alt Hacker NewsGMails custom domain "send as" discontinues January 2027
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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 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.
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?
This will probably grenade the plans for many small businesses, right now.
> 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?
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?
Calling it now: they will reverse this decision by December after they realize how many gmail customers they are losing.
Related from Oct 2025:
Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-party accounts via POP
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.
Moving to Fastmail was almost entirely painless, although you may end up with 1-2 pieces of spam a day.
Further clarification here: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/17101213
It seems like they're removing POP/IMAP support from the web client?
Brutal. How are other platforms solving this without disproportionate resources?
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 another long email 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.
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.