Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying | Hacker News Reader

Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

9to5google.com

660 pointscodyogden1,070 comments

I'm definitely getting screwed over by this. I've hosted close friend's and family's email for a decade now on an old G Apps instance. We only ever used it for email on a custom domain. It was most useful because I could reset passwords for them if they forgot it. Now I'm going to have to figure out what to do.

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.

> 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.

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.

Are you sure about the re-uploading part? I've had an issue like that last week, and am currently stuck with my mails locally, not able to 'put them back' to the IMAP server. Not Gmail though.

I most definitely did re-upload it without any issues to another G suite account. It was in 2014 though, maybe something did change since then. Here [1] people write that there are probably some differences between Gsuite and regular gmail accounts.

[1]: https://superuser.com/questions/446135/import-e-mail-via-ima...

Make sure you are not uploading into the Inbox folder. Any other folder should be fine.

you can use a tool called imap-sync ( at least thats what i remember it was called)

Why would you lose purchases? Can't you continue to log in with the same email@domain just with a different provider for mail / calendar / etc.?

If you migrate to a google workspace subscription wouldn't you keep the purchases?

I don't even think you have to do that. Your Play account is tied to the email address itself, which you can migrate to another provider with DNS, not the workspace / gsuite stuff.

According to what I've read I'll lose access to my google play purchases made under my legacy g suite account unless I decide to pay $6/month indefinitely. I'm not 100% sure, can't be until I do it; but I'm pretty certain, after reading through posts like https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/3195114/transfe...

For what it's worth, I came across this passage:

> After 60 days in suspension, you will no longer have access to Google Workspace core services, such as Gmail, Calendar, and Meet. You may still retain access to additional Google services, such as YouTube and Google Photos.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217

"You may"? May's a stupid word. Do they mean "You are permitted" or "hey, you may have access, you may not - depends how we feel".

Is there a definitive list of which are "Google Workspace core services, such as Gmail, Calendar, and Meet" and which are "additional Google services, such as YouTube and Google Photos."?

Do the 50 (in my case) G Suite legacy accounts on my domain because just 50 regular first-order Google accounts but without the core services? Can I still use gmail and point it at an external email provider?

And it's probably nothing to worry about but it's a bit odd there's no "i'm never going to upgrade and pay 50 users * $6 per month for this so please just cancel the G Suite workspace thing now and let me use my account on Android, with access to the apps and movies I bought, and using some other email provider" option and instead they're probably going to keep nagging me to "provide payment information". What if I use google pay - are they going to assume I'm interested in paying through that?

The list of core services is defined here: https://workspace.google.com/terms/user_features.html

Anything else that happens to work is an additional service.

My guess on the "may" part is that there is no guarantee it'll work, and the product teams of the non-core services won't go out of their way to make it work if it breaks. But they also won't go out of their way to turn it off, and so it will probably just keep working for some time.

People are having online chats with google and are being told they will not keep Photos once they cancel. So I think it's safe to assume that if there's not an official google page saying "you will not lose your photos" etc you must prepare for them to vanish either immediately or at any point in the future.

The official FAQ has been updated with the following:

"What happens to my additional Google services and paid content if I don’t want to pay for Google Workspace premium features?

If you don’t upgrade to a Google Workspace subscription, you will not lose access to other Google Services, including YouTube, Google Photos, and Google Play, nor paid content, including YouTube and Play Store purchases."

Source: https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217?hl=en#zippy=%2Cwha...

Shameless plug but https://epostflytt.se is a online mail transfer tool. Coming to think about it we should add calendar and contacts as well.

What is it? I can't read the page but am interested in something that could ease migration.

You add your credentials for the old and the new account and the tool moves the mail between the two. Very easy if you don't want the hassle. It should indeed exist an english version, I think there's a newer version soon to be released.

You can add several mail accounts and get a mail when the transfer is complete.

Would you be comfortable adding your email credentials for two accounts in a tool you didn't write?

That's how most of those tools work from what I've seen. Some let you use an MS365 admin account with impersonation rights, but that's even worse than giving up the credentials for all the normal user accounts.

The biggest problem with every migration tool I've ever tried is they all do a very poor job of reconciliation. I've even used a few that incorrectly report success for partial (aka broken) migrations.

The MS365 IMAP migrations are a good example of poor reconciliation, but at least they give you total message counts if you're paying attention. What I'd really like is a tree view of the old mailbox vs the new mailbox with read/unread message counts for every folder.

If I was to do this, I would:

1. Change password of each account

2. Enter credentials into tool

3. Wait for process to complete

4. Check process completed successfully

5. Change passwords of each account back to what they were (or new passwords)

This at least minimises the window of malfeasance. There's no guarantee, however, that said untrusted tool doesn't also syphon all mail off into its own data-mining database.

Those that don't trust the tool move their mail themselves I guess.

Things will probably get better as more providers have support for OAUTH2.

But still you allow someone else to see your mail.

Best case is that the destination provider have support for the migration such that you can import directly in your new mail.

Or IMAP support inside the browser!

Something I just discovered is that Office 365 Family only lets you use custom domains if they are hosted by GoDaddy. If you want to use another domain registrar you have to get Microsoft 365 Business, which has a similar price as Google Workspace :(

There's no way I'm moving my domain to GoDaddy.

There are reddit posts showing how to bypass the Godaddy requirement. I used them to setup Office 365 for my family.

I have since moved the family emails to icloud mail since we already pay for icloud+ and I get multiple domain support, and aliases.

Those Reddit posts are two years old.

I have considered moving to iCloud as well. How do you find the UX? It has been a decade+ since I used the Mail app but I don’t have fond memories.

I find it cumbersome. I have a custom domain on iCloud and it's terrible for checking the mail from web browser (which I need to do whilst at work).

Not only that. the 2FA requirement is particularly bad. You cannot use 2FA apps (such as authenticator.cc / bitwarden / 1password); the requirement is having an apple device that you have physically signed in on before to be able to allow you to log in. Every single time. Even if you save the cookies.

I absolutely hate Google and Apple’s 2FA of verifying with a diff device. So annoying.

I don’t need to check mail by web browser though. So maybe I’ll do it.

If I was starting off afresh I certainly wouldn't do that.

All it takes is for some partnership manager who deals with the GoDaddy rep to get enough pressure put on them about this for the workarounds to become impossible within a few weeks.

And unlike most other things, this being unofficial, there need not even be an announcement with a few weeks to months of transition time. You'll just wake up overnight and it's not working.

While purely anecdotal, mine's been working for over two years using a .tl tld.

Interesting. I didn't realise Apple supported multiple domains. That must have happened after I moved away. I actually went the other way from Apple to Microsoft. I run a Linux laptop and iPhone, and the kids run all Apple kit. I've found the Linux support for MS better than for Apple (Evolution for email and calendar; OneDrive for live home directory sync across devices; and I use Firefox for password synchronisation). I tried to find a way to use iCloud storage for file sync with Linux but found nothing.

>> aliases

Can you wildcard aliases with your domain?

Looks like only one domain can be connected on this

It's a dollar cheaper AND you get the full suite of Office applications to use please more space (1TB). O365 Business Basic is a better deal.

Just use iCloud. It allows you to setup custom domains no worries and give emails to everyone who’s included into your family plan. I’ve got two custom domains setup that I share with my wife.

Alternatively you can use Fastmail but I recentely moved from it to iCloud for consolidation purposes. Don’t get me wrong, Fastmail is absolutely awesome and I had great experience, I just wanted to consolidate.

Don't have any apple devices, not sure if i even can.

For you it is Fastmail then, they are awesome and integrate with 1Password for an-email-per-service thing (known as Hide My Email in Apple's world)

Both Microsoft and Yahoo offer the ability to do “imap in”. Could that be used to sync down the email from Google and then you reconfigure your DNS provider to forward email to your Yahoo/Microsoft personal email account and configure that account to send email using your custom domain name.

What is lost in that case?

IMAP doesn't sync stuff like calendar, contacts, tasks, settings, email filters (not usually, anyway), and many online clients will only download the email headers in bulk, not the contents; those are often lazy-loaded in when you open a message, especially from more than two weeks ago.

A more reliable way to transfer email would be to download all email through POP3 and then copy them over to an IMAP account on the new server.

You can definitely export your account information (in fact, European data portability laws pretty much require Google to provide such a functionality) but importing it may require some custom tooling.

Unless either Google or the receiving party provides an official migration tool, migration is probably a pretty sucky experience. I know it can be done (companies and educational institutions switch between Google and Microsoft all the time) but I'm not sure if there's any good migration path unless you can get in contact with someone from sales.

You can use mailinabox.

I never got this e-mail. Does that mean I'm not subject to this?

Your email is probably sitting in a job queue. I would start looking at other options now.

