Microsoft's Family offering is way better (not saying much considering Google doesn't have one). Right now I'm really considering moving over to them. But I have no idea what the migration of a decade of email across 5 inboxes will look like; not to mention Calendar and contacts. I used this as my primary email on at least 7 android phones (the original Pixel up through the Pixel 6 I preordered). The loss of Youtube purchases; android play purchases, etc. is going to hurt. I'm sad it isn't illegal to turn a free account into a paid one when it means losing purchased content like this.
I'm not 100% sure what to do, I don't have dozens of hours to walk everyone through a migration; and Google provides absolutely no migration tools to help with this. This is the last time I'll be burned by Google though. I used to be a huge fan; but at this point I'm done. I'm really looking forward to cutting them out completely. As an added bonus; I no longer have to worry about them deciding to ban my account one day and lose everything.
I'm all about Google being evil and all that, but spending valuable aggression on this seems a bit excessive..
The Google Takeout system gives you all of your email in a format you might be able to import into another system?
There's no way I'm moving my domain to GoDaddy.
Well, it's called Google _Workspace_ now and their cheapest offering is _Business_ Starter at $6/user/month, and their "Individual" offering is $9.99/month (currently on sale for $7.99/month).
I guess Google is making the service business-oriented. For you, that means you need to consider whether or not the service will add value to your _business_ before buying them. It's not a family service.
Little rant here: to be completely honest, I don't really understand what Google has been doing in the past decade. As a search engine company, the clerk of the Internet if you will, you'd imagine that they would do anything in their power to create and maintain a vibrant Internet. Things like encouraging custom domain usage, lowering hosting costs etc should be naturally on bucket list. But instead of doing that, they became one of the company who focused on sipping on their user, all the while the Internet is more and more concentrated and hard to search. Well played ...
If you do decide to move away it may not be as bad as you expect for the everyday email, contacts, and calendar.
In particular when it comes to your email you probably don't need to manually use IMAP.
I've migrated thousands of emails between different providers a few times, the last one being GMail to O365 then on to Fastmail when I decided I preferred them. Each occasion only took quarter of an hour or so and didn't involve manual work or IMAP downloads.
The not-so-secret secret is that many providers include the ability to import directly from other providers. In the case of Fastmail (which I've now used for years and totally recommend) their import options include IMAP but also include direct connections into GSuite to do it for you - in the background that option also uses IMAP as it happens, but other than providing the connection details they do the transfer server-to-server without your involvement.
Then you can copy over contacts as Outlook CSV files (which are recognised by most services), and calendars by exporting then importing ical files (connecting calendars only works until the connection breaks, in this case by your G account being switched off).
Contacts and Email seems to be the easy part: you can download the emails via IMAP to a client like Thunderbird, and the re-upload them on a new account. Years ago I did this transferring from one G Suite account to another for a friend, worked very well. Contacts can be exported in CSV and then imported bia CSV, no big deal too. I have routinely transferred loads of contacts between different systems this way, including Gmail. With calendar, I never had a necessity to transfer data, but I imagine that there are ways, given that it uses a standard iCalendar format.
And my advice: If you go that way, charge them automatically by CC every month and add a 30% markup to cover inevitable extra costs like footing the bill when someone cancels unexpectedly.
What is lost in that case?
Protonmail is more expensive at $5/month and provides migration from Gmail.
There are also other options - like Zoho.
If you migrate to a different email provider, you won't lose access to any of your purchases.
They have a free “limited” plan that should be good just for a custom domain email.
Painful. I know first hand. It is no surprise that these companies make migrating out of their services as painful as possible. This is why I treat personal services like I treat business services now: if there isn't a realistic exit option, I don't use it. There are just too many examples of services being cancelled, accounts banned, and prices jacked up unreasonably.
Context:
We're a small but relatively old SaaS company.
Been happily using G Suite's free tier since day 1 - only for email.
This announcement is a tad disappointing, but as other commenters have said, 10 years of a free product is pretty great.
We'll likely upgrade to Google's paid tier, but out of curiosity, since we're switching to a paid service, we may as well explore alternatives too.
