And I wouldn't even mind paying. If you wanted to charge me just for email without any of the other stuff and not offer support, I'd pay $100 a year if you could give me unlimited (or even 25 or whatever the original number of email addresses was) separate inboxes. But when you insist on charging me $5 or $6 a month per address and domain (which for my completely personal use case would be $24 a month), and I'm not ever going to use any of the other stuff -- then I get annoyed. Especially since I could have just set up an alias on a free account, years later, when that became an option.
I understand these types of plans keep getting shut down because businesses or spammers or moochers abuse them, I do. But a personal/family targeted plan for hosted email with a custom domain should be something someone can offer that doesn't charge people $25 or $30 a month.
I own my last name as a domain, and always thought it would be fun to use it for my primary email as firstname@lastname.com. Well... $6 a month for an individual "vanity" email address is already hard enough to justify once you realize Workspaces doesn't give you a "real" gmail account (google assistant, google one, etc... meaning you still need to maintain another gmail address, defeating the point), and then once you have 2, 3, 6 family members also wanting a vanity email address, the cost is just insane.
How is this not something anyone at Google have thought of? Gmail or use business accounts that come with a ton of strings attached.
If in 2007 or 2008, Google had positioned this as a business product (and they didn’t. It was literally called Google Apps For Your Domain, promoted as a free service, and people were told to sign up their families or use it for their websites to get all the benefits of Gmail (which was and remains free) but on your own domain), that would be one thing. If in 2012 when they made it a legacy service, they’d told us, you can continue to pay but it’ll be “$X per domain and you won’t get any of these extra business features,” that would have been fine.
If in February or March or whenever this was announced, they had said, “if you want to convert this to a personal Gmail account that has aliasing setup” or you want to again, pay per domain (not per account) and not get certain Workspace features and zero support, that would have been fine.
Instead, we were told a bunch of conflicting things, we were encouraged to upgrade to accounts we didn’t need or to migrate to other providers, or those of us procrastinators (me) held out some hope we’d get a solution like we got. And I’m genuinely thankful for that decision.
But I still agree that there is a market — maybe not a huge one, but a market, for hosted email on a custom domain aimed at individuals and families that doesn’t charge per address.
I’m sure you would risk cannibalizing some business sales for people who would want to be cheap and claim to be a family, but businesses too cheap to pay for email accounts usually just use regular gmail accounts anyway. And with the right restrictions (on number of accounts and of message volume sent), I think you could still have a profitable endeavor. At least I’d like to think so.
Alas.
Migadu, MXroute, or one other which is a YC company that I fail to remember the name of (ImprovMX I think?).
Cloudflare is doing forwarding too now.
The other nice side effect is I only use my gmail.com address for Google account related things. I don't get personal email there anymore and that inbox is pristine which is impressive since I've had it since Gmail launched.
My GSuite account, on the other hand, is quite a dumpster fire from years of personal email, aliases, and adding in other domains from time to time. Part of me would just like to walk away from it but too many things are tied to a number of email addresses in those domains.
I really do prefer Fastmail at this point, but I don't want to move these particular domains given how much junk gets sent to those addresses.
But... I wouldn't suggest using a vanity address as a primary Google account. Managing the two is worth the overhead and risk avoidance.
I'd gladly pay for the personal service if it wasn't per-user.
Though, I'm sure google got a lot of value out of this. I switched myself and many others onto gsuite early on. It was some of their first introductions to the "google apps" that have now become the structure for their "Workspace".
I have a few domains aliased to my main one on GSuite Legacy, with aliased email for friends and family that I brought in with the understanding that it was always free. And now I have to shoulder monthly costs for these people. Or push them out and be doing tech support to help them set up elsewhere.
$6 monthly with unlimited (or some high number) of family member users would be fine.
Any cost at all will limit spammers.
Also, migrating (including setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) was fast and easy.
The $50/year price difference is well worth it. I’m sharing this because I wouldn’t have switched on my own. But I should have migrated even before Google’s changes were announced. The competition has surpassed Google’s offering.
