AOL Mail Not Showing Up in Gmail? App Passwords, and Why You Can't Just Forward It

AOL Mail is the awkward one. For most providers, when Gmail's "Check mail from other accounts" feature goes away, the fallback is to have the old mailbox forward everything to Gmail. AOL doesn't offer automatic forwarding at all, at any price, so that route is closed before you start. If your AOL mail has stopped showing up in Gmail, or Gmail rejects your password when you try to add an AOL address, here is what's going on and what still works. All of it applies equally to @verizon.net addresses, which AOL has run since Verizon got out of the email business in 2017.

The POP settings

AOL's settings for any app that collects mail over POP3:¹

The last row is the usual sticking point. Your normal AOL password will not work from an outside app, no matter how carefully you type it, and AOL's help pages are blunt about the Gmail case in particular: "Gmail does not support the Oauth2 secure sign-in method for AOL accounts. AOL members should generate and use a third-party app password to sign-in securely."² So if a connection that used to work now fails with a password or authentication error, the password isn't wrong, it's the wrong kind of password.

Generating an app password

An app password is a randomly generated code that gives one outside app permission to sign in to your AOL account. To create one: sign in to your AOL Account Security page, click "Generate app password" (or "Generate and manage app passwords"), click Get Started, give the app a name, and click Generate password. AOL shows you the code once; paste it wherever the app asks for your password.³

Two catches, both from AOL's own instructions. First, AOL decides whether you're allowed to create an app password at all based on how familiar your browser looks: it wants "a browser that you've used to sign into AOL Mail for several days in a row", not a private window, and customer care cannot override the eligibility check.³ If the option won't appear, read your AOL mail in your normal browser for a few days and try again. Second, app passwords survive a password change: changing your main AOL password does not invalidate them, so to cut an app off you have to go back to Account Security and delete its password.³

The other half: Gmail's fetcher is going away

Even with a working app password, the Gmail side of this has a deadline. Google is removing "Check mail from other accounts", the feature doing the fetching: new setups stopped being supported after the first quarter of 2026, and existing users keep it until January 2027.⁴ In practice connections have been stopping in waves since early 2026, so treat January 2027 as the latest it could last rather than a promise. I've written up the full timeline separately, and if you're not sure whether your problem is the password or the fetcher, here's how to tell them apart. The short version: a password error means AOL turned the connection away, and an app password fixes it; no error and no new mail usually means Gmail has stopped checking.

verizon.net addresses: same fix, different hostnames

Verizon handed its mailboxes to AOL in 2017, and verizon.net addresses have lived on AOL's platform since. The AOL help centre keeps a dedicated settings page for them: incoming server pop.verizon.net, port 995 with SSL, username your full @verizon.net address, and the password is an AOL app password generated exactly as above.⁵ Everything else in this post applies unchanged.

One thing not to do: don't point anything at Yahoo's servers. AOL and Yahoo are owned by the same company, and some ISP addresses (att.net, cox.net, frontier.com) really are Yahoo mailboxes now, which I've covered separately. But AOL and verizon.net addresses live on AOL's own servers, with AOL's own app passwords.

Keeping AOL mail in Gmail

This is where AOL is worse off than any other provider I've covered. The usual advice when a fetcher dies is to forward instead. Yahoo at least sells forwarding as part of its paid Mail Plus plan; AOL doesn't sell it at any price. Its own help page: "At this time, automatic forwarding of email isn't offered", only forwarding individual emails by hand.⁶

The partial options: the Gmail mobile app can read an AOL mailbox over IMAP (imap.aol.com, port 993, same app password), but that mail only exists in the phone app and never appears in the Gmail web inbox. A desktop client like Thunderbird will pull the mailbox across whenever you run it, as a manual job. I've compared these in more detail.

That leaves scheduled POP fetching as the only way to keep AOL mail arriving in your actual Gmail inbox after the cutoff, and since Gmail itself is retiring the feature, something outside Gmail has to do it. That's what I built PopRelay for. You give it the settings from the table above and an app password, pick how often it should check, and it signs into the mailbox, collects anything new, and adds it to your Gmail using the Gmail API. It only ever asks Google for permission to add messages and labels, so it can't read or delete the mail already in your account, and the app password is encrypted before it's stored. And because it's an app password, you can revoke PopRelay's access at any moment from AOL's Account Security page by deleting the password. It's from the same people behind 33mail.com, running since 2011.

If that fits, you can set it up in a few minutes. Whichever way you go, sort it out before the fetcher's end date reaches your account: with no forwarding to fall back on, an AOL mailbox goes quiet in Gmail the day the fetching stops.

Sources

1. AOL, "Use POP or IMAP to sync AOL Mail on a third-party app or download your email", accessed 28 August 2026.
2. AOL, "Ways to securely access AOL Mail", accessed 28 August 2026.
3. AOL, "Create and manage 3rd-party app passwords", accessed 28 August 2026.
4. Google, "Learn about upcoming changes to Gmailify & POP in Gmail", accessed 28 August 2026.
5. AOL, "Configure POP and IMAP settings for Verizon.net AOL Mail accounts", accessed 28 August 2026.
6. AOL, "Compose and send emails in AOL Mail", accessed 28 August 2026.