Just need cloud email accounts for around 8 users, and with minimal risk of being flagged as spam.
Thanks!
Their support replies faster than google :)
Which means, if you like to set up new domains for specific projects, there's no extra cost (other than registering the domain of course).
Have never had a spam problem, but they stress that they don't consider themselves mission critical.
I went with fastmail for my personal email, after a small-ish provider I had used (and liked very much!) between 2001 and 2018 was unable for a few month, in 2018, to avoid getting my mails sorted by gmail into spam -- no delivery problems since mail. Alas, despite wishing to support the smaller players, silent non-delivery of emails is a huge problem.
I setup a trial with plan to use it long term but I got locked out of my own admin account with no way in (I use a password manager, yes) and the support page that was supposed to work kept crashing my browser.
Their Twitter account redirected me to that support page after explaining the situation to them.
The quality of the service itself is horrible for an individual to manage compared to gsuite or any other service I have touched.
16 years ago me and my friends signed up for "GMail for your domain". That's it. We wanted to use GMail, which was by far the best email available at the time, and have email addresses at our own domain instead of @gmail.com. That's it.
Since that time several of us have been using our GFYD/GSuite/Workspaces accounts as our primary Google accounts. We're not a business. We don't use any business features. We just use them as our personal Google accounts. We use them for YouTube, Photos, everything. Our entire digital identities are bound to these accounts.
Yet, over the years, these accounts are just worse than free personal Google accounts. Because we are not a business, there is absolutely no benefit to these accounts whatsoever other than the custom domain. In fact, we can't even use the new version of Google Pay. It only works with free accounts! We all had to switch to other payment platforms to split bills. Ironically, we'll have to use one of those non-Google platforms to split the Google Workspaces bill as well.
And now we're being forced to pay for something that everyone else gets for free. I'd be less angry if we got some kind of benefit above and beyond normal free Google accounts. I'd be less angry if the price wasn't a ridiculous per-user rate. I'd be less angry if we weren't forced into this against our will. This is not what we signed up for 16 years ago. I'd be less angry if they offered some way to escape. Let use merge/transition our accounts with personal Google accounts. Let us have personal accounts with custom domain, iCloud offers that feature now.
Nope. Just looks like most of our accounts are going to get deleted or are going to have to pay $6/month for nothing.
It's always been remarkable to me how badly Google shits on the people that are obviously its biggest boosters. I was personally responsible for multiple paid Google Workspace accounts. I can't imagine it makes financial since for them to axe the grandfathered plans. As a free service, it was bearable that my custom account was a little flaky, but there is no way I'm going to pay for a shittier version of their free product. On top of that, now I have to figure out if it's possible to transfer movie/app purchases. Thanks a fucking ton, Google.
What's funny is that I would probably pay a reasonable annual cost for the service (I'm already paying an annual fee for the domain), but the way this is announced is enough to lose me as a customer, permanently.
- No links to the information in my admin.google.com panel - No personal notification at all to the billing contact - An automated "upgrade" to paying a monthly cost for a formerly free product
Yeah, no. This is borderline scammy, not the way to treat people who have been your customers for 15-20 years, and who disproportionately are responsible for spending decisions at their companies.
Any competitors to Gmail want my business and support custom domains / have a reasonable strategy for migrating data away from G Suite accounts?
I now feel that this was a favor in disguise: Google spent so many years blocking Domains accounts from new services that I never developed habits around using them. Switching away is just migrating email since they made it hard to develop any other source of inertia.
> Just looks like most of our accounts are going to get deleted or are going to have to pay $6/month for nothing.
Am I wrong or are you paying that $6/mo for having the gmail UI in front of your custom domain? Doesn't really seem like nothing.
What's the alternative? Can I switch to a personal gmail and keep my personal email/domain?
For $1/month
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238
Cheaper than Google's $6/month but not free.
Same exact story, although we have been using it like this closer to 20 years now.
What we get for free is a <something>@gmail.com address and the associated services. We DON'T get yourcustomer@domain.com or anything like that on top of Google's infrastructure.
I can appreciate your frustration but these threads always come full circle to if you aren't paying for something you are the product and have much less control over your fate. Google's willingness to kill things is why I avoid coupling things like that to them.
