sausage gets made. Most people buy a drill to make holes, not to disassemble to learn how to build their own drill. And yes, I have a Migadu account. But I front many of those email addresses via Gmail.
Ignoring how the sausage is made is how people repeat the same mistakes, over and over, in domains as diverse as government, tech, employment, and automobiles.
I get that not everyone has the bandwidth or capability to dig into things on their own, but we live in a hostile environment, and we have to either acknowledge that and plan for it, or touch the hot stove over and over again.
This is partly why I like to read HN comments. People here go above and beyond in ways I would never bother. Reading other's experiences saves me from going through it myself.
There's no need to test mail services first hand. Just read up and do some rudimentary research.
You hosting your own phone service too? Everybody has a limit.
What phone service? I have not had a cellular plan of any kind in over 6 years and travel the world, have an active social life, and run businesses without issue. Wifi is just fine and everywhere. I do not need to be communicating with people while driving. Prime thinking time.
People make all sorts of excuses, but at the end of the day cell networks and the attention, privacy, and sovereignty losses that come with them, are optional. There are -always- alternative paths if you ask, and I do not mind being "that guy" to ensure those paths exist for others that need them more than me and lack the privilege to demand them.
Also my attention span has not been this high in decades. I take on crazy hard shit now I would have never touched in my doom scrolling fugue state years.
Who said anything about self-hosting
Apple Mail is a client, not a host. It's an old school e-mail program on your computer, which you connect to whatever server your e-mail is. Whether that's your own domain, Gmail, iCloud, Hotmail or Yahoo or anything else.
Poster didn't get burned.
Before you do that: Consider a more open and transparent email platform such as Proton, Fastmail, Runbox, Tuta, basically just reconsider moving from one evil, unaccountable platform to another. As you may find the evil, unaccountable platform may do evil and unaccountable things.
I'll say this for Apple Mail (the email service, not the email client): it's dirt cheap and works really well. You can bring up to 5 self-owned domains to it on the $1/mo iCloud+ plan. That price includes 6 users, and up to 3 aliases ("hackernews@example.com") per person. Even when Proton isn't helping the FBI identify protesters[0], their family plan is $24/mo if you pay annually.
I ran my own server for about 25 years. I put in my time and got tired of doing it. I've migrated my own email to Apple's servers mainly because it's the only reasonably priced family host I could find.
[0] https://www.404media.co/proton-mail-helped-fbi-unmask-anonym...
Proton is activity enshitifying and has introduced dark patterns to their onboarding process. Suggest you deprecate them from your recommend list until they come clean and step away from this dirty business we’ve been seeing.
Trust eroding on proton sadly.
Examples?
Tuta is effectively useless without any support for IMAP/SMTP. Bought subscription for a year just to get hit with this artificial limitation.
“Artificial limitation.” So you bought a sub for an E2EE service and are surprised when it doesn’t work with a protocol directly at odds with E2EE…
With workspace you can add your own custom domains anyway... This seems unrelated.
> This change does not affect Google Workspace aliases or other Gmail addresses you own.
As someone who uses their personal Gmail account to forward emails from custom domains to (via MXRoute and other email providers), losing the ability to "Send as" from the given adresses from Gmail means I will have to find an entirely new "home base" for email (and paradoxically start forwarding my peronal Gmail emails these instead?), right?
Similarly to losing Inbox many years ago, this really sucks.
Ha I totally forgot about inbox until right now.
But yes enshittification has hit gmail and workspace in a huge way and seems to be accelerating. I'm also looking for a new home after being a heavy user since 2005
> You can continue to use "Send as" for any Google-hosted identities, including other Gmail addresses or aliases associated with your Google Workspace account. The discontinuation will not impact these addresses, which only applies to third-party, non-Google email accounts.
I have "Send as" accounts that have this configuration:
Mail is sent through: smtp.gmail.com
However the actual email addresses are often custom domains with say both google and cloudflare sfp records with cloudflare handling the incoming emails and forwarding them to gmail with gmail handling outgoing via google's own smtp server directly.
They aren't remotely clear if this use case is considered a third-party, non-Google email account or a Google-hosted identity since the outgoing smtp server being used is still a google server.
It's crazy that they don't actually explain what "any Google-hosted identities" means.
Hmm I'm confused. I have my own domain that is totally not hosted on google. However, I use Google's SMTP to send mail as that domain (specifically the one email address that is enabled on my custom domain).
For that I'm authenticating to the SMTP with my google account, and I somehow proved to google i own the email a couple billion years ago when we all had pet dinosaurs.
Are they discontinuing that or something else?
And Q2: if this is what they're discontinuing, are there any other email solutions that would support something like this? I.e. incoming email to my server I control 100% but offering smtp relay?
