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Comment by oridecon | Hacker News Reader

Can't I pay to just use a custom domain in a regular Google account? All I want is to use it for my Gmail. I don't have any use for the "G Suite" features and I know that some features are not available there, especially newer ones.

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...

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Whatever you do, do not buy a Google Apps (sorry, G Suite) account for personal use. I made this mistake years ago and it bites me constantly. You get locked in to paying per month just so you get access to the things you bought through it (movies, apps, etc) and for that privilege you get locked out of many new features like Spaces, Google Now email cards, Fi, the new Trips app, Google Play Family Sharing.

I agree fully on the lame way Google rolls out (or fails to roll out) key features for Google Apps. Even when features do roll out, they are sometimes incomplete, for example, you can't set up Google Music family accounts with Google Apps accounts. Dumb. I like Google Music but Spotify is easier for me to use with my family's various google apps accounts.

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.

Those privacy terms apply only for the included apps. But when you search on Google, your searches get mined just like everybody else ;-)

Just like the parent, I once owned a Google Apps account and moved off it because of the lock-in effect. Now I have a personal account and no longer use Gmail at all. So I don't care about Gmail's privacy terms, because it no longer applies to me.

Yeah, Apps accounts have much different privacy terms and this is likely the reason for some of their exclusions such as Google Now email cards but it cannot logically explain why other things don't work like Play Music family plans.

Still, if I had the choice I'd opt in to the standard privacy policy in an instant. I understand some people's concerns about Google information gathering but it's not a concern of mine. I just want things to work.

Google play family plans don't work because Apps is expressly designed for non-family organizations. Ideally, they would have organizational plans, but the parameters for that are different.

Features that aren't relevant to the intended target market may be useful to people making atypical uses, but it's quite likely not commercially sensible to bother with them, and building a robust separate G Suite for Personal Domains offering that takes the right mix of features of the existing consumer and organizational offerings may itself not serve enough of a market to be worth the effort.

At this point I would even pay to transfer everything from my apps account to my good old gmail account :/

Can't you just activate Inbox etc. in your G Suite admin settings? Granted, they are not available to G Suite users instantly after consumers but they are available, nevertheless.

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.

I just use two accounts. One for my mail and calendar and one for the google products. Not really a big deal.

If you just want the custom domain, Fastmail is fantastic. Rock stable, fast, 2FA, modern UI (as good as Gmail, but fewer annoyances), great IMAP, very flexible in terms of domains and rules (uses Sieve), reasonably priced.

I will second this.

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.

I third this.

I recently migrated all my domains to fastmail (left my legacy gapps account as is, just in case) and am super happy with it. I am using a regular google account on the side for all the googley things I need but haven't opened gmail ever since.

The only thing I miss are labels. Once you get used to how to use them, it's hard to go back. I migrated my mailing rules to use folders but that forces me to check every folder for a new mail and don't have it aggregated in my normal inbox.

I fourth this.

I am a super heavy email user and live on Fastmail every day.

I'd just love a boomerang/snooze feature.

And agree on labels, however, it's just due to them following their own open source standards and with IMAP/JMAP emails can only live in one place at a time.

I'm soft trialling Fastmail at the moment (forwarding all email from Gapps directly to Fastmail). I will probably change over my MX records soon to make it official.

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.

Their Android client isn't as great as the native Gmail app, however it's basically a wrapped web interface. And for a web interface, it's great, because it's usable and it means you can have it on any device you want just by going to "fastmail.com".

And btw, on iOS/iPhone Fastmail does push notifications using the native email client: https://blog.fastmail.com/2015/07/17/push-email-now-availabl...

Try the Aqua Mail Android app instead. Slightly nicer UI.

How does it compare to Outlook.com?

Consider Zoho. I have my new business running on it and it's all free. It was very easy to set up my business' domain to be used for email. I still have a grandfathered Google Apps account for personal email, but I'm even considering switching that over since I really only use GMail and Drive, both of which have Zoho equivalents.

I almost lost a job offer due to Zoho's downtime. Nearly a year ago, they were suffering a lot with consistent downtime every day, and a company extended me an offer. I never got the email and the only reason I ever ended up getting the offer was, 3 days after the offer was sent, I switched to Google for work (I think that's what it's called) and the company did their due diligence and reached back out to me.

(Zoho CEO here) We apologize for letting you down last year. We had a string of DDOS attacks that coincided with a flooding event, that made it difficult to restore services quickly. We have made substantial investments in the past year, in terms of infrastructure as well as operations.

Our own 4000-employee organization relies on Zoho services to run our entire business. We hope to earn your trust some day!

I tried Zoho for a few days and had problems with e-mails not getting delivered and other things I can't remember right now. I'm not sure but I think that it showed some IP addresses as blacklisted at mxtoolbox.com. And I did setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

If you have your domain with Google Domains, there's a feature which allows you to forward all emails to your consumer Gmail account. By using Google's mail servers, you don't run into problems with being misclassified as spam.

If I understand this correctly (https://support.google.com/domains/answer/3251241?hl=en)

- 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?