Ideally I'd like to have some self-hosted solution though - will be looking at options...
And now they're going to start charging me $70 per family member or delete all of their purchases for the last decade or so.
To say I'm aghast is putting it mildly.
The only difference over the free Google Workspaces is the domain name.
My interpretation is that you'll still be able to use your account on Youtube, Play Store, etc. You'll just lose the workspace specific features like Drive, so use the tools that let you dump that data.
I need to find a nice alternative for email with my domain that's going to work for us and not cost me a fortune.
I'm not even massively concerned about Play Store purchases, I barely use any paid apps anymore anyway I can buy them again if I have to.
Since the domain was also bought through GSuite, how do I get that out?
When you cancel workspace, the accounts remain active but lose access to just the workspace features (gmail, drive, docs, calendar etc). The accounts will remain the same for things like google play, youtube etc and you won't lose access to any purchases.
The biggest impact I can see, other than the headache of migration, is that former GFYD email address can NEVER be used for docs, drive etc, even on the same terms as a free personal account.
The annoying part is that Google doesn't provide any migration tool, but there are migration tools for Google Edu accounts so that graduating students can migrate their data to personal Google accounts. The software is evidently mostly written and tested, but for whatever reason it hasn't been brought over the finish line for other workspace users.
Obviously our use case isn't that common (it's been "legacy" for years) but still annoying to know that there's probably some script I could run to do this, but nobody has built the web UI for it.
I was a proud owner of Nexus phones, Google Fi subscriber, Google Music (YouTube Premium) subscriber, I've purchased apps and tv content on Google Play, and I also started paying for Google Drive storage after they removed the free unlimited photo backups. I had YouTube TV for a time. Having a powerful Gsuite service was a driving factor into the Google ecosystem for me.
I've been slowly pulling out of Google's services as they've been shutdown, renamed, etc. This will be the ultimate drive off of their services for me. By wanting an extra $6/month/user, they are now losing out on a lot more. I'm sure that my situation isn't unique.
Well I'm very annoyed. It's not that I might have to pay for a service, it's the unfairness of it. I've several friends and family members up with accounts on my domain to be nice to them to make life easier for them or because they were too poor/techy to set up something for themselves.
I also have a few hacky things set up using free email accounts on my domain, because why not.
Now Google want to charge me cash for their accounts after I've done some free marketing for them in getting people using the Google ecosystem. They don't seem to be providing me with any help to get them transferred to a free account. It will cost me either a lot of money or time and/or social capital to solve this.
This is an enormous price jump from free. The free Google Apps or whatever it is had up to 100 users. If I had 100 users, that looks like £50 per user per year on their cheapest tier, so £500 [edit: £5,000!! - thanks, @alias_neo] a year.
I would gladly transition to a @gmail.com account and just do an email forward, which is why I had originally signed up, IF ONLY GOOGLE WOULD HAVE A MIGRATION TOOL. They pushed my family into Workspace as they abandoned us, and give us NO OPTION to transfer 13+ years of history.
I dont really need any more service than I have now, I don't need the full google workspace, I just want gmail on my custom domain, thats all really.
The most annoying parts of this, google, the company that hosts my email, couldn't even be bothered to send me an email about this, I instead found out about it on the front page of HN.
So now I need to figure out how to migrate out, because if I move my email, I have to move my entire google account, my email, domain hosting/registration, youtube account, everything, I have no way to port the data over even to a regular account.
I could almost be sympathetic to them not wanting to build a migration tool.
But the least they could have done is set up a way to permanently forward to another gmail account so at least old email addresses do not break. They did not do that.
Ooh, and one more super fun fact: there is no way to transfer ownership of a Google Drive folder to an account outside of your domain. Which is awesome when you're the owner of a large shared folder that needs to persist.
HUP gets you Microsoft 365 (Office apps, OneDrive, ad-free email with a 50GB quota and one custom domain) for your family, with 30% off list price for people using Microsoft solutions at work — which is most office workers, assuming their employers have opted in.
It’d be nice to see something similar from Google.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity for a 20% time project. Surely you aren't the only Googler in this situation?