I didn't get the email either, or at least not yet, but when I logged on to the admin console the notice was there.

Unless you verify that it's not in the admin console (and continue to verify that it's not there), I'd assume you're subject to it.

I've not got this either and its not in the admin console. I'm guessing I'll see it in the next couple of days. Think I'll be moving to Zoho mail.

Fortunately, all my Google stuff like Youtube and Google Play purchases are tied to a gmail account. I intentionally didn't use my custom domain for that, as I thought this would happen one day. I didn't expect the free email to last so long though.

I received this email about an hour ago, so it must be being sent out progressively.

You're complaining that a service you use all the time for a decade for free now might cost the equivalent of a cup of coffee per month?

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?

> The loss of Youtube purchases; android play purchases, etc. is going to hurt

It's basically blackmail: pay the new monthly fee which you didn't agree to when you signed up, or lose access to everything you've already paid for.

"paid for"?

The paid Android apps, YouTube purchases, etc which the parent commenter bought using his account. If it was just email hosting (the GSuite service itself), it wouldn't be such a big deal.

I misunderstood. Thank you for the clarification.

I mean, I’m annoyed sure but I’ve gotten over a decade of free service. When I saw the announcement for a half second considered setting up an email server again then remembered what a massive pain in the ass that use to be and just going to pay the fee

I'm getting precisely one value added service over a regular google account - a custom domain.

I dont need any of the other workspace related frippery, I don't want it, it makes some of the features of the account harder to use - it was better before it had the notion of an organization even.

I just want to be able to create some gmail accounts under my domain, I'm not a business, I'm a guy who handed out email accounts to his friends, now I gotta figure out if any of them are using them still.

Same here, its the domain I care about. Its my fiancees last name in our countries TLD. Here name is really short and nice, so it has been awesome. This is a bummer, since her sister and fiancee are also using it. Thank god I have not been using it for more than an email alias, and the kids too.

Same thing here. Within the past two years I started a transition to a regular Google Account b/c GApps Free was a second class citizen (no family groups, etc.)

Killing the free tier now is a huge PITA, and especially aggravating without them implementing any way to carry over licenses to a regular google account which is still free.

That's one reason why I have tried to only buy things on my personal Gmail account (@gmail.com), a few times I forgot and bought things on my private domain.

This is very troublesome... It is possible to create a general, personal Google account using any email address (iirc) so I wonder if it is possible to just migrate to your own email solution (since you own the domain) and keep the google account, or at least migrate it to a regular account.

It appears this is not possible. I don’t need any of the G Suite features, and I don’t even need email. I just need my single user inside G Suite to be converted to a normal unmanaged Google account but there doesn’t seem to be a way to do that.

Some people are saying if you convert your account to Google workspace then cancel that then you end up with what you want. You'd keep Photos and YouTube but no Gmail, contacts, calendar etc. I'm trying to discover if this is true.

I would still need Docs, which is “core”.

I don't really understand. Why, when leaving G suite and going back to a normal account, would you not have access to stuff like Docs, Gmail etc? It's like you're being punished, rather than simply not having extra features.

FYI this doesn't actually seem to be the case... quoting from my other comment in a different thread:

Over the last week I've gone through all of the steps of registering a new domain, setting it up with Google Workspace, sharing some docs back and forth, deleting the entire organization, and then signing up for a new google account using the same email address (so no gmail). After each step I waited 24 hours.

I was able to access Docs and share back and forth using this reused address on the new account. You'll obviously lose all of the existing share connections, but it's not like the address itself is burned.

> You're complaining that a service you use all the time for a decade for free now might cost the equivalent of a cup of coffee per month?

It’s easy to paint customers as frightful moaners, but that’s a surefire way to lose customers, or at least alienate them. Google’s Reader debacle comes to mind.

In particular, the short notice period (3 months + 2 months grace) for something people have been using for a decade is jarring.

And these were the earliest customers of Google Apps for your Domain, and created a lot of positive word of mouth publicity for Google.

Ultimately, it’s not about right and wrong, it’s about how you make customers feel, and Google institutionally doesn’t know how to make ordinary customers feel great when things go wrong. It’s an institutional issue. (Exception: if you’ve got enterprise support for GCP. Then you get a lot of engagement.)

By the same token, people have been using free Gmail accounts for a while now. What do you think the perception will be if Google asked them to pony up $60 a year with 5 months’ notice?

> In particular, the short notice period (3 months + 2 months grace) for something people have been using for a decade is jarring.

For me, this raises the obvious question. How long a notice period is long enough? Six months? Eight? A year? Five years? A decade?

I think we can all agree that a decade would be an excessive and unreasonable expectation.

> By the same token, people have been using free Gmail accounts for a while now. What do you think the perception will be if Google asked them to pony up $60 a year with 5 months’ notice?

Probably about the same as if Google asked them to pony up $60 a year with a year's notice. Which is to say incredibly hostile because people have come to view free Gmail accounts as a basic public service for which no payment will ever be required under any circumstances.

How long a notice period is long enough?

Looking at it another way, Google's most recent net profit is $18.94 billion per quarter.

I have no idea but if there are 1 million G Suite Legacy accounts out there at $60 per year. That would increase their revenue $60 million per year.

So just assume all that revenue is net profit which would make their quarterly net profit go from $18.94 billion to $18.955 billion for the low cost of pissing off 1 million people.

You never get to the point of making $19 billion a quarter if you aren't constantly looking for ways to optimize pricing and make a little more money. And at the individual level, $60 million is $60 million. What percentage of the bottom line it is is much less relevant than what percentage of your team's top line revenue it is and how it impacts your ability to get a bonus, increase headcount, get a promotion, etc.

The PR backlash costs worth way more than what this would have saved.

Their main customer base (by orders of magnitude) are advertisers. I'm not convinced that this move will change anything at all in those relationships.

I, myself, am a 'victim' of this, with two personal accounts grandfathered in from the good ol' days. I'm moving both of them to Protonmail.

> Which is to say incredibly hostile because people have come to view free Gmail accounts as a basic public service for which no payment will ever be required under any circumstances.

which is called entitlement. And i'm seeing more and more of this sense of entitlement as more and more people (esp. young people) being exposed to the internet - and this seeps into their other lives offline.

You do know they make money from you using Google Gmail because they serve ads. And you're probably logged in while you're searching and using other Google services so they know who you are and your history & they can show you better ads. Google actually does make money. If everyone is not logged in when they're using Google, Google will be less able to serve relevant ads and make less money.

Google has shown such "entitlement" on many occasions. Take, for one example, their idea that they are entitled to not pay Sonos for their technology which just came back to bite them. Of course it was Google's customers who ended up getting the short end of the stick.

> their idea that they are entitled to not pay Sonos for their technology

Might want to research that one. Sonos “technology” here is the idea that multiple speakers can be adjusted by one knob… but the knob happens to be software.

It is a bit more than that.

https://techstory.in/google-found-to-have-violated-sonos-pat...

You're right. There are 5 garbage patents instead of one.

> 9195258: System and method for synchronizing operations among a multiplicity of digital data processing devices that are separately clocked

I am struggling to see merit. It reads like "devices can play music in sync if you send them the timing info" which is not novel. Maybe I'm missing something, but I am doubtful. The patent system is full of garbage and patents are written to be obtuse on purpose.

> 10209953: Playback device

The abstract is literally identical to the previous patent word for word. I don't think this should at all be considered a separate patent. Partly because the claims seem like garbage, but mostly because it's just more of the same from the first. This is written to be almost impossible to parse, but the first claim in English is "two devices on a LAN can connect and coordinate playback based on one device's clock". It's NTP. Sorry, it's "NTP, plus audio".

> 8588949: Method and apparatus for adjusting volume levels in a multi-zone system

One knob, multiple speakers. Old idea. Every smart home app has exactly this same concept for lights and speaker systems have done this for decades without the software. It is not novel.

> 9219959: Multi-channel pairing in a media system

Jesus Christ. "You can use multiple speakers to play multiple audio channels." It is not novel that your speakers can be "smart".

> 10439896: Playback device connection

Ugh. "You can use your phone to add a device."

None of this stuff is novel. The last one seems the most novel, but also not valid because it essentially describes part of the WPS protocol, but using an app instead of a router button.

I don't see that it's "entitlement" to think these are garbage. The software industry giants have fought a long time for the patent office to acknowledge software patents that are not actually novel. I honestly hope this crap starts to hurt them more and maybe they'll start pushing for reform. But probably not because the primary effect is to harm smaller competitors.

It is not free. Google collects personal information for advertising purposes.

Let's not forget that Google's spam filtering racket has made it next to impossible to host your own email in any kind of practical manner, or even use many hosted email services effectively over the years.