I'm similarly confused/upset, but it really does sound like they're discontinuing sending via SMTP:
> The “Send as” feature will no longer be available. This feature allows you to send email from a third-party address, such as @hotmail.com, @yahoo.com, and others, using your primary Gmail account.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/17101213?sjid=2314716...
I have a domain and a contact email address for that domain that I have exclusively used through GMail, I guess this means I need to figure out a different path forward for that, then?
Since you planned ahead, it should be as simple as getting a new provider and updating the MX record. If you are looking for suggestions, I'm on Fastmail's $50/year plan and quite happy with it.
https://www.fastmail.com/how-to/email-for-your-domain/
Good thing they are reminding you to get out of Gmail for real
It's not an easy task! I had mine account since gmail beta, so much stuff is going through it.
Two years ago I moved to Fastmail(they're great), and pretty much setting up an alias per site/purpose. While I'm happy to see that gmail receives less & less, I still have about 150 entries in 1password that say @gmail.com... maybe one day...
I switched to migadu which was not too painful for a single account (basically the advice was to put both accounts in thunderbird and then move everything over, thunderbird does the work). For email very happy with the provider, notably also as it allows infinite domains.
But I miss a proper calendar which migadu is strangely mostly lacking (basic caldav only). Is fastmail better in this respect? And can you do wildcard emails and send/receive as whichever name you want with fastmail? E.g. I have it set so every email which comes to xyz@domain.com arrives in my single inbox (so not catchall but all with a certain letter combo) and use this to have custom emails for every site.
Just do email forwarding and progressively update your accounts?
Yeah, I'd say it's this easy, but it just takes a very long time to get confidence on it being ready enough.
I know! I got my own domain and it probably took me over a year to be confident that no important email was getting to me though my gmail handle I had been using since 2004
It's a very easy task. Move your stuff and accounts to a different provider in the pace you prefer, and set gmail to forward to the new provider. Keep your gmail account around as a haunted house for the occasional messages that can only come through that way.
Compare it to somebody who eats fast food every day. They can start eating healthy instead, but it doesn't mean that they are never allowed to eat fast food again, or even once per week if so be.
Whelp. I’ve been using Gmail since it was invite only. Sending as my personal domain was grandfathered in. This is going to be my push to leave for another service. I wonder if they understand or intend that?
Regarding the outrage in this thread: Am I missing something? DMARC/SPF/DKIM enforcement makes third-party relaying fragile and likely to cause deliverability failures. Discontinuing it seems like progress towards reducing abuse. Where am I wrong on this?
I bet you there's a lot of people on HN that
1. want their email on their own domain (for professionalism and portability)
2. Want to use Gmail (it is actually a pretty nice service to use)
3. Don't want to use Google Workspace (either because of how cobbled google features are on workspace, because they don't want to migrate google accounts, or because of it's cost)
Google just killed the ability to meet those three requirements. There's lots of people facing either a) showing the world a gmail.com address, b) switching to a different mail solution or c) paying for workspace and accepting it's flaws. It's totally fair for people to be mad about that.
If the "new" infrastructure doesn't support a common and reasonable use case, then perhaps it needs more work.
IF headline contains (Google OR Musk OR Israel) GOTO outrage.
That's all.
This is really frustrating along with them removing POP for external accounts. I have an old email account that I had configured to have my Gmail account pull in emails from, and I can reply from that email using this feature, and now their only suggestion is to set up forwarding on the old email account to Gmail but that is way less reliable, and even then I wouldn't be able to reply. It's confusing because like, I'd figure they'd want more data, not less.
This is really obnoxious. I've used this feature for a couple of decades so that my email is not beholden to Google in case I decide to stop using them someday. I guess that day is coming sooner than I had thought.
This will probably grenade the plans for many small businesses, right now.
Certainly seems intended to drive Workspace subscriptions, but I wonder how many of those users will sign up for Office instead.
This doesn't apply to Google Workspace addresses that most small businesses will be using.
A lot of small businesses actually have a free address for legacy purposes. Send as, even for paid users, won’t support third-party providers.
This is incorrect. The plan doesn't apply to workspace aliases, but it does apply to workspace users using Send-As via SMTP.
What alternative solutions would people who use a lot of aliases at their own domain name suggest?
> we occasionally have the difficult choice to discontinue features that require disproportionate maintenance resources.
Am I really expected to believe that the billions of dollars the company makes in pure profit can't sustain this feature? Am I really expected to believe the touted productively gains granted by Google's AI can't sustain this feature?
The flip side of this is that GMail's Send-As feature has seen virtually no maintenance whatsoever. It's buggy-as and I expect most people (like myself) have been putting up with it out of inertia because switching email clients is a pain.