Extremely, extremely annoyed that Android app purchases will be lost.
Since I also have Apple devices I'm considering moving over to iCloud+ since they now support 3 email boxes and 5 domain names per account: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212514
Other options I'm researching include Outlook Premium and Zohomail. Will be watching the comment section for other alternatives.
Say what you will about Google/Gmail, but it has always worked extremely well just in a browser let alone all their app offers.
I swear that we woke up 20 years in the future and that Google and Microsoft traded places.
Google has for ages already supported Google accounts for external domains whose email is not handled by Google.
(not affiliated or anything, just like and use this service myself for similar reasons)
It's free for 1 domain.
10 years of a free product is not bad
But now I'll lose access to any purchases on my phone, my Youtube purchases and history, I need to create a new account for my phone, etc....
That product is still free at other providers. We'll just be moving.
It will definitely hurt us financially as we have around 10 domains with 20 email ids. We can't delete them due to older emails but can't complain as Google did allowed free account for 10 years.
I hope there is a service Migration of emails from Gmail to other platforms.
I am not willing to pay USD4x6x12 per year to have this continue to work. Looking around for the most affordable alternative for four active email accounts brings me to... Microsoft! Microsoft 365 Family Edition. Like a lot of salary drones I use Microsoft products at work, so I get a discount.
It is sad to be paying for full Microsoft Office capability only to not use it, only to keep my email addresses working. It seems positively bizarre, from the view of 20 years ago, to be fleeing from Google to Microsoft. But the fact remains, CAD$76.xx or so per year is something I can stomach for email address continuity for four people. Well, maybe the terabyte of cloud storage per user could come in handy for (encrypted) cloud backups as well.
If you can't get the employee discount, googling suggests the best deal for M$365 Family in Canada is: Costco! $99 for 15 months.
Anyone else find something good for four users? A colleague has Fastmail for CAD$46/year (paid multiple years in advance). I'd love to use that, but for four users... too expensive again.
Also, no aliases. Are multiple domains even possible?
Mid-level tier is just under $60/year for 4 mailboxes, custom domain name, and, if desired, catch-all email. Reasonably good webmail, as well as SMTP/IMAP/POP3 options.
You get 50 GB of storage, custom email domain, etc...
You will probably need to subscribe to some iCloud plan and have an apple device. But if you already use those, you are good to go.
Are there any ways to migrate those licenses to a "google account"? Or am I being forced to pay to keep using licenses I already paid for?
Oh, and what about my YouTube channel?
Google can get bent. They advertised Google Apps as a solution for families way back when it was announced, and they're seemingly content to burn any good will it bought them.
Play store purchases are probably lost (I'm in the same boat). I have no intention of repurchasing my Android apps so I guess its an easy permanent switch to iOS at this point.
Finally, actual motivation to get off google. Probably will go to Outlook premium for my own domain’s email.
The article links to an official Google support FAQ regarding Legacy G Suite accounts shutting down on July 1, 2022. [1] 1. https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217#faq
iCloud+ may also be an option.
Microsoft discontinued that and increased the price under O365.
If your address is somebody@gmail.com, you are not affected.
If you use a personal GMail account, there is no change here that applies to you.
A free @gmail.com? Nothing to do with it.
- gmail.com -- no.
- if you can go to https://admin.google.com and you have users -- yes
The problem here is there's no way out now. If 15 years ago you made the mistake of wanting gasp a domain for your email, you're basically roped into paying now.
Almost everything a free G Suite user wants is identical to the free @gmail account, which is remaining free. Except the custom domain. Fine - but there's no way to just lose the custom domain at this point.
Over the years, the Google account has grown in importance and things tied to it. It's fairly un-viable to migrate it to an @gmail account. Especially for your whole family.
So, the options are nuke all your Google accounts and suffer the consequences, or pay up.
Not like we didn't see this coming of course, but still sucks.
I've been paying google for GDrive for some time now, and that's about to end. It's back to Dropbox. I know, I don't have to do this, but the hell with google. I'm done. This is nothing short of a needless f---over, and I want as little to do with them as possible.
You will still need to find the replacement for gmail etc though
Why?