This. I hosted my own email for over 15 years, and last year was the year I gave up. There was nothing wrong with my machine's IP, I was doing the right thing email server wise, but Gmail still didn't let me deliver. A racket is a good way of describing it.

We've got to flip the narrative on this. Google deliverability is poor, users should switch providers if they'd like to get their messages.

users are never going to switch because by-definition-minor-mailers cant reach them

Users may not switch (right away) but how we as a community talk about this problem can switch. This will ultimately help the problem get fixed when perceptions shift, either within Google or by new users evaluating other options given Google’s reputation of poor deliverability/interoperability.

Also I suspect a lot of Google’s early adopters will be switching away due to this change. These are the tech-savvy evangelists who helped build Google Apps to what it is, and can plausibly do it for another service too.

Absolutely. I set up my own domain last year, hoping to run a mailserver directly off it. The whole thing was perfectly configured, but the 'some dude' IP address made it unusable. Eventually I moved the domain's hosting to Fastmail, and now the mail actually arrives.

I don't think so and I'm not a fan of the "(esp. young people)" notion.

Since I can remember email services across Microsoft, Yahoo and Google have been free. It is completely okay for us to expect that to continue as it has been around for so long. Now if you want perhaps more premium features, or access to the entire suite of product then yes it is expected you would need to pay.

Let's not act like providing users with free email hasn't been beneficial for these companies either.

We used to get email from ISPs. ISPs weren't free.

You still can get your email from ISP's, but I don't know why you would. In my experience ISP based email is average.

But Hotmail and Yahoo for example have been around since the mid 90's. That's 27 years of free email.

Google created and offered the service for free, ie. they created the sense of entitlement themselves.

As such, they have no justifiable reason not to expect user reactions reeking of entitlement.

That they did. Per Google's press release for Google Apps:

>Furthermore, organizations that sign up during the beta period will not ever have to pay for users accepted during that period (provided Google continues to offer the service).

http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/08/google-launches-host...

I signed up for my account 1 year after that... 15 years I have been on that account, 5 years I have been saying I need to de-google my life... 2022 Google gave me the shove in the ass I needed to pull that trigger...

Thanks Google, finally I have the motivation to end my relationship with you

I'm also in the same situation, I opted only because they offered it for free "Organizations that sign up during the beta period will not ever have to pay for users accepted during that period. "

I have to agree on this.

Google should not set the wrong expectation right from the start. At that point in time, the impression I got is Google App is just a typical Gmail account with the additional feature of using custom domain with some administrative features.

And with what Google is doing today to Google Apps (now packaged as G Suite legacy free), there is nothing stopping Google from doing the same thing to the typical Gmail accounts as well.

Imagine you have been using your whatever@gmail.com for everything and is deeply integrated in you life. One fine day, Google bite back and also say you have to start paying to use whatever@gmail.com, how does it sound? We don't own the gmail.com domain and we will be held ransom to stay or lose the email address if we don't want to pay.

So are we also wrong to have the expectation of entitlement that the normal Gmail account will be forever free to us (i.e. provided Google is still around)?

You shouldn’t get to play the ‘get off my lawn’ card without disclosing your age.

> which is called entitlement.

Or you can call it bait and switch by the company.

Who said the notice period should be an entire decade? Or even five years?

They're arguing against the (IMO ridiculous) assertion that 5 months is "short notice." Everyone here agrees an hour's notice would be far too short. Everyone here agrees a decade or five years is too long. So where is the line?

It doesn't mean anyone suggested it should be any of those lengths.

It may take me two months just to figure out how to migrate my services someplace else. I'm hosting 10 accounts worth of email.

I'd say that a year or a year + 3 months is a reasonable transition period.

People need to assess the situation, evaluate existing solutions (including paying for the service), what needs to be done, etc. They're not doing it as their job, so do not necessarily know the current market offers.

Then they need to allocate time and resources to do the transition. Time, when the transition is the least disruptive, and the resources are usually availability if an in-house specialist. I know plenty of companies where upgrading a software take more than a year, with all their budgets, IT departments and external contractors. A typical G Suite user won't have all that expertise readily available.

That means that the transition will often require an IT enthusiast working in their free time. It's reasonable to assume that they will have at least one vacation per year to do that. So if the transition is ≥ 12 month, everyone and their mom should be able to do it.

If the transition is 3-5 months, I can see how it can be a problem even for commercial users with a dedicated task force.

I moved from Gmail to Fastmail recently, because Google Sites forced me to move from V1 to V2. However, in their defense, they gave me over a year's notice to convert my site and I still didn't do it. They made it read-only after a year, which is what pushed me into trying the migration. It was a disaster: the Google V2 site was slow (my release notes page took 15 seconds to load but used to load in a couple seconds) and the site looked like crap. So I had to do Takeout and hand-edit Google's 512KB-per-page of Javascript and HTML. But now, pages average 19KB each, the site looks great, and it's way easier to manage with Asciidoc instead of using a browser editing window.

My point: it doesn't matter how long they give us to switch - most people won't do it until they are absolutely forced.

This reminds me of Microsoft back in the day. Windows was (is?) crap, unreliable, and without the kindness of technical friends and relatives willing to work on someone's Windows issues for free, Microsoft may not have ever made it past DOS. I got sick of working on everyone's Windows problems so got rid of all my Windows machines and just told people "sorry, I don't have any Windows machines anymore and can't help you". And it was the truth - after about a year I really didn't know how to help them anymore! It's great!

Maybe it's time for technical people to stop working for free for Microsoft and Google. If their stuff is crap, let them sort it out with their wonderful customer service that you now have to pay for.

A reasonable standard is one month for every year of use, especially for those of us who are not businesses.

It's not 60 bucks a year for most of us, it's whatever the domain costs plus $6 per account times the number of accounts. In my case it's 720 dollars a year, which is more than it is worth.

Actually, I think that the "right move" should be quite different: DONT STOP a service with a short deadline but DEGRADATE it with a long deadline.

If you STOP a service (or turn it to a PAID service) on short notice - and a service that is essential to people - then people will have to rush to find a solution... and will feel been extorted.

If you DEGRADATE the service more and more, people will slowly leave or upgrade to PAID, but they will have the choice.

Moreover, email is really a sensitive matter: it's a main point of contact for... well... email... but altogether for online service (IRS, website account, etc.) and in a way our digital life. So you can't just leave such a short notice. However, you have to let your FREE customer know that they have a choice to make quickly... so DEGRADATION is a good tradeoff I think

They have been trying that for awhile, legacy accounts have not been getting some of the new feature, space was more limited on the legacy accounts than the paid accounts, and a few other things.

Most of us however we perfectly fine with the limited on the accounts... in reality if they just gave me the exact same level of service as they do the free gmail but with a custom domain I would be fine / happy. That is after all what the original service I signed up for was in the beginning.

I have no interest in Google Workspace, I want Gmail, Drive, and Identity. That is it. Maybe Photos... All of which they offer free to everyone still today just not with a custom domain

Same here. I honestly don't need the custom domain email stuff (I can move that to another provider). Just give me an option to turn my account into a regular @gmail.com account with working email/calendar/meet like everybody else paying $0, and I'll be happy. I'm just not a fan of being left with a crippled account even compared to their free service if I want to keep my existing stuff outside of email.

I'm thinking of doing something similar, basically:

1. cancelling my Legacy Free Edition

2. moving my domain to another provider (e.g. Proton Mail, Fastmail, etc.)

3. creating a personal Gmail account using one of the email address that will be formerly part of my Legacy Free Edition

I have some hesitance that the Google account creation flow won't allow me to do this.

Five months is not short notice, full stop. Even three months I would have a hard time thinking of any reasonable argument. The length of time you've used a service is irrelevant, the question is how much of a lift is it to switch, and nothing on Google Apps would take you anywhere near 90 days to switch out of. I pay something like $65 or $70/yr for O365 Outlook for a personal domain email, and the email is the only thing I get with that, so this is on the cheaper end to boot. I'm sure you can find custom email domain handling for less though.

> What do you think the perception will be if Google asked them to pony up $60 a year [for Gmail] with 5 months’ notice?

Realistically, I and a lot of other people would think "remind me in 4 months and ~25 days so I can put my credit card in." But it's also not a valid comparison because in Gmail you're the product via advertising. Not the case for Apps.

I found out because I saw it on HN, this page was posted on googles side, last month.

How many people have not even been told yet?

I'd be happy to pay them 120 bucks a year for what I'm getting now, 10 email accounts, of which, one sees actual use.

Same here. Question for anyone that knows: do I have to pay to keep my gmail account that I only use to manage my GCP services? (Auth)

> I'd be happy to pay them 120 bucks a year for what I'm getting now

The only reason I'm still using it is because account bound purchases are attached to it, otherwise it would have been long gone. As long as there is no way of transferring these anywhere google will not get a single cent.

