They're almost certainly doing this to put the screws on Gmail users. Data export compat isn't great with Gmail to begin with, but at least with a vanity domain you could have the option to use that instead and if Google went bad, you could still use it directly without having to reconfigure a lot of stuff. (Since this feature is meant to integrate with shared hosting providers that offer an email service "for free".)
Axing this feature (title is slightly misleading - you can't do the same thing over IMAP with the Gmail service; external mail fetch is dead) is an attempt to get people to stop using vanity domains so they're locked in/tied to the Gmail ecosystem.
Pretty awful and I wonder how wise of a business decision this is, given Google is one of the companies who's getting side-eyed in Europe due to being an American big tech company with ties to the US government. Wouldn't be surprised if a good number of people will just abandon the big G's mail service as a result. Regular people (so not tech people) are more aware about this sort of thing than they were before, and Gmail specifically has been getting the stinkeye because of how obvious it is. This will only end up confirming those fears.
Axing this feature (title is slightly misleading - you can't do the same thing over IMAP with the Gmail service; external mail fetch is dead) is an attempt to get people to stop using vanity domains so they're locked in/tied to the Gmail ecosystem.
Pretty awful and I wonder how wise of a business decision this is, given Google is one of the companies who's getting side-eyed in Europe due to being an American big tech company with ties to the US government. Wouldn't be surprised if a good number of people will just abandon the big G's mail service as a result. Regular people (so not tech people) are more aware about this sort of thing than they were before, and Gmail specifically has been getting the stinkeye because of how obvious it is. This will only end up confirming those fears.