What's stopping you (or me, because I'm also affected) from exporting all data from Google, paying another provider for an e-mail service and changing the DNS settings?
Expecting Google to offer free services within their own sphere is one thing -- making gmail a paid service would be absurd, but this is not even close to being the same thing.
I used a microscopic subset of the features. Aside from them hosting my email, I don't think I'm any different from other users. It's just me; I'm not really a business. I notice some differences, mostly in limitations: less storage, features of my Pixel phone that sometimes don't work with that account.
I'll probably upgrade to whatever the minimal plan is just because it's less trouble than any alternatives. I've had this for a very long time, so there's a lot that I'd rather not touch. They're providing a fair bit of value and I don't really mind paying for that.
But I'm surprised not to have heard about this by email. Perhaps I'm on yet another different legacy thing.
I keep wondering the same thing. Haven't seen any communication at all from Google, so maybe for some reason I don't fall into this thing that is no longer free? They can't possibly do this to me and not even tell me... can they?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20211207200137/https://support.g...
I dont know if I want to pay six bucks a year for that privilege, per account. I'm giving away emails on my domain too. Most of which are not used.
If so, I guess it's time to setup my own mailserver. I've been meaning to do it for a long while now anyway, as I'm not comfortable with the thought that Google is data-harvesting all my and my family's emails. But with mailservers being notoriously difficult to setup and configure securely, I keep putting it off.
Time to get reading a few tutorials, methinks. Can anyone recommend a good lightweight email server [I have less than a dozen email accounts on my domain] and a useful tutorial on setting it all up securely?
Incidentally, I run email accounts on some of my other domains, using Yandex Mail for Domains [0] which [at least last time I checked] was still free. Im slightly dubious about using it for my main domain though as I've found delivery to be less than 100% reliable. In the past, I've had one or two emails disappear completely. Yandex's own mail logs showed them being received, but they never showed up in my inbox or any of my other folders.
I suspect Yandex have a slightly over-eager server level spam filter, which ate them before they ever reached my inbox. But Yandex's support are generally useless and were unable to tell me what had become of the emails in question, even when I presented them with their own mail log.
Plan details
Payment plan -- Free plan
Licences -- 88 available, 12 assigned
Estimated monthly bill --Free edition (no charges)
So, either that article was a spoof, or Google are rolling this out gradually.
If you want a secure mail service that won’t read your email, try ProtonMail.
It looks like it's not free anymore. I used to see a free plan, now there are only paid ones.
I think even the users of this product knew that email with custom domain is a premium product that pretty much no email provider provides for free. I am still surprised that they let it run for 10+ years.
I dread the reaction on HN when Google finally decides to kill Google voice , which is another very popular but free Google service. In fact I am sure that running Google voice is even more expensive to run than workspaces because just the cost of assigning a phone number is some fractions of a dollar to the FCC.
The value we get is _not_ worth ~$500 US per year.
I don’t need a full business suite. I mostly need the email and calendar. I’d need to poll other people whether they use Google Drive or not.
Looks like the price has gone up since I signed up, but so did the storage included.
Not this is a good or bad thing, but this news make no sense to 99.9% of their customers.
I understand you just lose all your Google Play purchases and need to re-purchase any apps or subscriptions you want to keep. I'm assuming this will basically require an Android phone factory reset and to be setup fresh with a "new" Google account for the old email address? Is this the case?
I also understand the need to do a Google Takeout and download everything. Already got bit by this once though when I recently did a Takeout to backup all my Google Photos content: a week or so later, after I had already permanently deleted the originals, I received an email from Google saying "sorry there was a bug in Takeout and some of your large videos were omitted from your exported data". I guess you need to comb through and verify everything actually made it to the Takeout to be safe.
When you migrate an email address off of Google Apps for Your Domain to another email host or self-host, what happens to the Google Account for that email address? Is it possible to shut down the Google Apps for Your Domain service for the domain in question and then establish a new fresh Google account for the same email address (not a gmail address) that was formerly part of the Google Apps for Your Domain service?
You understand wrong.