Not quite, but almost. I've been using this setup for a few years now, with my own domain and Gmail.

To answer your questions:

- Login: You'll have two logins (Gmail address, GApps address you@yourdomain.com), but in daily use you only need the Gmail one.

- There is an additional copy of your emails in the GApps account. I configured GApps to move them to the trash after forwarding, but you can't outright delete them. I just empty that trash once a year. You'll also need to setup a mail rule that whitelists either all Spam, or (what I do) all your whitelisted addresses, so that no mails get stuck in GApps spam filtering.

- You'll be able to send emails in Gmail from your custom domain, and it will show only your custom domain in user-visible From: fields, if you configure Gmail to not use the Gmail SMTP user, but your GApps username and password. The "sent via Gmail" is what you get if you don't configure the SMTP server. FYI I use Server: smtp.gmail.com, User: me@mycustomdomain.com (this works!)

- You'll need to add the SPF and MX records for Google Mail to your DNS records. If in the future you ever want to switch from GApps to something else, you'll just need to change those and transfer your mails.

- I don't use any of the other GApps features, as to not get locked in.

If you like, I can send you an email so you can take a look at the headers yourself.

You don't really need a Google Apps account for this if you're using Google Domains as your registrar. You can choose to forward whatever email address you want directly via Google Domains.

https://support.google.com/domains/answer/3251241?hl=en

Of course it might involve manually fiddling with MX records if you're using a different registrar for your domain and forwarding (e.g. with Google Apps) might also be required.

That's new, and did not exist when I setup my domain.

But if I understand that link correctly, if you do this you'll run into the "sent via Gmail" problem the parent poster alluded to, as Google Domains will not issue you a new SMTP username like with GApps. With my version, I'm actually sending mail via the GApps user (and my domain), not the Gmail one, and my Gmail account name is not revealed in the headers.

I have this setup. Your login remains the same i.e. gmail. For receiving emails it acts more or less like a forwarding service without an extra inbox. When you reply to an email sent to the alias, it will choose that alias to send from so you won't accidentally send from your gmail address. Also in email headers you'll see a gmail message id but it won't reveal your gmail address AFAICT.

Can't believe no one has mentioned buying your own domain, running a MTA to reroute mail from those addresses to your current gmail, and then setting your preferred address@yourdomain.com as a send-from address in gmail.

Tricky, depending on the volume you run into problems if you forward the mails.

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.

I've been doing this for years, except that I used to use the DNS provider's mail forwarding feature for it (as opposed to running my own MTA.)

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.)

How much time do you want to spend troubleshooting email delivery issues? Running an MFA that actually gets mail these days isn't trivial.

If you don't want to pay the $5/month/user for G Suite, you can buy an account with a grandfathered free Google Apps plan and change the primary domain to yours.

Now, there's no way to change primary domain. Any methods were blocked from Apr. 2016.

This - sadly.

I also own a legacy account but google really wants you to stop using it.

- At first you were able to just change the primary domains / add new domains at will - Then it was only possible for full gapps accounts. There was the trick to upgrade to the trial, do all the domain changes, revert back to the free tier - Then google changed that as well. Adding a domain in the trial will block you from downgrading until you remove the domain again

I think you can still change the primary domain by upgrading through a gapps partner, but then it's not a legacy account anymore.

That's strange, I still have a change primary domain button on my free account, but I've not used it.

Edit: just tried it and was able to change primary domain and then change it back.

Can't the original owner find a way to recall the account? Saying he was hacked.

Buy with a credit card through one of the companies that resells grandfathered Google Apps accounts and you should be okay.

Edit: I just remembered reading an article [1] about hooking up a regular gmail account to the free tier of mailgun, so you send and receive through your custom domain but otherwise have a plain old gmail account.

[1] https://simplyian.com/2015/01/07/Hacking-GMail-to-use-custom...

> one of the companies that resells grandfathered Google Apps accounts

wow, this is really a thing.

https://www.gappsdomain.com/

http://getgapps.com/

I personally picked up a 1k account from eBay for $199.

It'll never be used but I'm glad I can say I have it.

What is a "1k account"?

Is there a "reputable" reseller that HNers use? I can find tons of resellers but e-mail is too central to my identity to gamble like this. At least I would be able to transfer my domain again, but if they get full access to my stuff even for a few hours I'm already screwed.

(edit: what I mean is that he can recall the account and get full access to it while DNS still points to Google)

You shouldn't have to hand over control of your domain at any point. You buy a placeholder domain from them, log into the placeholder Google Apps admin settings, add your domain to the account, and then switch your domain to be the primary.

None of that works after April afaik

This is almost certainly against the Google Apps TOS. So do so at your own risk.

Someday they may allow custom domains. They were testing it: http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-testing-plan-to-offer-cu...

Sadly that's all I've heard about it.

You don't have to pay to receive and send email with a custom domain using GMail. GMail supports POP3 and SMTP to interface with third party mail servers, and the support for multiple addresses in the interface is very good in my experience.

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