It's really that insecure to have POP3 enabled in my gmail account?

Question

Several people are claiming that you should turn off pop3 in gmail because it allowed bruteforce attacks on the password.

Doesn't Google prevent this kind of attacks? What is the truth on this claims?

IMAP is so slow with Outlook that I really want to keep using POP. I have a strong password in place.

Answer 1

If the password is strong, then there is no worry whatsoever.

POP3 does not open new ways for cracking passwords IF you use it sensibly, i.e. within SSL/TLS. Otherwise, depending on the underlying authentication mechanism, a hash of your password may transit on an unprotected connection (bad !), or maybe even the password itself (worse !).

A feature of POP is that the emails are removed from the gmail servers once you retrieved them, so:

• you can no longer read them through the gmail Web interface;
• you no longer benefit from the disk redundancy and automatic backups of the Google infrastructure;
• you can read your emails locally even when deprived of an Internet connection.

Therefore, this is not only a problem of performance and brute-force attacks.