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.

Google on The Solutions Are Known

Gmail Enshittification

The way things were