El Capitan killed my Gmail pop setup

I put in the pop.gmail.com address to search for in Keychain Access. It saw my password that was changed yesterday. I looked at access control. It said I couldn't edit that info and had "Apple" shaded out as the sole entry for the access group for that item.

So, that didn't lead anywhere but it was worth looking into. Thanks.

A ha! Not only do you have to do that, but wait until you get an e-mail from Google telling you that you are now less secure, did you really want to do that? When I first made that change today, I tried again and it didn't work. Once I got the e-mail, about a minute later today, it worked! I got an e-mail saying that yesterday but it arrived or was sent much later and I'd already turned it back off so trying to get POP to work then was futile.

So, our Google accounts are less secure as POP is less secure than IMAP but also one's Google account is now more susceptible to being hacked. OK. So far it's been ok for me.

Thank you, David.

PS The "Allow less secure apps" option is under the Connected Apps and Sites category, under Sign In and Security, on the left. You'd left that out.

And I don't know about anyone else but now I am getting old mail downloading again! Mail from 2011! Groups of about 400 at a time. I erase them and a few minutes later another batch from about the same time as the others comes in. (Sent mail..., not mail to me...)

I made inactive my Gmail IMAP account. According to the accounts tab in Mail, I only have 3 POP accounts active. According to the Internet Accounts pane of System Preferences, I have 5 Mail accounts active, of which 3 are the known active POP accounts in Mail and the other two are inactive POP accounts. Those other two are not what I am getting mail from now as they were only set up this year. I could uncheck them from Mail in the Internet Accounts pane but that shouldn't affect all this new old mail I'm getting...

I realize this is a new issue so it deserves a new thread and I'll deal with it but if anyone has any ideas, I'd love to know about them. Thanks.

(Up to 2676 messages so far and counting...)

And it's now not downloading my most recent messages... Weird.

Thanks. It seems to have stopped on it's own now. It downloaded all of my sent mail since about June of 2011. I deleted them all from my inbox as well as deleting them from all accounts once they were in trash. Fingers crossed that it's all done.

And it's interesting that an OS update caused this to happen. The setting is on Google's end. How does an update on our OS cause this setting to change? I don't remember but I probably had to do that setting earlier.

And Jeremy, I wanted to mark your 6:06pm comment as being helpful, not the one I did. Apple won't let me mark it though... nor edit my first comment. I don't get either of those situations....

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Update

My current mail is being downloaded without my "getting" it. (Acting like IMAP) I know I changed some settings. Now to figure out which ones so that will stop.

Fixed: Unchecked the "include when automatically checking for new messages." You'd think it wouldn't be checking by itself when that is checked (since I have the General preference set to check for new messages manually, but it was... (Still sounds like IMAP behavior...) Now I get mail only when I hit the Get Mail button. As it should be. All is well.