Google deleted a number of free Google Apps email accounts last month or so

Presumably this comes too late to warn anyone who would have been inconvenienced? Or are we supposed to worry that active free accounts are next?

I received a number of emails regarding deactivation of certain accounts. Other accounts which are actively used didn't receive any notifications and remained as they were.

But yes, the Google Apps freemium is greatly missed. Over the years I've mounted quite a number of domains onto the free Google Apps simply to have a single email address available on the domain. In normal circumstances these accounts would receive hardly any traffic.

I'm still looking for an alternative email service where I can, in a single account, mount a large amount of domains for the single reason to have any number of email inboxes available for that domain. To be more precise, I'm looking for a service that allows me to mount an unlimited number of domains and charge me for traffic and storage rather per domain and/or inbox. Maybe this includes a reasonable annual flat fee as well (say $50 USD or something).

Any suggestions welcome..

Yup. Pretty lame. How much were my inactive accounts costing them?

Did the email warning of the shutdown not get forwarded as well?

I'm surprised that you're using forwarding instead of giving your clients access using the gmail app and/or IMAP/SMTP. I've found this works better than forwarding, primarily because I don't then have to maintain my own reliable authenticated SMTP service.

Anyway, my personal experience was that the warning messages before deletion were over-and-above what could be deemed reasonable. They were sent to the domain administrator, and also to the email address specified when creating the account (i.e. to a different domain). The text was something like:

"We noticed that you haven’t used your Google Apps account for the domain [redacted].com in over a year. Please let us know if you’d like to keep this account."

All I had to do to keep the account was log in via the web, just once.

FWIW, I got fair warning about this mailed to the admin address on an abandoned free Apps domain. Google is still being a bit abrupt, but probably sent out a warning that could have been heeded if the admin were more on top of things.

I've got several accounts deleted as well. Let me say that they warned that those accounts were going to be closed with several emails, all sent with weeks of advance. I realize that your customers may have simply ignored all the communications, but in this particular case, Google just did a fair and comprehensible move (at least, makes sense to me). On the other side, Google accounts that were actually actively used, are still there.

This is standard practice with free accounts all across the industry. Inactive free accounts are regularly pruned. As long as the provider has stated their policy explicitly, they are entirely in the clear. They wouldn't even have to send you reminders, that's just courtesy. You have nobody to blame but yourself.