For those of us who have other things to do than migrate email, 5 months is super short. Also, I just found out from this post (ironically the mail they sent me about it went to the low priority box).

Luckily I just use it for domain forwarding, so it won't be a huge issue, but I do have some accounts tied to the gmail auth, and untangling that mess will be hard.

How really can you tell me how many project migration project that involve changing a whole basic infrastructure is done in less than 5 months from idea to completion in your company? For a personal project where you may not have a lot of time to invest in this is quite short.

Back when I was using Apple I paid for an @mac.com address. I could get used to paying for email again, though I may be in the minority there. Although being a paid product didn't stop Apple from killing it.

I don't mind paying for e-mail personally. There's a lot of odds and ends stuff you have to deal with operationally if you self-host, and most of the places that charge you don't display ads.

> Although being a paid product didn't stop Apple from killing it.

Email to whoever@mac.com is still working as far as I know, and I send emails to a couple of people who still use mac.com addresses all the time (whoever@icloud.com also works).

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201771

Also @me.com. Apple have some sick domains!

This was the .Mac subscription. Poking around the history, it looks like I misunderstood Apple's move at the time. When they discontinued .Mac they also seem to have switched to the me.com domain. My impression at the time from whatever messaging they sent out to subscribers was "no more mac.com email" so that's when I switched to Gmail.

> It’s easy to paint customers as frightful moaners, but that’s a surefire way to lose customers, or at least alienate them. Google’s Reader debacle comes to mind.

Years later and I still don't use Google (except for search and sometimes maps) because of Reader.

Isn’t search the most important part of Google? And in a way, everything they do is usually to get you to use Google Search (Chrome, Android, etc).

The problem with this argument is that for many (including myself), we just wanted to use Gmail and other Google services with our own domains. That was free and worked perfectly for everything Google offered at the time.

Now, they are asking for more money (It was $6/mo; it's now $12/mo) for less features that apply to us (can't use YouTube Premium or Google Homes on a family plan if you have G-suite, can't port a Voice number from a consumer account into a G-Suite account, amongst other limitations) because Google decided to convert this offering into their business collaboration portfolio instead of leaving it as its own thing.

Worse, if you want to move all of your email, photos, Google Maps activity, etc. to a free account, well, too bad! You can't! You can use takeout.google.com to download everything, but most of that data can't be imported into consumer.

Basically, we were duped, and now our data is trapped.

Personally, I would be happy if Google offered a way to convert legacy accounts into Google Consumer accounts like flipping a switch. Shit, I'd even pay a few bucks/month still for exactly this experience without all of the Google Workspace-y stuff that I never use. (I never use Google Chat, Google Meet, or any of their business-only offerings _because I never wanted those things in the first place!_)

Someone not paying, using the free tier is by definition not a "customer". At least not yet, they are a potential customer at best.

Google makes a hell of a lot of money from me and people like me by selling ads based on multiple aspects of our lives. Spare me the "I'm not a customer" BS.

They make a bunch of money off you, but they don't receive that money from you. The customer is the one you receive money from.

"You're not a customer" isn't BS, it's a fact. Time to realise: You (and I) are the product.

I host 7 emails right now, it'd cost $500/year for email moving forward.

I'd be happy to convert accounts to personal Gmail accounts and do mail forwarding. I'd be happy to move to a family plan for $100/year.

After being a user for a decade, you'd think Google would provide me a reasonable way to pay them for their services. But I can't swing $500/year for email.

Migrating to another email provider might be a pain when it comes to importing older mailbox content, but any of the alternative email providers would be way cheaper in the long run.

I use Protonmail for myself and around 5 others, with close to 10 mailboxes. I highly recommend it. Not sure what's available from them re. importing older mailboxes - I've never done it - but everything I've used jas been fantastic.

Protonmail's cheap too. Less than $50 annually for all that I use, including multi-user VPN.

I've heard good things about Fastmail too, of you're looking for an alternative.

Do you know what plan you are on for Protonmail? I can't see anything that would allow that many mailboxes for anything less than 288 EUR a year?

Fastmail works pretty well and it's priced from $37.20/year/user. Still a bit pricey if you're not a heavy user and the mailbox is just for random website contacts.

I started migrating to Migadu last night after seeing this post. I have 5 domains and a few users and it should cost me $20 a year once their trial expires.

Microsoft has a Gmail migration tool. not sure if MS is cheaper, but it is stupid easy and fast to migrate from Gmail/gsuite to o365. just plug in credentials and hit run.

I've moved small businesses on gsuite free, multiple personal gmails over using their tool, and I have not had an issue in the dozen or so corps I moved

Doesn't that only work on the business plans? (Not the family plans that are 6 users for $99/yr)

ZOHO mail works for me. The entry level premium account is €0.9/user/month. Free tier is reasonable too (up to 5 users). I find their web UI a bit overloaded with features, but they have all check boxes crossed.

The email service that Google provides for free solely to data-mine / profile you and be assured they always know your IP addresses/browsers so they can better track you, and so on?

And they will be doing the same thing when getting paid.

It would be nice if the system worked but it isn't currently for me. It says I have to have 2 factor enable which I have had enabled for a long time.

> You're complaining that a service you use all the time for a decade for free now might cost the equivalent of a cup of coffee per month?

People always complain about bait and switch tactics.

Give them a way to revert to a free personal account without losing access to their files, data, and any digital goods they may have purchased and let them decide if they want to covert to a paid account or not.

You can always use Google Takeout so you don't lose access to your files.

You can always use Google Takeout so you don't lose access to your files.

Does Google Takeout allow you to download de-DRMed media you've paid for through Google properties? Provide functional APKs of paid Android apps that will continue working without an active and functional Google account?

How do I migrate my domains purchased under my google workspace account?

Those should be pretty easy, provided you do it now. Domain transfers are straightforward with any provider. I moved mine to Namecheap a few years ago.

unfortunately, that isn't reliable. hwwn the ended google play, I lost TBs of music because Google takeout didn't work, and there isn't a sole at Google I can contact to get support for it.

That's not a substitute for not allowing people to choose between a free account and a paid account.

Takeout is "fine" for core services (Gmail, Calendar, Contacts) but unusable for anything involving activities and events. Examples:

- Google Maps search history, custom maps, stars

- Google Photos albums, comments, activity

- Google Search activity

- YouTube stuff, of any kind (unless you use something like Soundiiz, but even then it's nothing like Google Play Music was where your files were YOUR FILES, and somethings aren't available on the streaming platforms)

The account that locked them into Google for a decade? Yes. No competitor could begin to attempt to sell a new service against free. Now the social contract is switching after all the baiting and it’s money time.

It’s typical in SaaS to grandfather in old accounts. You take the hit because your later client base is so much bigger, and why not keep your early adopters sweet. Google has calculated the value of those early adopters and decided it’s worth it. Wait until customers have too much to lose and then yank the fishing line. “You call them early adopters? We call them freeloaders.”

This is why I use an iPhone. I pay the money and I get to keep (mostly) my data. Google, you give away your data and pay nothing. Now you give data and you pay? Ick. If Apple starts giving away my data I’d be equally pissed.

Takeout is a terriffic service, but not a great way of doing this. It will actually create additional work. When you set up the new microsoft account you can simply migrate all calendars, contacts and mail as part of the setup. [1]

A lot of people are talking about entitlement and saying how people shouldn't complain when free stuff goes away. I think those people are missing the point. Google is an incredibly profitable company and it would cost them almost nothing to continue to offer this service. By choosing not to, they piss people off (rightly or wrongly) and won't make much of anything in return. We can speculate about how they got to a place where maintaining this service was painful enough to justify doing that, but from the outside it seems like a poor decision that is hostile to users and antithetical to how they used to do things. That plays into the narrative that this ain't your mamma's google any more and something cool about the 2000s spirit has passed away.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/import-gmail-to-o...

Yes. Because non-free is infinitely more than free.

Imagine nothing changes, but now your wife demands you pay her cost of cup of coffee every time you have sex. Does that eff you up a little bit or do you barely notice?

Um, depending on where you live, wouldn't that create some legal headache?

It's a minimum of $6/m per inbox so if you have just 10 emails it's $720/year. That's not a small chunk of change if you're just using the email feature.

No. People are pissed off because this is a clear example of bait and switch. Google advertised this as Free forever. Forever isn't a decade.

If they had instead marketed it as 'free for a decade and then you'll pay some arbitrary amount' what do you think the adoption would have been?

