Breaking up is hard.
Gmail
I’ve recently learned that Gmail will remove the ability to check email from external accounts. (If you don’t use Gmail for this, you’re not affected, but see the notes about IMAP below.)
Per Learn about upcoming changes to Gmailify & POP in Gmail, starting in January 2026:
The option to “Check mail from other accounts” will no longer be available in Gmail on your computer.
Using this feature has been a popular way to access exmsft.com email accounts, and it’s an approach I’ve recommended and used myself for years.
Unfortunately, there’s really no good equivalent replacement. I know of only two approaches:
- Rely on https://exmsft.com:20000/ webmail. It ain’t pretty, but it works.
- Switch to a desktop email program like Outlook (classic), Thunderbird, emClient, and others, or switch to a mobile email app. like the mobile Gmail app, Outlook app, or any of several others. Each of these just access your exmsft.com account directly via IMAP or POP3.
The only online email services I’m aware of that will let you pull multiple email accounts into a single web interface are:
- mail.com (“Mail collector”)
- yahoo mail (“mailboxes” setting)
I believe neither are free, at least for this functionality.
IMAP
For years I’ve resisted IMAP simply because of disk space issues. IMAP leaves the master copy of your email on the exmsft.com server, and with 1,000+ email accounts that can add up.
However, desperate times and all that.
Given that most Gmail users are likely to switch to using a desktop or mobile email program, and that those are most easily set up using IMAP to allow account access from multiple devices, I’m going to formally support IMAP. I’ll be monitoring disk space usage, as well as individual account quotas (which are not going away), but I expect this’ll work fairly well.
FAQs
Why can’t we just forward email sent to my exmsft.com email address to my “real” email address (like gmail, outlook.com, or earthlink, or, or, or….)? You know, like we used to?
Because forwarding forwards everything, and that includes spam. The net result is that it then looks like exmsft.com is a source of spam. Its reputation is severely affected, and the email we send is more likely to be filtered as spam by the recipient email services, or even not delivered at all.
We used to do this, and it was a source of deliverability problems. We’ve taken several steps in recent years to rebuild our reputation.
Forwarding’s not an option.