You do not lose access to your purchases. You will still have a Google Account (with your own custom domain), it's just that after the conversion from G-Suite Legacy to Workspace, if you stop paying it it will not allow you to access the "core" products (Gmail, Drive, Calendar, whatever).
Nothing stops you from moving your e-mail somewhere else but still keeping the Google Account with that domain.
I have been plagued by account problems for years, though, having signed up for services like YouTube with a personal email prior to creating the same email address in Google Workspace. I recommend avoiding it, and just using a free Gmail account for basic usage of Google docs and YouTube and your phone.
Furthermore, the costs to upgrade are not egregious, most everyone here would not have a big problem with it.
Also, it's not like one is losing one's email address -- you control the domain...
You're right the fee is not unreasonable for the services offered, especially compared to the competition. But given it's not really what many were actually after (we just wanted a @example.com gmail account!) and are left with a handicapped account, why would we want to pay up?
Since I'm one of those people who prefer to learn from mistakes of others instead of mine, I never used Google, or Github, or other OIDC/SAML2/whatever provider as the IdP and always created local account.
I'm more worried about the Google services that provide absolutely no support for migrating between different accounts.
I will say, they broke imap/pop without an announcement. They just silently changed the pop endpoint. I had to reach out to support to get the new endpoint. That's totally unacceptable without advanced notice.
They also doubled the price and added worse storage limits in 2020 citing the pandemic and increased expenses. So it's something to be weary of.
However, the price quality of the product are good, so I'm happy I migrated away from Google.
"No bulk messaging You cannot use Migadu to send mails fast. These attempts are monitored and will be quickly sanctioned.
We do not approve of or accept bulk mailing, even if it is not spam. Please use dedicated services for that."
I wonder if CC'ing or BCC'ing a list of 100 or 1,000 people every 3-6 months is included in this - if so that's probably the biggest turnoff so far.
This is such a half assed answer. Data Export won't export my android purchases for example.
Just make sure you set up working mail for your domain, e.g. run your own / use some other MX service.
Migration is going to suck only because of stupidly relying on login with Google which won't work after I putge everything google from my life with fire.
I'm presuming this includes paid apps that Google will be stealing when I decline to pay them by the month to keep them.
Lesson learned don't use anything Google.
Yep. Get out. Stop relying on Google for anything important.
https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/add-a-custom-domain-m...
Back when legacy accounts weren't legacy, Google Voice was free for G Suite (I think they are now called "unmanaged") and Google is trying to get rid of those accounts in favor of newer paid "managed" accounts.
The worst part of all this, is most of us casual users just want to do email, nothing else. I personally don't have a high enough volume of email to even warrant paying out for most services.
Or is there a cultural difference I'm not understanding?
"How does the upgrade affect my current G Suite legacy free edition subscription? Your current G Suite legacy free subscriptions and related services will continue to function as they do today, until you self-upgrade or we upgrade you automatically to one of the new editions."
So does this mean I lose all of my google gmail, photos, sheets, drive, YouTube etc or not?
And before anyone chimes in about needing to deal with backups, etc. on shared hosting, go check out all the backup products for MS365 and Google Workspace.
And before anyone chimes in about deliverability issues, those are caused by Microsoft, Google, etc., not solved by them.
Reading the comments I found a number of things:
- There are actually a lot of these accounts.
- A lot of people were paying for extra storage anyways.
But it still seems like the math doesn't work out. They are probably using a lot of current users for adding services like YouTube premium, extra space, Google Pay... as well as losing a lot of future users because they have just pissed them off. A lot of buisbesses that may have naturally expanded might just migrate to new providers now and angry people may pick other providers in the future.
It seems like maintaining this must have cost near zero. Overall it was likely actually profitable if you count total cost for these accounts vs all spend. There is probably a decent amount of new revenue, but a lot of this probably would have occured naturally on its own and you are cutting off this marketing forever.
It seems like I must be missing the true reason. Unless they really, really whatef that short-term small profit bump.
So the paid account is in several things worse than a free Gmail account.
Google kept moving the goalposts and now they tell me that I'm a freeloader for not paying for the features I didn't ask for.
Sure I don't often use them all, but it comes in handy at times to be able to quickly use a different domain.