I'm in a different boat than OP so maybe I can also provide a different perspective. I have a half-dozen legacy free G Suite accounts that I set up way back in the day. One was sort of a "junk email" domain that I used for logins on sites I registered for to try out and whatnot. Another was for my main personal domain. Another was for a family domain. A couple others were projects that then got retired. Now I'm down to two personal Google Workspace accounts and I probably will pay for one of them, while closing the other.

But the biggest issue for me right now is the club I run, which has nearly 30 accounts on our Google Workspace domain. The only reason I did this, way back when, was because of the promise of "free forever."

While we have about 30 people on Google Workspace, we have another 70 or so "non-staff" members. Our entire group of about 100 fundraises for our website costs every year, which are considerable for an all-volunteer group ($2000-ish) because we have a pretty resource intensive MediaWiki installation, and other resources.

We've spent 10 years integrating with Google. All of our other resources use Google login. Our group has dozens of Google Groups used for sub-committees. We use Google Drive/Docs excessively. And so on.

But there's no way we can afford to DOUBLE our costs just for Google Workspace. And we can't get a non-profit discount because we're not a charitable organization – we're just a club of writers.

So for us, this is a huge nuisance because not only is Google breaking the agreement it made with us ("FREE FOREVER"), but I don't have the time or resources to manage this kind of transition to something else. And... what, even? If we had known from the beginning they'd break their promise of being free forever, I just wouldn't have built so much infrastructure on top of this system.

You see how things change in perspective depending where you are in the world. Google cost would be nowhere near a coffee per month. If I consider my family, the 4 of us, the cost would be equivalent to going 1 extra week per month to the supermarket. Per year terms? It would be like saving the money to spend a weekend at the beach at a nice hotel once a year. I want that money for me!

Edit: I'm in Brazil BTW.

Think about it this way:

Google: "Come enjoy this limited version of our service, it's absolutely free!"

Consumer: "Excellent. I was going to go with this other service, but since this one is free I will take advantage of it!"

Years later...

Google: "Ok, now that you have many years of data in our system, it's time for you to start paying!"

Consumer: "Wait... what?"

Yes, it's been free. But Google offered it for free and now people have years of data in it. Data which could have been in another service had Google not offered this one for free to begin with. It's kind of like a bait and switch. Get people in, get them to sink most of their life into it, and then start charging.

Also, it's not like a lot of people were out looking for this kind of solution. The fact that it was free brought in a LOT of people who otherwise wouldn't have done it, and are now tied down to it.

That's why a lot of people are mad, and to me it is justifiable.

Check out https://360.yandex.com/business/tariff .

They have a free “limited” plan that should be good just for a custom domain email.

I switched to Fastmail about 6 months ago after a decade on Google Apps. Yes, it’s paid, but I like it.

The problem isn't just mail. Mail is easy to migrate, but this means you either pay, or you lose access to everything you bought on that account, like Android apps, music, YouTube premium (and playlists), and so on

I can’t help you there. I don’t rely on those other things much. I still buy all my mp3s and I don’t have many apps on my iPhone. It was partly principled opposition, partly indifference.

I've had good experiences with Mailbox.org - the basic plan supports multiple domains with wildcards. Also, a neat free option is Seznam.cz though I don't have considerable personal experience with the domain feature on it.

> The loss of Youtube purchases; android play purchases, etc. is going to hurt.

If you migrate to a different email provider, you won't lose access to any of your purchases.

Do you have a definitive source form Google on that? There seem to be conflicting messages from Google. (Not helped by the "may" wording on this page: https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?article_ur... )

Yes, the official FAQ has been updated with the following:

"What happens to my additional Google services and paid content if I don’t want to pay for Google Workspace premium features?

Source: https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217?hl=en#zippy=%2Cwha...

Having been through maybe a dozen of these over the last decades, my experience says that when all costs/hours/conversations are added up it’s going to be cheaper and maintain those relationships better if you simply bill your friends and family so everyone can stay with Gmail.

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.

Zoho is the only one I know that still offers free email with custom domains, but with limited number of users - https://www.zoho.com/mail/custom-domain-email.html

Having used Microsoft Outlook for personal use and Gmail for work, the UI for Google is so much better. Much less clutter IMO.

> Microsoft's Family offering is way better

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 ...

>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.

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.

I totally get that this is largely about losing a decade of "purchased" stuff that is tied to the email address, meaning you're being heavily steered into starting paying for emails etc just to keep your purchased movies, apps, and so on.

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).

I have a number of users at user1/user2/etc@mydomain.com on G Suite. If I started to use Fastmail, could they all continue to use their existing email addresses at Fastmail to send/receive mail, access their historical emails (if I copy those across) etc using whatever client? And second question: if after this G Suite shutdown in May (or whenever) Gmail is stopped for these users they can presumably still link Fastmail to Gmail? Or would they have to use some other email client? Would they each get their own credentials for logging in or would I have to trust them with my "main" Fastmail credentials? I've never used another email provider before.

(I'm not affiliated with Fastmail, just a user of their services. Please do research to double-check stuff.)

> I have a number of users at user1/user2/etc@mydomain.com on G Suite. If I started to use Fastmail, could they all continue to use their existing email addresses at Fastmail to send/receive mail, access their historical emails (if I copy those across) etc using whatever client?

Fastmail supports multiple users per domain (and multiple domains btw). For those users it should only need the client updating with details of Fastmail's servers instead of Google's. Then it should work the same.

> And second question: if after this G Suite shutdown in May (or whenever) Gmail is stopped for these users they can presumably still link Fastmail to Gmail? Or would they have to use some other email client?

You'd not be using the GMail app at that point. You would either be using Fastmail's own app or a third party client such as the Outlook app (which is actually very good, only moderately tied to MS, and works with other email providers).

If your users are using GMail on the web they'd switch to the Fastmail site instead and, personally, I think that wipes the floor with the mess that GMail has become.

> Would they each get their own credentials for logging in or would I have to trust them with my "main" Fastmail credentials? I've never used another email provider before.

From Fastmail's user configuration screen: "Each user has their own inbox and login".

---

Whatever and whoever you choose, try it first whilst you've still got time. Pick up a really cheap domain name (a random one as it is a throwaway for testing) and start a trial account. Configure a few users, set up the app, and try it out.

Transferring emails is quick with Fastmail, but I wouldn't do that for any kind of test as it is very easy to get a setting wrong and move them from GMail instead of copy them, which makes your trial somewhat more permanent unless you move them back.

Thanks, but Fastmail is $5 per user per month if you want to use your own domain. Not much less than Google's $6 per user per month. I'm going to want between 2 and 4 users, but they're not heavy users and I just know I'm going to be wondering why I'm bothering to pay when I could just create another google account, have access to docs/calendar/drive/etc which I'm apparently not going to have access to even if I am successful in doing the "update to workspace/don't pay for workspace/cancel workspace/keep the workspace accounts in a sort of zombie state" dance.

For what it's worth only the admin user has to be on the Standard tier to use your own domain. The others can be on the basic tier of €3/user/month from where I am.

Just to add, one of my golden rules for online stuff is to never use one of the ecosystem providers for my email or anything critical.

I have accounts with MS, Google, and Apple, but my domains are elsewhere and my emails are with Fastmail.

The reason is simple. There are too many tales of the ecosystem providers cutting off accounts with no reason and no recourse. If that happens I may well lose some purchases (which ought to be illegal, and I don't buy from the ecosystem providers anyway personally) but I will not be locked out of anything other than devices that need their account (iOS, Android, Azure, etc).

Give one of these providers control over either your domains or your emails and you have a single point of failure for your whole online life (emails, banking, password resets, etc) and whose main concern is policing their obscure Ts & Cs for their other cloud properties. The risk is huge.

Users won't lose anything purchased - your google login will stay the same (Same as you can use your Yahoo e-mail as google login), you will just lose g suite domain hosting.

Doesn't affect me, but that's useful info for those caught up in this - thanks.

I'm not following your line of thought.

G Suite domain hosting includes the email address and the user licenses (albeit free ones.) If you stop paying for G Suite (Google Workspace) the user licenses will be revoked. They will not be able to login to Google services, access Play Store / Music / Movies purchases, etc.

I don't think there's a "line of thought". This isn't a logic problem - it's a business decision. Whatever Google wants to happen will happens. And some people have interpreted the available information - or have spoken to google representatives - and been told that they'll be able to keep using "additional" services such as music, movies, youtube, photos. And - this being google - other people have been told the opposite.

The offical FAQ has been updated with this:

"What happens to my additional Google services and paid content if I don’t want to pay for Google Workspace premium features?

https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217?hl=en#zippy=%2Cwha...

Thanks for that. They really could have put this simple statement up at the start and avoided a lot of bad press.

Also, they could have told their stuff who've been fielding questions online about this change online; it might have stopped a few of them from telling people they'd be losing all their Photos, paid-for content etc.

