The thing you do,is exactly the same thing I'm doing with my personal email addresses (and which works great) and now my son's email addresses (which doesn't work without the aforementioned fix). Maybe this is because Google has updated their security settings ever since I've setup my own email addresses? I don't know. Also, the history tells me nothing, I've just checked.

I've also tried it with Thunderbird. Here also, I cannot set it up with POP3 without using the "less secure apps" fix.