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Comment by nousermane | Hacker News Reader

Yep. If you go and register a new gmail account today, there will likely be no option to enable IMAP access for that account, altogether.

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Why would you post a baseless conspiracy theory that is easily disproven by anyone in less than a minute?

FYI, the above is true for "child accounts", as my son painfully discovered the other day, after his school shoved Gmail down his throat. No IMAP in the settings, or anywhere else, for the next generation of users, not until they are 16+ in my country.

What makes you think this is for youth accounts, and is not simply the preference of the workspace administrator for your school?

That appears to be incorrect. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229

Why would you need to enable IMAP ? It works out of the box. Every non-android platform uses IMAP to access your account (k9 mail, outlook, thunderbird, the iOS/mac email client, etc).

You do have to go into the gmail settings to enable IMAP, FWIW.

As a former K9 Mail developer I will say that the Google extensions to IMAP for Labels and OAUTH (neither of which are standards) are a pain in the backside that no email platform would have dealt with were it not for the fact they are huge.

(I did a spike development for OAuth and a separate investigation into Labels when I had some free time).

So they are definitely not nice IMAP citizens.

Oh and then there's the issues with Labels that their own documentation apparently gets wrong...

To be fair here, labels are a great feature and the default limitation of a letter existing in only a single folder is a dumb remnant of ancient times.

If it's still not standardized then the pitchforks are aimed in the wrong direction.

Are you sure?

Because, IIRC, IMAP access must be explicitly enabled by going to Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> IMAP access: (o) Enable IMAP. And I think it is not enabled by default.

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