Thank you! Seems like they sometimes listen afterall. They now also added: "In the coming months, we'll provide an option for you to move your non-Google Workspace paid content and most of your data to a no-cost option. This new option won't include premium features like custom email or multi-account management. You'll be able to evaluate this option prior to July 1, 2022 and prior to account suspension. We'll update this article with details in the coming months."

They've added yet another section to that FAQ: "possibly maybe let's see what we can do because I like your face sir" they might do something with up to ten users:

https://9to5google.com/2022/01/26/g-suite-legacy-free-person...

As you'd expect from Google it's vague and unfinished - what happens to the other users you don't choose to save, or perhaps you have to delete all but 10 users, and what happens to those 10 users anyway.

Tune in again in a few days and see what else has changed on that FAQ, or search for news articles about this process because they sure as hell aren't going to email you about it.

They can't even kill services properly any more!

Yes they will:

"If you don’t upgrade to a Google Workspace subscription, you will not lose access to other Google Services, including YouTube, Google Photos, and Google Play, nor paid content, including YouTube and Play Store purchases."

Source: https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217?hl=en#zippy=%2Cwha...

Your use-case could be well solved by Cloudflare's email forwarding[1]. I'm contemplating switching since I'm already on Google One.

[1][https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/email-forwarding]

That is a third party paid app.

The Cloudflare one is in preview https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/

We're mass enabling the zones that have asked for Beta access and will be going GA soon. Email me at celso@cf if you can't wait; we'll try to prioritize.

Are you going to add smtp relaying / sending mails too?

Otherwise this is a one way street, you can receive mail on your domain, but not send from it.

You can use the SMTP relay from other providers. The free tier should be enough for a personal account or two. For example AWS SES, Mailgun, Sendgrid, etc.

I'm guessing tutanota is cheapest - $1/month. But there's no easy, automatic way to migrate from gmail.

Protonmail is more expensive at $5/month and provides migration from Gmail.

There are also other options - like Zoho.

I'm a Google employee who just found out about this. I'm not annoyed that I have to pay, it's been ~13 years of free service and I don't think Google is obligated to continue providing this to me.

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.

The problem is, I'm not a freeloader despite having my free account for almost 13 years.

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.

The long-tail isn't being considered here IMO.

Dyn.com (nee DynDNS, in the dialup days) was bought out by Oracle, my nearly 20 year old lifetime VIP account will be terminated in May despite using a few thousand requests per month and in the past highly recommending their extortionately priced but rather excellent global load balancer and enterprise anycast services (to the tune of thousands of dollars per month).

Likewise with Google, I had an original G1 phone and several iterations of the Pixel, have migrated several companies over to their excellent their cloud offerings, again to the tune of tens of thousands per month.

It just feels like I'm getting the shitty end of the stick here. In both cases I could've done it cheaper myself with other providers, and had to strongly argue that the alternative (Dyn, Google Cloud, AWS etc.) is a pragmatic and possibly the best albeit expensive choice in the long-run.

Ah yes, we used Dyn global load balancer 10 years ago. It was a great solution at the time. But they kept their high prices while AWS started offering more flexible solutions at 1/100th of the Dyn price.

Identical situations, VIP dyndns, all Nexus phones, 3 Pixels and google apps. On the plus side, I can't think of any other free service I use. (Damn, just remembered I use the hobbyist license for fusion360, they are slowly crippling that but not a big bang).

What are you going to do for DNS? I just got static DNS for home so I guess I could host my own DNS but the custom gapps domain mail will be a hassle. Maybe just forward it to my other @gmail account?

Luckily I never trusted this to stay free (for all 10 years I think), so I never used the calendar or drive, just the email.

So I own the domains, I can register them for 10 years at a time with ICANN, with that I can switch providers at will. Most of the reputable domain registrars have been around for the past 20 years and offer free basic DNS hosting... All I need is a MX record.

Next step is buying IP space, that's a lot more expensive with the yearly AS fees, I'm not sure I can afford that, and ARIN/RIPE seem just as bad as the [PS]aaS cartel where if you don't pay up your IP space gets re-sold.

Posted this on a few comments because I find them really helpful: https://improvmx.com/

Thanks for the link @collin128! I'm the founder of ImprovMX, happy to answer any questions!

Big fans of yours. Thanks for making an awesome tool.

Thank you! I really appreciate it! :)

Hi "cx". If you skim this page you'll notice the predominant personas and their own-domain email use-cases. Something like: 1 domain, 10 aliases, ability to send/receive messages. So, why don't you create a "Google Workspace Rescue" plan at $1/$2 per month? I'm a potential customer myself, and it seems to me that the free plan lacks functionality and the Premium is too resourceful (at a $9 tag). Just adding my 2 cents.

Thank you for the suggestion. We had had this requests since the beginning, but the issue is that at $1/$2 per month, one chargeback cost us 7 to 15 customers at these plans to support just the implicated costs. That's why we never got lower than 9$.

Granted, we don't have chargebacks everyday, but we get some occasionals one that, at these price, would hurt way more.

Now, we still offer an alternative plan that is available only upon request (or on certain occasions). We call it the "Lite plan" at 30$ per year, where you have all the advantages of the premium plan, but without the SMTP sending part. If that interests you, just send a request to the support and we'll enable it for your account :=)

Maybe you can charge annually for this, so it's more than $9. I don't mind if PayPal costs as much for chargebacks.

I switched from Dyn to Namecheap (who is the registrar for my family domain) for their free DNS service. No issues but we really only use it for e-mail.

I have some domains with Namecheap but I didn't know they would host DNS for me. Thanks I'll look into this.

I have been using NoIP for my simple home setup. It’s free but requires a monthly acknowledgment, but it’s relatively quick and easy.

Just to answer one of my own questions. I am tossing up between ProtonMail and Runbox. Both have custom domains for the first paid level tier and I'll get better security to boot. Both take BTC so it comes from my trading account and not the family funds. :) DNS I'll probably look at when Larry from Oracle kicks the last of the VIPS off dyndns. Looking at hosting on a container in my DMZ. Something I have not done for 20 years. djdns anyone?

I used Runbox for very many years and loved it. I cannot even remember why I migrated off; I was probably naively seduced by the launch of GMail (it was a long while ago) and getting similar stuff for free (I was an idiot).

Every couple of years I get a new trial account with them as I liked it so much, and each time I think 'nothing has really changed'. I read their dev blog and it's interesting, and their staff were great each time, but it just seems to take forever for anything to get done.

It may have been finished now, but the last time I tried them (only maybe a year or two ago) I was put off by wanting to move my calendar entries over and finding out that the new(ish) CalDav support they'd added had no web interface to it.

I get that the basics don't really change (and they are good at it); I just get irritated at the lack of pace. Otherwise I'd definitely consider returning to them.

Check out https://improvmx.com/

Thanks. The free tier looks good. The only issue I have is I use a different alias for every account so I think I'd run out with only 25.

By default it sets up a wild card local-part so any and all email sent to your domain will be forwarded. So you don't have to predefine aliases for every online account/service that use.

What the 25 aliases allotted in the free tier allows you to do is have 25 different domains.

Hi! I'm ImprovMX's founder. You are correct that you'd reach the limit of 5 free alias in your case. Upgrading to the monthly plan at 9$ would allow you to have up to 100 aliases.

Happy to answer any questions that you might need!

TLS please?

What about TLS? We support it on both standard SMTP connections and for sending emails.

https://imgur.com/a/8CtFSgv doesn't look like it :)

That got me thinking. I tested again on CheckTLS.com and if you use the port 465 and direct TLS, everything is fine. If you use port 587 and use STARTTLS, it's all good too.

Our decision was to not use STARTTLS for port 25, but that's maybe not a good idea and we should allow it back: this would make both services happier ;)

In a nutshell: TLS via 465 works correctly, and STARTTLS via 587 too.

Don't hesitate if you want to weight on this, happy to discuss this further!

Thanks for deciding to support STARTTLS on port 25 as well, and for updating your certificates!

You are welcome. Seeing that MXToolbox was testing STARTTLS on port 25, and a few other indicators made us decide to enable it :)

Good but no TLS. I don't know how I feel about this...

I've been using AWS Route53 DNS for my domain for many years, very cheap and easy to automate a DDNS setup if desired (e.g. https://crazymax.dev/ddns-route53/)

I was an early "GMail for domains" user, and have felt abandoned as there are services in Google Home I can't use as a "Workspace" account.

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.

Yes, making me migrate manually means I'm very likely to migrate to Outlook365

Is there an equivalent of Microsoft’s Home Use Program (HUP) for Google Workspace?

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.

The 365 Family plan is $99/year, total (not per person), for up to 6 people, and you can use your own domain.