In that that time:
* I have not had to worry that I’ll inadvertently trigger an account ban and lose my email account/all my email with no recourse.
* UI updates have been gradual, subdued and useful.
* Support requests have been answered promptly and have been extremely helpful, including one case where the web UI wasn’t loading through the corporate proxy, we determined it was the proxy (not their service) and an engineer STILL helped me with a fix after the ticket was closed.
* No significant (if any) price changes.
* No significant outages (that I can remember).
Never heard about Fastmail, but I was even more intrigued to learn they developed the JMAP standard, https://jmap.io/.
It's pretty steep if you want a handful of mailboxes for close family on a vanity domain, especially when these days personal e-mail is just a glorified password recovery channel
I disagree, most of the Mom & Pop businesses I deal with are all in on email to communicate because they don't want to deal with fancy ticket systems.
I also tried ProtonMail before switching to Fastmail. I liked some of the security advantages of PM, but being forced to use their client due to E2E was too difficult in the long run. I missed seamless calendar integrations, managing multiple emails from one UI, etc. Also Fastmail is slightly cheaper.
I've also completely switched over to Apple native Mail/Calendar clients. Both apps I used to despise, but all alternatives I tried have failed to match feature parity (or have serious data privacy concerns).
Especially with Google, they have the sort of high level decision making that is only sustainable if you are constantly drowning in cash. You need to give them a little time to come to their senses. Let the bad PR soak in a bit and work its way up the reporting chain.
(I went to Fastmail and have been mostly happy so far)
Edit: I just followed the link from the other comment about contacting support…
> To get phone, chat, or email support for your legacy free account at [mydomain.com], you need to upgrade to Google Workspace
So I can’t contact them until the “upgrade” takes effect, and I get charged for it?!
You got rid of Google, you migrated to something that suits you better, you will not worry next time Google try to pull this stunt again.
In my book, those are 3 positives, not a screw-up.
Edit: There's this summary, but nothing detailed so far:
Continue using your custom domain with Gmail
Keep using Gmail with your custom domain
Retain access to no-cost Google services
You will retain access to the no-cost version of Google Workspace services such as Google Drive and Google Meet, and additional Google services such as Google Search, Google Maps, and YouTube
Keep your purchases and data
You will retain access to paid content such as movie purchases at Google Play and data stored on Google Workspace
This option is for non-commercial personal use
Google may remove business functionality from this offering and transition businesses to Google Workspace. Additionally, this option will not include support.
Maybe this really was supposed to be some sort of "shock" to push a certain group over to google's paid services. Or maybe it was just a mismanaged mess.
Theory 2 is they really were developing a GSuite to Google Account migrator and it ended up being way too messy to be workable in the deadline they set themselves.
Funny how some (arguably futile) memories stick in.
The catch is, as soon as you migrate you will lose your gvoice number, since that is not included in the "all free services will be migrated".
And then it will be too late to research alternatives as you lost your number and will start paying (and then realize your old number is long gone :)
>I do in fact though still have my google voice on my personal no-cost accounts still working. Logging into each account and going directly to http://voice.google.com
>
>*this seems to work with already established voice accounts, and new ones cant be made for account on suite legacy anymore.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/comments/ur3h...
https://support.google.com/voice/answer/12083094?hl=en&ref_t... See the section titled: “Transfer to another Google Account (ends in @gmail.com)”
And now I’m curious what that number is.
It looks like I may be able to undo this switch:
> If you transitioned to Google Workspace after January 19, 2022 and used G Suite legacy free edition for personal use, you can [contact Support](https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213)
2. Click the question mark in a circle, at the top right
3. Click buttons named as seen in this screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/VxluEzc
4. Confirm that you got the email that explicitly says no cost, and no further action required on your part
https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213
If you follow the instructions and go to the '?' > 'Contact Support', there is an option for switching back to the legacy edition.
I posted more details about this here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/comments/urb8...
(I see there's an email address at the bottom of the link in your bio FWIW, just in case someone might consider reaching out that way)
https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/comments/ur5x...
