I'm probably leaving for another provider because of this. I'm more and more concerned about the @gmail.com lock-in. I don't even send any media attachments (audio, video) or store anything in my Drive since I know of several people getting banned and not even receiving a justification (anecdotal, but it's enough to make me nervous about it). I'm not saying that was the cause, but I can't know for sure, so...
However, there is one VERY important difference: data ownership and privacy. Google Apps for Work (and edu) accounts, which I use for various organizations as well as even for my own personal, single-user domain, have much better data ownership and privacy terms:
See: https://support.google.com/work/answer/6056650?hl=en
Does Google use my organization’s data in Google Apps
services or Cloud Platform for advertising purposes?
No. There are no ads in Google Apps Services or Google Cloud
Platform, and we have no plans to change this in the future.
We do not scan for advertising purposes in Gmail or other
Google Apps services. Google does not collect or use data in
Google Apps services for advertising purposes.
The process is different for our free offerings and the
consumer space. For information on our free consumer
products, be sure to check Google's Privacy and Terms page
for more consumer tools and information relating to consumer
privacy.For my personal use, I have a custom domain on Outlook.com and this account is also a generic Google Account so I have access to the best of Microsoft and Google in one account. Might be a good approach but the only thing I wish is that Outlook had some of Google Inbox's capabilities.
Since I don't use Google for email, my Android phone can't automatically sniff for stuff like parcels or movie tickets and show me Now cards in my device. Other than that, I have a full-fledged Google account tied to my Outlook.com email. That's been my setup for a while.
Moving to Fastmail from Gmail was a massive improvement for me. Being able to quickly hook up custom domains to the same inbox is a big boon. Plus it costs less.
One thing I don't like is that their Android client which supports push notifications (a feature I personally valued in Gmail) also has some weird UX.
For example, the message actions bar within the "view message" pane. At first, I wasn't aware it existed. I thought you had to archive/delete messages from the inbox by swiping it! I only discovered it by accident when my finger missed a link in an email. It seems like it appears when you tap somewhere in the message itself, and it appears over the top of the bar that holds the message title and the back arrow.
Very silly in that regard, but otherwise quite solid. Their servers, service, and desktop offering are great and I found their pricing quite reasonable.
- My login stays the same (regular @gmail account)
- For receiving e-mails, it works like a simple forwarding service to my Gmail inbox. There's no copy of the e-mails anywhere else, no extra inbox, like I was using POP3
- I'll be able to send e-mails from that custom domain directly in Gmail, using Google's SMTP servers, but all the recipients will be able to see my original Gmail address in the hidden e-mail headers, and it's going to show "sent via Gmail" or something like that. I remember that's how it worked for an old alias I had, maybe it's the same thing.
If this is how it works I would definitely use it. I keep a live local IMAP backup and I also use Takeout regularly so there's very little risk involved.
Are you using this setup? Any problems?
What works pretty nice and what I'm doing is let gmail fetch the mails via POP3 and configure it to send outgoing mail via the SMTP Server from the domain.
No hassle about SPF/DKIM/DMARC and you can keep a copy from the mails on your server with the MTA and don't depend on Gmail. The from: is also from your domain and Gmail is clever enough to reply with the correct from: to mails that reached you that way.
I'm using this with all my mail accounts and it's working fine.
Recently I switched to pobox.com (which I pay for) because I wanted some mail delivery guarantees (which most DNS providers don't give you.)
(Personally I think running your own MTA is useful only if you want to learn how to run an MTA, otherwise you're just asking for trouble.)
Sadly that's all I've heard about it.
I've never found a good way to do email for cheapskates since then.
A turd by any other name is still a turd.
This name is definitely poor; people will have trouble with "suite", short of english/french speaking countries, and even in english speaking countries, considering suite and sweet are homophones and the fairly low usage of suite.
Can anyone at google explain why the brand changes every couple years? New leadership?
i suspect you're spot on with the new leadership guess - somebody wanted to leave their mark.
I owned a company that was a Google reseller for a couple of years and when pitching it I would just call it gmail for your company. Brainstorm all the fancy names you want but people understand what you are talking about when you call it gmail.
Microsoft even with all its flaws has never bothered to claim that a calendar is a standalone app. Actually, considering how badly they merged Sunrise into Outlook maybe they should...
https://abevoelker.github.io/how-long-since-google-said-a-go...
"Drives help streamline teamwork from end-to-end, from onboarding a new team member (add her to the team and she instantly has access to all of the work in one place) to offboarding a departing team member (remove him from the team and all of his work stays right in place), and everything in-between."
Nevertheless it could be one of those things that is in flux as part of the evolution of the English language.
https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion/status/78161631937652736...
Interesting if so, it's exactly the opposite to most other companies: create a consumer product, reuse brand and/or code for biz product.
Or, as you aptly mentioned, these are wasteful words.
You know what company sounds like mostly marketing fluff? Hint: It's the one "no one ever got fired for buying [from]."
EDIT: It's hard for this product to have its own stable brand identity. All it does is add a feature to the existing Google products: the ability to use a custom domain, with some useful tools to manage that namespace.
Maybe the word Domain should be emphasised: "G Domain Suite" (or Domain Pack/Extensions/Link). Sounds better than just G Suite anyway.