To be fair, they’re only talking about being able to fetch other (third party) mail accounts via Gmail. No one in their right mind should be doing this anyway. And only via POP3, IMAP is still supported.
Google are an advertisement company. Their business model is data mining. It should be an inconvenience for them to build a profile on you. Running your third party email via them is the opposite of that.
To be fair, they’re only talking about being able to fetch other (third party) mail accounts via Gmail. No one in their right mind should be doing this anyway. And only via POP3, IMAP is still supported.
Why not?
Google are an advertisement company. Their business model is data mining. It should be an inconvenience for them to build a profile on you. Running your third party email via them is the opposite of that.
Not sure what op meant, but according to TFA, “POP3 requires sending passwords in plaintext.”
Yes just like HTTP, FTP, SMTP, telnet and all the other pre-TLS protocols that we now run over TLS for exactly this reason.
Google, just like every other modern mail client, supports connecting to POP3 servers over SSL: