Importing mail from a Google Workspace account into a regular Gmail account

Almost all my clients who have websites want to also a professional email account so that their email address is shows up as a constant reminder to their contacts about what their company domain is. Because of the robustness of their spam filters, I almost always recommend going with Google Workspace, previously known as G Suite.

Sometimes my clients are already users of Gmail and want to only have to check 1 email source, which out of habits is their personal gmail account. You’d do this through the “check mail from other accounts (POP3) area in the personal account’s Settings>Accounts and Import.

First, you’ll want to go into the admin account for the Google Workspace account and enable the option for “Show users the option to import mail and contacts from Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL, or other webmail or POP3 accounts from the Gmail settings page”. This is found at Apps >Google Workspace >Settings for Gmail >Setup

There’s a couple steps here I wanted to point out that are wonky. If you’ve done this already for other accounts, you know you set it up via POP3, entering in your full email address as the user, your regular password, pop.gmail.com as the server, designate it to only use SSL, and a port of 995. And if you only do that, you’ll get an error about user/password not accepted. That’s not the problem however. It’s because of the settings of the Google Workspace account.

If you go to the inbox of the target Google Workspace account, you’ll likely encounter an email like this:

This is because by default, Google Workspace accounts don’t allow access from “Less secure apps.” Yeah, that’s right, Google considers its own product gmail insecure. :D Here’s a whole article about how to enable access: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6010255?p=lsa_blocked&hl=en&visit_id=637442615129023168-2288329070&rd=1

To enable access, you’ll thus go to the security settings of the target email address and turn this on. It’ll look like this once confirmed:

Now go back to the POP3 settings for the personal gmail account, re-enter your credentials, and it should work.