Been looking at Tutanota, but not sure how I feel about being required to use their clients.
Any other good suggestions?
All I want is to be able to use my own domain for my family, and carry on using the current settings on Android etc. Now I'll be paying over $40/mo for it.
Can't Google just come up with an "own domain for families" version at a lower price, and make it work with the child protection features?
We are still 4 adults using my domain and it is in no way business-related. These prices are way too steep for simply having a nicer domain.
I hope they succeed in completely ruining any goodwill they have left. I'd toss out some four-letter words, to boot, but I just can't be bothered.
Does Cloudflare have any options for handling outgoing email? If not, I assume you still have to set up your actual email host in a way that can send through all the vanity domains, with appropriate DKIM records, etc.
This was essential for me as I used g suite for my family and some are using it for photos.
Info about Cloud Identity Free: https://support.google.com/cloudidentity/answer/7319251
Steps for adding Cloud Identity Free: https://support.google.com/cloudidentity/topic/7555155
You will only lose access to Gmail and Calendar, though make sure you migrate email and calendar before moving to Cloud Identity Free.
Disclaimer: i haven't followed the steps myself since i'm paying for a personal Workspace account since a few years ago.
I'm not going to pay $6/user/mo just to do that, and I don't think any of them (all adults at this point) would either.
If I could get up an email forwarding without needing a paying user, I'd probably move to Business Starter for a user or two. I've not reconfigured any users in there for about 6 years, so I have to look to see if this is possible.
or
https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/email-forwarding
(I have no idea if they work as advertised, as I have never used these services.)
From what I can tell we'd will have to start paying CAD $31.20 per month for 4 users. Seems pricy for our use case?
The name is exactly what's referenced in this article, but I've received no notice, and I don't see any warnings on admin.google.com for these accounts.
What gives?
The more disturbing part is that I, like you, haven't received any notice from Google themselves.
The bad thing is that some of us have no choice - or need a long day or two to migrate all the stuff.
I am a heavy Google Photos user who has shared a lot of albums. Also a lot of Android payments and much more.
For Google Photos, I can't export and import albums - only photos. So I would have to recreate the structure manually. This alone is a huge task.
If there is a "migrate to Gmail" button all is fine. But there isn't an easy solution.
I am now glad I had to create a private Gmail account for Stadia. But I also have to think about investing more money in games - or not.
Does anyone have a good tool to extract emails from Google Apps? I literally only use Apps for custom domain email and a placeholder static website. It's certainly not worth $72 a year for it.
I saw that someone had posted that iCloud supports custom email domains so I suppose that's an option but now need to figure a way to migrate from Google to iCloud.
Found this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212514
One can host 5 domains with 3 email addresses per domain on iCloud.
You can use SES for inbound email receipt as well, but unfortunately there's no POP3/IMAP service (emails just get stored in an S3 bucket). However you can use a Lambda to forward inbound email to a personal email account: https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder
You'll have to manage each inbox separately (I had 4 email accounts in GSuite legacy).
1) False advertising. A lot of it....
2) All those Google purchases....
If they don't do something, I'm going to think about emailing every developer I've ever bought an app from and asking them if they can move my purchase to an alternate GMail account. I'll at least do it for anything expensive that I still use.
I'd love to see a class action lawsuit for Google Play purchases that get usurped.
One interesting thing I just learned is, by switching designation, I can get 2TB of storage per user for $3 a month. Right now I'm paying $10 a month for 1TB of storage from Google Drive. So actually this will wind up making things cheaper for me.
1) Apparently bait and switch is fair play now? The fact that it took years for the hook to be applied makes it no less wrong.
2) Apparently we cannot buy software anymore. I don't want 90% of upgrades but they force me to buy them as "subscriptions" now. How many do you have now that virtual monopolies are converting from buy one copy of software to "subscribe only"? Google Apps is just another in this "hook the user on free access -- then milk them forever once they are committed," business model. Office, Creative Suite, what's next Chrome?, Edge?, Firefox?, Acrobat?
Google seems now 100% devoted to evil.
