IONOS (1&1) Email Not Showing Up in Gmail? The Setup Guide Is Gone, and Here's Why

If your IONOS mailbox has stopped turning up in Gmail, and you went looking for the IONOS help article that told you how to set it up only to land on a 404, those two things have the same cause. Google is removing "Check mail from other accounts", the Gmail setting that logged into your IONOS mailbox over POP3 and pulled the mail across. IONOS has taken down the guide that depended on it, and hasn't said why.

The guide that vanished

Until this summer IONOS had a help article called "Accessing IONOS Email Accounts Through Gmail". It walked you through Gmail's Settings, then Accounts and Import, then "Add a mail account" next to "Check mail from other accounts", with pop.ionos.com as the server, "Always use a secure connection (SSL)" ticked, and smtp.ionos.com for sending.¹ When I checked it on 3 July 2026 it was live, with no mention that the feature it described was being removed. As of 9 September 2026 the same address returns a 404 on ionos.com, ionos.co.uk and ionos.ca, and Google's index is still serving a snippet of the old page, which is presumably how you found your way here. I couldn't find a replacement article, a notice, or anything else on the IONOS help centre about Gmail's change.

So in a way IONOS has done better than some hosts, whose guides still cheerfully teach a feature that no longer accepts new accounts. But deleting the page without a word leaves people who followed it a year ago with no idea what happened, and people following the cached copy now wondering why Gmail refuses the account.

Here is what happened. Google's support page says "Check mail from other accounts" stopped accepting new setups after the first quarter of 2026, and that existing users keep it until January 2027.² Mail already fetched into Gmail stays put; only the fetching of new mail stops. In practice the removal has been reaching existing accounts in waves since early 2026, so treat January 2027 as the latest it could happen, not the date it will. The full timeline has the detail, and if you want to confirm the fetcher is what stopped rather than something at IONOS's end, here's how to check.

Your IONOS POP3 settings

Whatever you replace the fetcher with will need the same details the old guide used. IONOS publishes them on its server-details page, which applies to Mail Basic and Mail Business mailboxes:³

A few IONOS-specific things to know about that table, because between them they explain most failed setups.

The password is the mailbox's own password, not the one you use to sign in to your IONOS customer account. IONOS's page puts it as "Each email address has its own password".³ If you've forgotten it, you reset it per address in the IONOS control panel under Email.

If you've turned on two-step verification in IONOS Webmail, the mailbox password stops working for anything other than webmail. IONOS's own article says so directly: "The regular password will no longer work in these programs once two-factor authentication has been activated."⁴ The fix is an app password: sign in to Webmail, open My Account from your initials at the top right, go to Login & Security, and click "Create app password". Use that in place of the mailbox password. This one catches people out because the server-details page doesn't mention it.

The hostname depends on which IONOS country site you signed up through. The UK help centre lists pop.ionos.co.uk, and the German one pop.ionos.de; ionos.com gives pop.ionos.com.⁵ I checked on 9 September 2026 and all three resolve. If your setup dates from the 1&1 days, pop.1and1.com and pop.1and1.co.uk still point at the same servers as their IONOS equivalents, but IONOS no longer documents them, so move to the ionos name while you're in there. One to avoid: IONOS's own glossary entry for "incoming mail server" gives the POP3 address as pop3.ionos.com, and that name doesn't exist.⁶ It's pop.ionos.com, with no 3.

Two smaller ones. IONOS is switching off TLS 1.0 and 1.1 and unencrypted connections on its mail servers, so anything you connect must speak TLS 1.2 or later; Gmail did, and any current client or service does.⁷ And if IONOS sold you Microsoft 365 or Exchange rather than Mail Basic or Mail Business, none of the above applies; those mailboxes live on Microsoft's servers and the settings are Microsoft's.

Keeping IONOS mail in Gmail

The quickest option is forwarding at IONOS. In your IONOS account go to Email, click the address, then the Forwarding Address row, then "Add Forwarding", and enter your Gmail address; you can list several destinations separated by commas, and how many you're allowed depends on your package.⁸ If you don't need the IONOS mailbox at all any more, you can also create a forwarding-only address with no mailbox behind it, which IONOS won't let you do on a domain assigned to an Exchange contract.⁹ Forwarding is free and takes a couple of minutes. The trade-offs are the usual ones: it only covers mail that arrives after you switch it on, forwarded messages reach Gmail from IONOS's servers rather than the original sender and so sometimes land in spam, and whatever spam IONOS would have caught gets forwarded along with everything else.

One thing you keep either way is sending. Gmail's "Send mail as", which lets you reply from your IONOS address through smtp.ionos.com, isn't part of what Google is removing, and IONOS's Digital Guide still describes setting it up.¹⁰ The only rule to know is that since January 2024 IONOS's SMTP servers refuse to send unless the sender address is on the same domain as the mailbox you're logged in as, with a "Sender address is not allowed" error otherwise.¹¹ For sending as your own IONOS address that's already true, so it only bites if you were routing some other domain through it.

The Gmail app on your phone can read the mailbox over IMAP (imap.ionos.com, port 993), which works but never puts the mail in the Gmail web inbox. A desktop client like Thunderbird will pull the whole mailbox across as a one-off job. I've compared all of these in more detail.

If what you actually want is the old behaviour back, mail from your IONOS mailbox appearing in your Gmail inbox on a schedule without a forwarder in the middle, that's what I built PopRelay for. You give it the settings in the table above (and the app password rather than the mailbox password if you've turned on two-step verification), choose how often to check, and it signs in over TLS, pulls anything new, and adds it to your Gmail through the Gmail API. Because nothing is forwarded, the spam-folder problem doesn't arise. It only ever asks Google for permission to add messages and labels, so it can't read or delete what's already in your inbox, and your IONOS password is encrypted before it's stored. It's from the same people behind 33mail.com, which has been running since 2011.

You can set it up in a few minutes if that's the shape of fix you want. Whichever way you go, do it before the fetcher's end date rather than after, because IONOS has already taken down the only page that would have told you.

Sources

1. IONOS, "Accessing IONOS Email Accounts Through Gmail", formerly at ionos.com/help/email/using-webmail/accessing-ionos-email-accounts-through-gmail. Live and verified on 3 July 2026; returned a 404 on ionos.com, ionos.co.uk and ionos.ca on 9 September 2026.
2. Google, "Learn about upcoming changes to Gmailify & POP in Gmail", accessed 9 September 2026.
3. IONOS, "IONOS Mail: Server details for IMAP, POP3, and SMTP", accessed 9 September 2026.
4. IONOS, "Email: Activate and configure two-step verification (2FA)", accessed 9 September 2026.
5. IONOS UK, "IONOS Mail: Server details for IMAP, POP3, and SMTP", accessed 9 September 2026.
6. IONOS, "Incoming Mail Server", accessed 9 September 2026. DNS lookups of pop.ionos.com, pop.ionos.co.uk, pop.ionos.de, pop.1and1.com, pop.1and1.co.uk and pop3.ionos.com made the same day.
7. IONOS, "Updating Your Email Settings to TLS 1.2 for IMAP, POP3, and SMTP", accessed 9 September 2026.
8. IONOS, "Setting Up Forwarding for Email Addresses", accessed 9 September 2026.
9. IONOS, "Creating a Forwarding Email Address", accessed 9 September 2026.
10. IONOS Digital Guide, "How to use Gmail with a custom domain", dated 22 June 2026, accessed 9 September 2026.
11. IONOS, "Important Change for Sending Emails with Different Sender Addresses", accessed 9 September 2026.