Anyone still using Google for anything other than ads and YouTube post Reader has only themselves to blame.
Maybe GCP. It's like saying the tiger had no prior history of violence.
It is not possible to use Google for anything but ads, since otherwise you can only be a product for them hence be used by Google.
Do not be used by Google.
Sodas are no longer free. *
Seem Google don't feel the need to market to hackers and early adopters anoymore..
* https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
Keeping the good, bad, and evil aside for a moment, is it possible that the very reason this company makes billions consistently is because they ruthlessly (or stupidly as per "us") drop things they don't want to do, don't need to do, irrespective of whether we think those would have been profitable, or even very nice of them?
So, when do they drop support for IMAP and SMTP altogether?
> third-party email addresses, such as @yahoo.com or @outlook.com.
Unfortunate choice of examples as it doesn’t make it clear whether it applies just to other free web email providers or also to e.g. my own custom domains.
Custom domains are still 3rd party.
I am not technical. What does this mean for one who migrated to Proton but has their old Gmail account forward to a new Proton address? I am guessing that's unaffected and it's just outbound from Gmail as a third-party email domain?
Yes, that's unaffected
This only impacts Gmail web interface, according to [1]. You can use a desktop email client and continue to receive and send email from your custom domain.
"Web access changes: As previously announced, you can no longer add or sync your third-party email account in Gmail on the web. Alternative access: To access your third-party email account, you can use a dedicated mail app, a desktop mail client, or the Gmail mobile app."
[1] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/17101213?sjid=9352980...
That is basically just saying "the gmail app can be a smtp/imap client for a 3rd party mail provider". It's not really using gmail as when the gmail app is operating in this mode there's a tone of gmail features you don't get.
I think mainly your mail won't go into the sent folder and be searchable. You can work around that by CCing your domain.
What other features will you not get? The mail composer in Gmail is pretty sucky anyway. For example when you are replying on a long thread it is very hard to see the message you are replying to.
The multiple nudges just turned into a shove.
I’ll now be actively enacting plans to move on and be sure to support family and friends, even non tech savvy ones, to do the same.
When you think they can’t fall further, they do.
Can anybody tell if this announcement affects a personal gmail account's ability to send as a workspace-hosted custom domain email?
That should not be impacted, in fact thats the whole point. tldr; Google is trying to monetize everything, if you have a use case for using personal custom domains then move to google workspace
Honestly i'd love to migrate off of google, but its been a pain. My family is a heavy user of google calendar so I either have to migrate them off or I have to keep my google calendar account.
I tried fastmail but honestly its not as easy to use as gmail.
Has anyone pulled off a migration like this? how did you do it?
My family uses google calendar but has never used gmail for day to day stuff.
Maybe a problem if you send calendar invites, I guess?
Obviously, can't close your account and still use their calendar, but whatcha gonna do.
You can have a google account using a not-gmail email.
Related from Oct 2025:
Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45439670
This is suicide for Gmail.
that's pretty hyperbolic. i would guess some very large percent (80%? 90%?) of gmail users have never once even thought about the feature.
it'll lose them some tech folk, but it's hardly "suicide".
Their percentage of users who care about this feature is almost certainly fractions of a percentage.
Doubtful. It will reduce some user count, but most people won’t care. And they probably spend more supporting the feature than they gain from the Gmail users that actually use the feature.
Further clarification here: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/17101213
It seems like they're removing POP/IMAP support from the web client?
It's weird that they are actively discouraging us from using external mail inside gmail. Like, you would think they want us sucking down all our scannable data into their system and staying inside the wall.
I'd imagine the adoption of DMARC, SPF, DKIM, etc. have just functionally killed the feature.
Yes, that was my first thought. It's wild to me that GMail would support sending as yahoo.com, outlook.com, etc. in the first place. Google makes lots of questionable decisions and shuts down lots of products uncessarily, but this is not a strange or unwarranted move.
It's not wild at all. It's just behaving like any other MUA but with an extra step. You have to give GMail your SMTP submission credentials for the sending server of the target domain, then prove ownership of the specific address you want to send as. SPF/DKIM/DMARC works fine, as GMail is just submitting your message on your behalf the way any MUA would.
Oh, if they're sending via your provider's SMTP then that makes sense. Still, I can't imagine a lot of people use this feature.
I use it.
It is useful for anyone who has a personal domain from which they'd like to send/receive without needing to migrate off Google entirely. My registrar gives a few email addresses with SMTP support. Then I use GMail's send-as to remain in gmail but still use my name@mydomain.com mailbox.
We are a small web development company. I'd say that about 20% of our clients used this feature because gmail WAS their email client. They did't want to use a device-based mail client.
I am happy we will no longer have to support this. Losing the POP access a couple years ago got about half of them to move, and this will kill it off.