I would suggest looking at options like Mailbox.org, Runbox, Mailfence, and a few others that I don’t recall right now.
For a pricing scheme that’s not based on number of mailboxes but on other parameters like storage and mails sent, there are options like mxroute and Migadu. I don’t prefer either of these for different reasons (the former is in the U.S. and the latter left me with a bad taste when it moved from a free plan to paid).
I always recommend Ctemplar (even if i am swiss)....however i have my own mail-server..so there's that ;)
EDIT:
OHDAMN READ THIS!!!:
https://ctemplar.com/ctemplar-is-shutting-down/
Now i have to make some calls
Yeah exactly what I'm afraid of. I don't want to do more than one migration.
>You have chosen to continue using the Free Legacy Edition of G Suite for personal use.
>If you change your mind and want access to premium features, you can take advantage of a special discount by upgrading your subscription in the Google Admin Console.
What a self inflicted mess though since this is what should have been announced in the first place.
Unless your family has a foundation that's planning to give grants, this sounds like an abuse of Google's goodwill towards nonprofits.
If it's a 501-c-3, "sending donations to whatever my family wants to" may also not be valid, and may be considered a tax dodge.
(I am not a lawyer).
You should write a blog post about it!
Are you a mindreader? That's exactly what i do ATM ;-)
It's essentially:
You need a DKIM, SPF and DMARK and some let's-encrypt-certs, additionally you can make a "site-verification"-key for google and ms, those two want to be threaded special ;)
Hmm i thinks that's it more or less, for reliable delivery.
You can test your mail with those "tool's":
and some more...
I post it here if i finished the blog entry.
You need about 2 days to set it up, and a reminder for those who wants to go that path...keep all your spam mails (you need them to train rspamd later)
The parts are FreeBSD13, blacklistd, pf, OpenSMTPD, Rspamd, Redis and Dovecot
I've been constantly annoyed over the past few years over features that are missing from GSuite accounts. To name a few: you can't invite people to your Google Home household, you can't start or join a YouTube Premium family plan, you can't add Nest devices to your account. I think some parts of the calendar integration still don't work with Google Home if you're using a GSuite account. It's been pretty frustrating, honestly.
And you can't really use Takeout to download data, delete the account, and then re-create it as a non-Gmail Google Account without it being super lossy. Things like docs and photos sharing settings would have to be manually recreated (or I suppose I could try to write a script that uses the GDrive API, but who has time for that). YouTube watch history and subscriptions can't be imported. The worst bit: Google Play purchases are just gone. Etc., etc.
So if they actually offered the ability to convert my account, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I've already moved my email over to Fastmail, so I don't need Gmail anymore.
I was really happy with the service. I liked not having ads on YouTube. Still dumbfounded by that.
It's an overused trope, but this was so poorly planned, executed, and communicated and it can only be explained by decision makers actually being on drugs.
How much impact did you have :/
So thanks Google.
Well, I already moved my custom domain email over to fastmail.
Been meaning to for a while anyway... I'd rather pay them a few bucks than keep having Google do whatever it was they were doing with my email (maybe nothing all that bad, but who the hell knows?)
The transition was smooth.
So the option is available to those who were waiting until the last minute to do anything about it -- which is probably quite a lot of people actually. (It is me, but I still will probably use the push to get off google finally).
I wonder what's going on within Google.
Part of me doesn't want to deal with the risk and hassle tied to all this, but another part of me wants to get as far away from Google as possible as a result of this experience.
Exporting your email data and importing it into a different provider (and perhaps more importantly, changing the MX DNS record on your domain) should work fine though. Your inbox on the Google side will just cease receiving new email.
We are all aware of how Google treats products they sunset. We are aware how they want to raise their subscription rates and services.
I would say besides Fastmail and other email providers, take a look at Microsoft w/ O365. Yes it's pricy, but it offers a full office suite and can be as low as $60/yr for a business premium plan.
Good riddance… feelings mutual I guess.
I’ll remember this when the GCP sales people call at work
