Bluehost Email Not Showing Up in Gmail? Their Own Guide Won't Tell You Why

If your Bluehost mailbox has stopped showing new mail in Gmail, or Gmail refuses the account when you follow Bluehost's setup guide, your settings are probably not the problem. Google is removing "Check mail from other accounts", the Gmail feature that guide is built on, and the guide doesn't mention it.

The guide that hasn't caught up

Bluehost's help article "How to Set up a New Email Account in Gmail", last updated 31 October 2025, still walks you through connecting your mailbox with POP under "Check mail from other accounts", with no hint that anything is changing.¹ Google's support page, meanwhile, says new setups stopped being supported after the first quarter of 2026 and existing users keep the feature until January 2027.²

So if you followed Bluehost's instructions recently and Gmail failed at the "Add Account" step, that's why: the door has closed for new setups, and no combination of settings will reopen it. If an existing fetch has gone quiet instead, the removal has been reaching existing accounts in waves since early 2026, so treat January 2027 as a ceiling rather than a promise. The full timeline has the detail, and here's how to confirm the fetcher is what stopped. To be fair to Bluehost, most hosts' docs are no better; they're either silent about the removal or state its dates wrongly.

Your Bluehost POP3 settings

The settings from that same Bluehost guide are still correct, and still worth having, because whatever replaces the fetcher will need them:¹

Your server hostname is in your Bluehost control panel: look for the stats section in the sidebar (click "expand stats" if it's collapsed) and the hostname is in the list. Bluehost's guide also describes a non-SSL variant using mail.yourdomain.com; skip that one, there's no good reason to fetch mail unencrypted in 2026.

Keeping Bluehost mail in Gmail

Bluehost hosting comes with cPanel, so forwarding is the quick option: create a forwarder from your mailbox to your Gmail address in the control panel. It's free, but it only covers mail that arrives after you set it up, and forwarded messages sometimes land in Gmail's spam folder because they arrive from your hosting server rather than the original sender. Forwarding also forwards the spam your hosting mailbox would have caught.

The Gmail mobile app can read the mailbox over IMAP, which works fine on your phone but never puts the mail in the Gmail web inbox. A desktop client like Thunderbird will pull an old mailbox across in one go, as a manual job. I've compared all the options in more detail.

The closest replacement for what "Check mail from other accounts" did is to have something sign into your mailbox on a schedule and import the mail into Gmail for you, which is what I built PopRelay to do. You give it exactly the settings in the table above (your server hostname, port 995, SSL), pick how often it should check, and it pulls anything new and adds it to your Gmail using the Gmail API. There's no forwarding relay in the middle, so the spam-filter headaches don't apply, it only ever asks Google for permission to add messages and labels, and your mailbox password is encrypted before it's stored. It's from the same people behind 33mail.com, which has been running since 2011.

If that's the shape of fix you need, you can set it up in a few minutes. Whichever way you go, do it before the fetcher's end date arrives, because Bluehost's guide isn't going to warn you.

Sources

1. Bluehost, "How to Set up a New Email Account in Gmail", accessed 17 August 2026.
2. Google, "Learn about upcoming changes to Gmailify & POP in Gmail", accessed 17 August 2026.