Looks like it's still allowed in app. Probably a way to cut down spam and push people to the app.
Brutal. How are other platforms solving this without disproportionate resources?
Moving to Fastmail was almost entirely painless, although you may end up with 1-2 pieces of spam a day.
Fastmail seems great
This is against site rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Do you see a referral link or code in their comment? No? Then obviously they aren't making money off it.
I've been searching for email provider that's not purelymail, fastmail really seems to be the best reputable option.
(Looking to switch off purelymail because the new design blows and I'm really unsure about the new owner. Can't put my finger on it, but I just dont trust the guy.)
Calling it now: they will reverse this decision by December after they realize how many gmail customers they are losing.
Unless you have insider knowledge, this seems incredibly unlikely. Do you really think most GMail users even understand what this functionality is, much less use it? Google is many things, but they're not suicidal. I'm sure they did the math of the ongoing cost of supporting this functionality, versus whatever revenue people who care about it (and are still paying nothing) might bring in and realized its a cost savings for them. Losing 0.3% of all users is likely in their interests.
This doesn’t affect me, but it certainly influences me. I’ve been holding off from leaving Gmail for years. They try to force you into their Gmail app on iOS, it’s the only way to get push emails from them. OK fine. So I switch from Apple Mail to Gmail. I write a relatively long email full of research to send to my great uncle who is a professor at a nearby university who I greatly respect. I type it up on the desktop, go to the app, add another sentence wishing him well and send it. Come to find out since my phone is in dark mode it changed the text from black to white. That’s Google‘s idea of dark mode. So I have to send it again removing that text formatting and apologizing. Dark mode is something that Apple and Microsoft and everyone else can get right. It’s a presentation layer problem, not text formatting. And they don’t let you change the app to light mode, it only tracks the phone. Their web dark mode is also terrible. Apple and Microsoft have no such issues. Even smaller players like Proton get these things right. Maybe focus on delivering quality and value instead of trying to extract more out of your existing customers.
Google is pathetic and has been for a long time for anyone paying attention to all their quirks, terrible UIs, and canceled products. I have a Gmail beta account from the earliest days. That 1GB was nice 23 years ago but it’s time for me to finally do the work and get off of Gmail. I have email accounts at most providers; Microsoft, Proton, Apple etc, and no one else has these sorts of issues.
> This change does not affect Google Workspace aliases or other Gmail addresses you own.
I bet most people complaining about this change don’t even know this feature exists.
Right now you can forge email from any email address you can verify ownership.
Most of those emails will end up in a spam folder.
This doesn’t affect email addresses that Google controls DMARC records for.
>Right now you can forge email from any email address you can verify ownership.
how can you "forge" something if you verify ownership? when you own something, it's not "forging" to use it.
i think the point you're trying to get at is that the mail might fail dmarc requirements?
Because ownership can change. I can still use Gmail to send email from my old university address that I lost access to 15+ years ago. This should not be possible.
if the mail from that address is being delivered to mailboxes, that's your universities fault.
if it's not (i.e. spf & dkim is failing), that's just how email works and is not unique to gmail.
Cool try explaining any of these terms to the average sysadmin.
Email security is hopelessly broken, and the best you can do is try to limit exposure. Removing Gmail as an attack vector is one of those decisions.
>Cool try explaining any of these terms to the average sysadmin.
if someone is managing a mail system and doesn't know what spf is, they should be immediately fired.
i am also not convinced this will remove or limit exposure to anything. the attack vector lives in the protocol, not the service used.
this might end up as a tiny, tiny blip in some small percentage of spammer/phisher operations.
Yep, SMTP itself doesn't have any security.
Anyone else remember the open SMTP relays of the 90's?
One could use aol's smtp servers to send mail as clinton@whitehouse.gov
Isn't this just using SMTP through whatever mail server you have connected to Gmail?
Either way, this is likely going to stop me from using Gmail as my mail aggregator, I've used this feature for nearly a decade to send and receive from 6 different addresses, Gmail recognizes the to address and automatically sets the from address to the correct account.
Is Thunderbird still decent nowadays? What's a decent mobile + desktop replacement?
No, Gmail directly sends the email from their own SMTP servers (you have to set up SPF to allow them etc)
> Right now you can forge email from any email address you can verify ownership
I find this sentence confusing. Do you mean “forge” in a technical sense of “this email came from a server unassociated with the domain”? I don’t really get it. I’ve know this feature existed in Gmail for 15+ years and have made regular use of it. Plus I’ve used it to help older relatives keep an old address alive.
What an odd choice of inflammatory language for a feature that uses standard email headers. It doesn't forge anything since it clearly says it was sent from the GMail account on behalf of the other email address in the headers.