Funny.. I was apparently already paying for this and never knew it came with email. Too bad there is a 6 person hard limit as I need 7 accounts.

Just tested a bit and it looks like only domains with DNS hosted by Godaddy work with this.

That's supposedly just a marketing thing. It doesn't have to be Godaddy.

The process is a little convoluted: https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ft15pk/use_perso...

And each of those 6 come with 1TB of onedrive and 6 devices of Office apps

I honestly would not mind a one-off fee to convert my accounts so that I can carry on using my accounts just like any other free @gmail.com user. I never used any of the extra functionality. I only wanted to use my own domain with Google.

Yeah, unfortunately going to @gmail may mean the account name isn't available because it's already in use. Almost all of my family members fall into that category.

> I'm a Google employee who just found out about this. I'm not annoyed that I have to pay, it's been ~13 years of free service and I don't think Google is obligated to continue providing this to me.

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 think you mean £5000 per year.

I have a dozen or so family members on mine, that's ~£600.

Agreed. I'm fucking livid.

I don't know what their freeloader costs are on the grandfathered Google domain accounts, but I'm having a hard time believing it's going to be worth the amount of goodwill they're going to burn by shitting on their most loyal users of all. These folks have been using Google services (and presumably suggesting as much to others) for at least 10 years.

But I'm not paying $100/mo so my extended family can continue to have a vanity Google account.

Google ought to think long and hard about this one. The email I draft to everyone to tell them that they're losing access to all their email, docs, pictures, apps, music, etc. is going to be harsh as hell on Google. And I'm sure that I'm not the only one that's going to have to author one of those...

It's basically the drug dealer business model: get people hooked for free, then start charging them a huge amount when it's too difficult for them to stop.

At least your local heroin vendor doesn't pretend it's /always/ going to be free, though...

I've been reading people on HN talk about how Google is burning their goodwill and there will be Very Serious Consequences for a literal decade. Over that time Google stock price has gone up 10x.

Google's stock price is so driven by its advertising business that it is absolutely disconnected from Google burning its goodwill in "prosumer" services like this and some of the others cycled through on HN. Given how large Google's advertising division's reach is outside of Google products, its probable that even a large boycott of Google's first party consumer services wouldn't easily affect the advertising business bottom line. At least for now. At some point they could burn enough goodwill that even advertisers and sites that need advertising won't work with them. (Given what we know from DoubleClick's legacy even before they merged into Google though, the internet in general doesn't seem to mind evil companies running their ads so long as they get paid their share of ad revenue.)

Maybe, but you'd think if you spent 10 years steadily burning goodwill you'd eventually run out of it

>Over that time Google stock price has gone up 10x.

Based mostly on taking display ads from "only in the sidebar" to "everywhere, including every pixel above the fold if the search term is lucrative". There's not a lot of juice left there to continue revenue increases that exceed general internet eyeball growth. They will still make an insane amount of money, but I don't see how they can sustain past growth YoY percentages.

No, GCP and Google Workspace are great compared to most options out there. Microsoft Family is a good price and I use it as a backup, but the 1TB of storage is per account and I honestly hate Microsoft at this point way more than Google, have fun with Outlook and everything else.

The thing that was the most annoying was the shift from G Suite to Workplace. Before, I was getting unlimited Google Drive storage for $12 a month, and now it is like $20 or something... still, for $20 a month you get basically unlimited cloud storage. No other provider can compete.

20$/month is quite expensive compared to many cloud offerings. It’s only a bargain if you actually store a lot of data which is so rare they can offer it at 20$/ month with the expectation that most of their customers are getting screwed.

$20/mo. is for their enterprise std version. They have plans starting at $6/mo. and $12/mo. provides 2TB of storage per user which is plenty for most users and a much better deal than O365 IMO.

> GCP and Google Workspace are great compared to most options out there.

GCP is number 3 and struggling, with few wins big enough to compensate for the gaps. Workspaces isn’t bad but it’s not compellingly better than O365. Both are held back by management and sales teams who appear to think it’s 2008 and everyone will do the job of selling for them.

As I see it, GCP has successfully become a peer competitor to AWS and Azure (which I was, to be honest, uncertain they could pull off), while, conversely, Workspace is a truly painful experience compared to almost every alternative -- and I'm including Sharepoint in that. It's horribly disjointed, and they've changed chat and conferencing solutions so many times that it's virtually impossible to figure out how to make their own hardware work with their own services. O365 has its issues, but it hangs together as a single product far more successfully than the farrago Google is pushing.

Until you need to manage it, and then Workspace is far ahead of Microsoft. Hence, why at least Workspace has proper DevOps integrations for things like Terraform. Google's MDM is pretty good too, while maybe not as diverse as Microsoft, far cheaper and Microsoft MDM is a nightmare.

I'm working on drafting such a letter now.

This has been a legacy feature for quite some time. Honestly, if it was just about email I think there would be nothing wrong with it. The main problem is that it's THE Google account for some people, which includes all their purchases and data and there's no way to move it.

Using G-Suite as your personal email has always been hell anyway.

> it's THE Google account for some people, which includes all their purchases and data and there's no way to move it.

In these comments (on HN), I've seen claims that we'll still be able to login to Google with our old accounts, like how it's possible to have a Google account with an @yahoo login.

I've also seen people disputing that, though.

> Using G-Suite as your personal email has always been hell anyway.

I've not had "hell"-level problems. It's all been working pretty well for me.

It started out really simple, and good. Then as google added other features, new products, acquired companies, it's gotten harder and harder.

Any idea if they'll make a "gmail.com" account migration utility down the line? This is extremely concerning for Play store purchases, and anything non-email attached to the "google apps for your domain" account, like YouTube.

Afaict your account will still exist, just not be linked to mail (which I get), but also not linked to calendar (which I don't get). See the email: "You may still retain access to additional Google services, such as YouTube and Google Photos."

I will wait for an official answer from a Google rep. There is too much at stake to guesstimate on vague phrasing.

And still, losing google docs document sharing, and calendar, on the e-mail address identifier which will stay my valid and primary one is a hostile move, plain and simple.

My email didn't say "You may". May's a stupid word. Do they mean "You are permitted" or "hey, you may have access, you may not - depends how we feel".

I dug into this with support and the docs.

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.

I will wait for an official answer from a Google rep. There is too much at stake to guesstimate on vague phrasing.

And still, losing google docs document sharing, and calendar, on the e-mail address identifier which will stay my valid and primary one is a hostile move, plain and simple.

I agree with you on losing access to sharing to your primary email address.

The situation has been officially confirmed on their support pages [https://support.google.com/a/answer/1257646]:

" Impact to services after you cancel Google Workspace You lose access to core Google Workspace services, such as Gmail, Calendar, Meet, and more. You still have access to Additional Google services, such as YouTube, Google Photos, and Google Ads. "

That's info related to cancelling from "Google Workspace". I'm on "G Suite legacy" so i'm not sure that applies to me. Maybe I have to upgrade, but not pay, then cancel. It's a bit of a gamble. What if I do that - or do nothing except wait - and find my account is eventually suspended? I have a bunch of accounts I use for photo backups, plus maybe 5 humans using accounts for Android login, and email. Suppose I own mydomain.com. Can everyone continue to log into android using user1@mydomain.com, user2@mydomain.com? Gmail stops working - what does that mean? Assuming the users can continue to use their accounts for Android (youtube, photos, apps etc) can't they configure gmail to send/receive email via some other service?

Yes, you would upgrade and then immediately cancel. I've had this confirmed by google workspace support.

Thanks. This is Google, where nothing's ever finished, so when I logged in and tried to find out the answer to questions like this I saw:

"Support availability is rolling out to our G Suite legacy free edition customers over the coming days. If you do not currently have access to Support, please check back in a few days. We apologize for any inconvenience, but look forward to connecting with you shortly."

I look forward to some support for the service I've used for 15 years and what to tell the 5 family members who use "G Suite" (aka Google Apps) to handle email from my domain.

Do you know if there's a list of which services will/won't be avaiable after this process? Seems a bit random. Google ads but not gmail..but you can use gmail to point at another email service presumably? Can I still use the google apps I paid for? Does my user1@mydomain.com sort of work like it would if I'd use a hotmain account as my android account? But...if I did that, wouldn't I have access to gmail still? I sort of assumed you would but perhaps not.

One thing about G Suite accounts is Google never got around to making them act just like normal accounts; I cannot review android apps with my account, nor can I share paid-for apps with family members. Will this functionality magically appear after I cancel?

But then what happens when that new account wants to use Google Docs? From what I've been reading it sounds like they would be blocked from doing that forever.

Yes, I had this confirmed by support. This is the most frustrating (and ridiculous) aspect. People will no longer be able to share things with your main email address.

