Forwarding to Gmail via API

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 23:05:01 -0400

Google is deprecating, and will soon turn off, Gmail’s ability to fetch mail from other servers via POP. (Despite what you may have thought, Gmail has apparently never supported fetching over IMAP.) In an update, covered in the link above, Google has extended this deprecation to it’s send-as feature as well. So while this tool will still work, it won’t be possible to use your Gmail account as your primary interface to reading and responding to email at another domain. Forwarding by SMTP is not a good substitute: forwarded messages commonly fail SPF, DKIM, and DMARC checks, because the forwarding server is no longer an authorized sender for the original domain. (The ARC protocol exists to soften this, but it depends on the receiving side trusting you.) So I turned to Gmail’s API, and after a little more research than I wanted, I wrote a modest Python script.

Gmail Enshittification

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 01:35:21 -0400

Google long ago dropped “Don’t be evil” from its code of conduct, which I take to mean it no longer pretends to avoid it. We have watched Google enshittify its search engine, and now it is working on Gmail.

The way things were

It was (and for the moment still is) possible to set up a Gmail account to fetch mail periodically from a remote POP server and to “send as” a particular identity through a remote SMTP server. You could run a mail server for your.example.com, read what it received from your Gmail account, and reply from Gmail with the message originating from your domain’s server, so SPF, DKIM, and DMARC all worked correctly.

Email on The Solutions Are Known

Forwarding to Gmail via API

Gmail Enshittification

The way things were