Just going to start this off by saying I have little to no sympathy for this guy’s situation.

While the situation does suck (and this is how I found out I’m losing this feature too), we can’t really be surprised that Google is finally getting rid of that shitty insecure protocol that SENDS YOUR CREDS OVER THE WIRE IN PLAIN TEXT. Eventually, security must move forward and ditch laughably insecure methodologies, and this does mean peoples’ workflows will get broken. But if we kept bad shit around because removing it negatively affects someone’s workflow, we’d never get anywhere.

And on topic of the article, this dude is sitting in a pool of shit of his own making. From the comments:

I’m not “sticking with them” in any way, it is that my staff are statistically average humans and therefore their preferred email addresses end in gmail dot com.

I don’t know this guy, but despite his readily apparent technical knowledge, the dude really seems like he isn’t a good admin. Being the company IT guy means making internal tools available, making them easy enough to use, and making people use it. He says that the staff is “statistically average”, which means they should be smart enough to use a company mail service and not facilitate his users to use a free 3rd party service to kludge shit together.

One of the gigs I was at used Kerio Connect as their self hosted email solution, and you know what? Even the below average users could figure it out without having to hook into a Gmail account.

This dude is trying to bubble gum and duct tape his orgs mail flow with below sub par methods and complains about it breaking, all because he couldn’t be bothered to push back and not hook their company email into Gmail. Don’t be surprised you’re in a circus when you’ve got clowns running your infrastructure.