My advice is:
1) create an HTTPS WEBDAV server to sync your photos to. I did this a year ago when I realized that my bill for photos would increase forever if I didn't erase the old ones as I took new ones. Switching to my own hardware is like getting a print of those film negatives... 2) host your own email 3) Get an old copy of Word and Excel (who cares about new features?)
EFF killed cert costs, may they turn to these other commodities... Once you go through this painful transition you'll only pay for Internet access and the hardware to run it.
If that shared email address is google@yourdomain.com, and Google suspends that Google account on July 1st, how are you supposed to disconnect it from G Suite and sign it up as a free Google account (no Gmail)?
I have been using this since it was “gmail for your domain” and have a number of old addresses I’d like to keep for history but am unwilling to pay $6 a month for, not to mention many friends having long neglected addresses I’m sure they’d like to keep.
My home town has a tiny hobbyist theatre group. Their shows have like 30 people in them max, and half of those are family and friends.
I set up a G Suite for them to handle email, because it was - you know - within their budget of 0€.
There's no fucking way they can start paying 12€/user/month. That's more than they make from a show :D
Any alternatives with reasonable pricing for ~5 people?
Otherwise I guess I’m going to look at using something to forward emails to my free Google account (Cloudflare now has email forwarding…)
I didn't receive any email this morning notifying me about it though.
I guess maybe it's finally time to move to fastmail. I'm not giving up a custom domain email address. I don't like that I'll lose access to giant archive of received email.
Is there a way to export all my archive/inbox from gmail? Import into fastmail? It looks like... maybe. But the fact that I'm trying to keep the same domain is going to complicate things maybe, since I can't easily have them both active at once to import from one to the other.
We're actually writing a detailed HOWTO about this workflow, mostly centered on gmail since you can't interface with gmail (directly) using rclone.
Regardless, it is rclone that (in my opinion) makes this quite a bit less impactful.
Answer to what? You mean for extracting your emails out of gmail?
For example, I have a fairly unprofessional primary Google account that I created when I was young and dumb(er). I would like to transfer the hundreds of dollars in purchases I've made under that account to another, more appropriately named, account but it does not seem possible.
They could solve this part of the problem for the affected G Suite deprecated users as well as people in positions like me by having a way to do this.
For years I have used FOO.org address with a legacy free edition. I always create service@foo.org email addresses, and they all drop through to the catch-all domain.
Can I just register the one address "patrick@foo.org" and have all the addresses still just fall through as normal? What a nightmare :(
Google really needs to figure out their customer support. I've always been hesitant to commit because I've feared I'd not be able to get support if I ran into an issue.
I can. Free forever means exactly that. They shouldn't have made the promise in the first place if they didn't have a plan on how to sustain it. Along with their other behavior these days they are just another lying corporation.
At least give folks a chance to migrate their purchases without forcing them to pay rent to keep what they ostensibly already own.
Connect to your gmail account using IMAP.
Drag & drop your emails from the original account to your local mailbox in Thunderbird. This process may require a little bit of babysitting, or work flawlessly without a hitch, I've seen both outcomes doing this for folks over the years.
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591053-Plu...
What about Gmail use? Is that going to stay free?
Personal Gmail is not connected to this.
Achieving the same functionality is possible on our free plan, and you can still use Gmail’s free SMTP method (https://improvmx.com/guides/send-emails-using-gmail/) to send emails from your alias, so no need to upgrade to anything.
One main caveat: since it’s not possible to downgrade a G Suite account to a « free » one, you would need to create a new Google account for each of your users. That would mean that you’d lose all previously bought subscriptions or apps bought on Google Play with your account.
Feel free to ask if you have any questions.
I've lived in this obnoxious state for a long time where my Google account (with an email address that is nearly as old as Google itself so I'm not switching) sometimes works, sometimes doesn't (and even sometimes works then suddenly stops working one day) for any random Google service.
I just want to keep my email address and have a plain old Google account. Is that too much to ask? That's all I ever wanted and that's all I thought I was getting when I signed up so long ago. I wish I had a time machine so I could go back and warn myself before I signed up for "Google Apps For Your Domain".
The solution is to allow users an option to convert back to a free account without losing access to their data, files, apps, and any purchased digital goods.
