Pop3Fetch
The official Gmail importer for external email accounts.
Google killed one of Gmail's oldest features: "Check mail from other accounts", the POP3 fetcher that let you pull email from Yahoo, Outlook, IONOS, GoDaddy, or any custom domain mailbox directly into Gmail. It had been there for over a decade. Millions of people relied on it. Now it's gone. I was one of those people.
Google's official replacement is SMTP forwarding rules, which routinely break conversation threading, trigger spam filters, and strip authentication headers. Legitimate business mail lands in spam. Client replies stop threading. It's was unreliable and didn't work for me.
So I built Pop3Fetch. It's a service that does what Gmail's fetcher used to do, but using the official Gmail API instead of SMTP forwarding. Messages arrive with original senders, headers, and threading intact. It supports both IMAP and POP3 (the old feature was POP3-only). Zero-storage pass-through: message bodies never touch our database. Google CASA Tier 2 verified. Free tier is genuinely free forever for one mailbox.
Live at https://pop3fetch.com. Solo founder, bootstrapped, running lean. I'm in the middle of the first Google Ads campaign and starting the directory-submission phase this week. This post is part of that. If you know anyone still running Yahoo/Outlook/custom-domain email and wishing they could just get it in Gmail, send them my way.
Happy to answer questions about the build (Python/Flask + Gmail API + PostgreSQL), the CASA Tier 2 assessment process (it was educational), or the "Gmail killed my workflow" origin story. Feedback welcome. This is my first launch and I'm learning as I go.
2 Comments
The fact you rebuilt the old Gmail fetcher with the Gmail API instead of forwarding is what caught my attention. That's such a specific pain that people only notice after their workflow breaks.
I can imagine someone asking ChatGPT why Gmail stopped pulling mail from another account and what still works now. If Pop3Fetch shows up there they're mostly looking for signs that it behaves like the feature they already trusted instead of feeling like a workaround.
I'm curious if you've noticed people describing it as "the old Gmail feature is back" rather than introducing it as a new product.
What I like is that you didn't build a better email tool—you restored a workflow people had already built their habits around.
Replacing something users unexpectedly lost is a very different positioning challenge than convincing them to adopt something completely new. That existing frustration can become a much stronger source of demand than introducing another email feature.