Posts

Gmail removed check mail from other accounts

In 2026 Gmail removed the feature for fetching emails from third-party accounts with POP3.

Some of my clients liked using Gmail with a custom domain and were using this feature. Google were trying to convert users to their Workspace product which lets you use a custom domain, however it seems to be very fussy what domains will work with it. If it thinks your email is spam it seems there is nothing you can do about it. Domain verification doesn’t help. Support seem unable to help.

After extensive searching for a solution I found Gomailify which works with Googles official APIs. It took about 30 minutes to set up a client and required some changes to DNS and Gmail settings. It costs just $12 per year for 2 linked Gmail accounts.

Benchmarking the CPU of a cloud server

With a virtual or cloud server you get very little information on how fast the processor actually is. A fast processor is an important factor in a fast WordPress site where hundreds of thousands of lines of PHP code need to be executed.

You can gain a rough idea by timing the CPU performing an intensive task like calculating prime numbers or in this instance calculating Pi to 5000 decimal places.

Run the following:

time echo "scale=5000; 4*a(1)" | bc -l

Results:
Ionos VPS L, 4 vCores,  8 GB: 16.660s, 16.775s, 16.804s
DigitalOcean Basic (Cloudways) 1 vCPU, 2 GB: 21.117s, 19.791s, 20.939s
DigitalOcean Basic, 1 vCPU, 2 GB: 23.525s, 26.642s, 29.319s
DigitalOcean Premium, 2 vCPU, 4 GB: 21.384s, 22.779s, 21.587s

2024 Kinsta PHP Benchmarks

Kinsta have evaluated of the most popular PHP content management systems (including WordPress) and frameworks using multiple PHP versions including recently released PHP 8.3.

It is well worth reading to take in all the details but a few highlights are CodeIgniter 4, my favourite framework achieving 1684 requests per second.

WordPress and WooCommerce weren’t so great but then you shouldn’t be choosing WordPress for speed, it’s advantages are that it’s easy to use and the third party themes and plugins make it inexpensive to get a rich website created quickly.

https://kinsta.com/blog/php-benchmarks/

CodeIgniter 4 hide the Debug Toolbar for certain routes

To hide the debug toolbar for a certain route, edit Config/Filters.php and add  a new constructor at the bottom of the file containing the following

public function __construct()
{
    if (isset($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) && strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 'your_URL_here')) unset($this->globals['after'][0]);
}