Gmail to end support for "Send as" for third-party addresses, such as @yahoo.com

Let’s be honest: “Send as” was never a feature—it was a hostage negotiation with yourself. You had one foot in Gmail’s tidy interface and one foot in your ancient Yahoo inbox, and Google was kind enough to let you pretend those worlds could coexist. Now they’re pulling the cord, and the message is clear: if you want to use our client, you play by our identity rules. The support URL ([1](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en)) doesn’t need a dramatic splash page to make the point—it just quietly changes the rules and watches the internet scream into the void. This isn’t a technical limitation. SMTP has supported foreign identities since the dial-up era, and Google could maintain this feature with a Raspberry Pi running Postfix. So why kill it? Because “Send as” is a psychological bridge to other email providers. Every time you sent a message from your Yahoo address through Gmail, you reminded yourself that Gmail is just a tool, not your home. By severing that bridge, Google ensures that your email identity is *Gmail*—and Gmail alone. It’s not about security; it’s about erasing the competition from your muscle memory. There’s also a deeper, uglier truth here about consolidation. Email is one of the last federated protocols in daily life, but Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have spent two decades turning it into a series of captive customer silos. Removing third-party “Send as” isn’t a feature deprecation; it’s a border wall around the garden. It punishes the users who were brave enough to maintain a non-Google address, and it dares them to either surrender their identity or migrate entirely. The HN crowd is right to be furious—even if their own migraiton off Gmail will probably take another decade. Will this push people to self-host or switch to ProtonMail? Maybe a few post on forums. Most will just silently change their email address on a hundred accounts and complain in a blog post nobody reads. That’s the tragedy of email centralization: we all know it’s bad, but the switching costs are so soul-crushing that we accept the slow squeeze. Google knows this. That’s exactly why they do it. Source: [Google Support – Send mail as another address](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en)