You can sign up for a google account with any email address, so if you'd never used GFYD you'd be able to do this no problem.

Absolute insanity.

So this doesn't actually appear to be the case.

They're telling some people the exact opposite - that they'll lose all their photos. Google need to forget all this "core", "additional" crap and just list what people will and won't lose access to once they cancel Workspace.

That same page also says:

> (Optional) Step 3: Delete your organization’s Google Account

> If you no longer want a Google Account for your organization, delete the entire account. Deleting your organization’s account frees your domain within 24 hours for use with a new Google Account.

Not totally sure the implications of that, it kind of sounds like you can create a clean slate where you can re-use that email address as normal? But not sure, it's confusing and I wouldn't count on it.

Which I'm not surprised about not being sure what will happen -- honestly for the last ten years, the implications and consequences of this legacy free "g suite"/"g aps"/whatever it is account have been continually super confusing and un-documented, and often seemed accidental on google's end.

> 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.

If the legacy product is the same as the paid product, you may want to rename your accounts/switch domains before you close the workspace. Then there wouldn't be a naming conflict.

Switching domains is one of those features that was not available on the free account.

> 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.

Uh oh. So, let's say I take my custom domain email address and set it up on a non-Google provider. (The whole reason I have a custom domain is to avoid locking me to a vendor).

I can't then set up an ordinary personal google account using this email, it'll be reserved forever?

That stinks.

> 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.

Sounds like a perfect opportunity for a 20% time project. Surely you aren't the only Googler in this situation?

Its not just googlers, the legacy accounts where available to everyone at the start.

but the venn diagram overlap of people

    * willing to pay for such a tool, 
    * not having switched to another provider since
    * and not willing to start paying for it now

will be tiny

You're forgetting the circle of ageing techies that used to use AltaVista and now (in)directly control large budgets, have long memories and significant clout when it comes to guiding our replacements into making the right decisions and educating them about corporate (mis)trust.

Uh, why do they matter in the context of a potential side project to let people migrate their Mails from the discontinued free legacy project to a free private account?

Because sometimes you have to "do the right thing" and not be an arse, despite what the metrics say.

I'm in that circle. I've cost Google millions of dollars in business due to a history of similar dick moves on their part. This adds just one more to the list. The organization I work at will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever consider using Google for anything business-critical, and neither will businesses I advise in various roles.

I have at least a dozen relatives on my Google family domain. We're looking at a lifetime cost of tens of thousands of dollars if I were to switch to Workspace, which is a non-starter.

One possibility is to finally incorporate my family foundation as a 501(c)3, if we can do that in time. It's been on my to do list.

I'm not even sure where to go from here, but I have things like Android apps I've bought on this account, as does my family. Or I guess the word is "rented." I have a bunch of logins with Google OAuth. Or I guess past tense.

I feel like there's a class action in here somewhere.

It was free for 10 accounts. The number one massively applicable use case vs plain google accounts was vanity domain names and signing up was no harder than creating a regular gmail account. There are probably more vanity domain users than small businesses with 10 people. In fact I would venture to guess with the 10 address limit they are nearly 100% of the remaining users on the legacy program.

The cost of the domain name is $10 per domain per year or $1 per person per year little enough for one person to pay without thinking.

Most people keep an email address for a very very long time rarely switching unless a service ceases to exist.

Almost no domain owners are going to pony up $720 per year themselves and collection from other users will be an untenable hassle.

Basically every bullet point you listed is wrong. The remaining pool of users is likely 99% vanity users who would have used Gmail+custom domain forever at no real cost to Google over free Gmail none of which will migrate to Google workspace.

For Google the gain from this change will be identical to picking n random Gmail accounts and canceling them and keeping those users digital purchases as a giant fu.

Not ruinous but hardly profitable either.

Someone with an ounce of sense would have included the option to migrate all email accounts to regular Gmail accounts.

I agree with everything you posted here! With one exception. The number of accounts, originally, was unlimited—you just needed to request them.

It was free for unlimited accounts (I still have a G Suite Legacy account that was grandfathered into that) at first.

Eventually unlimited free accounts was dropped to 50, in 2009 (my grandfathered account was soft-capped at that, with the option to reach out to support to increase it), but I had several other domains that were hard-capped at 50 since I opened them after that limit was instituted. [1]

Then that limit was dropped from 50 to 10 (hard capped, grand-fathered accounts kept their old limits) in 2011. [2]

Then last but not least there was the 1 user free if you had a Google AppEngine project (that came with the requirement that it was tied to a G-Suite at the time).

My G Suite legacy accounts were all created in 2007-2010 timeframe.

[1]: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2009/01/50-user-limi...

[2]: https://cloud.googleblog.com/2011/04/helping-small-businesse...

Have you even gotten an email from them yet on your oldest accounts?

Mine is from '08 and I have heard no official communications from them.

No email here. Mine is from the very early days, pretty much as soon as it became available as Google Apps for Domains. I have a 200 user cap because I requested more than whatever the default was. I have a total of 3 active accounts, everything else is just a forwarder.

I use it as a forwarder to my gmail, but now I have to migrate my parents off their accounts. It will either end up as Gmail or Outlook.com for them. Migrating their email will be annoying.

I maintain a full GSuite Business account for other purposes, so I can use that as my mail relay service.

Thanks to routing rules, they'll continue to receive emails transparently, it will redirect a copy to their new email, as if they were a BCC.

I'll handle the groups the same, only a few and the routing rule can add 100 recipients.

Eventually, once cloudflare email forwarding supports groups, I'll just move to that. It's on their internal roadmap, so maybe it will happen before 2024.

I think I may have figured out why the very oldest accounts have not received notifications about this change.

I dont think they can/will do it for anyone prior to December of 2011.

http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/08/google-launches-host...

"A standard edition of Google Apps for Your Domain is available today as a beta product without cost to domain administrators or end users. Key features include 2 gigabytes of email storage for each user, easy to use customization tools, and help for administrators via email or an online help center. Furthermore, organizations that sign up during the beta period will not ever have to pay for users accepted during that period (provided Google continues to offer the service)."

The original version of the TOS from August 2006 read as follows:

https://web.archive.org/web/20061029132431/https://www.googl...

"16. Modification. Except as provided in Section 17, Google reserves the right to change or modify any of the terms and conditions contained in this Agreement or any policy governing Google Apps, at any time, by posting the new agreement at http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/terms.html or such URL as Google may provide. Customer is responsible for regularly reviewing any updates to this Agreement. Any changes or modifications to this Agreement will become binding (i) when made in a writing executed by both parties, (ii) by Customer's online acceptance of updated terms, or (iii) after Customer's continued use of Google Apps after such terms have been updated by Google."

"17. No Fees. Provided that Google continues to offer Google Apps for Your Domain to Customer, Google will continue to provide a version of Google Apps for Your Domain (with substantially the same services as those provided as of the Effective Date) free of charge to Customer; provided that such commitment (i) applies only to End User Accounts created during the period when the Google Hosted Services are considered a beta service (the "Beta Period") by Google (such Beta Period determination at Google's sole discretion) and (ii) may not apply to new opt-in services added by Google to the Google Apps for Your Domain in the future. For sake of clarity, Google reserves the right to offer a premium version of Google Apps for Your Domain for a fee."

In mid 2007 the language was changed to read the following:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070407174217/http://www.google...

"17. Modification. Except as provided in Section 18, Google reserves the right to change or modify any of the terms and conditions contained in this Agreement or any policy governing the Service, at any time, by posting the new agreement at http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/terms.html or such URL as Google may provide. Customer is responsible for regularly reviewing any updates to this Agreement. Any changes or modifications to this Agreement will become binding (i) when made in a writing executed by both parties, (ii) by Customer's online acceptance of updated terms, or (iii) after Customer's continued use of the Service after such terms have been updated by Google."

"18. Fees. Provided that Google continues to offer the Service to Customer, Google will continue to provide a version of the Service (with substantially the same services as those provided as of the Effective Date) free of charge to Customer; provided that such commitment: (i) does not apply to the Domain Service described in Section 4 above; and (ii) may not apply to new opt-in services added by Google to the Service in the future. For sake of clarity, Google reserves the right to offer a premium version of the Service for a fee."

This version was persisting thru at least March of 2011:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110330181415/http://www.google...

However by December of 2011, that language was gone:

https://web.archive.org/web/20111231230542/http://www.google...

I sort of doubt it... I didn't receive any notification, and I'd been active since 2013.

I hope this is the case. Either way, I'm not taking action unless I'm forced to.

Worst case, I may end up paying for a month or two while I make the transition.

I have received The Email for domains set up with Google Apps on 2007-09-08 and 2007-10-08 (got the emails on Jan. 20 and 27 respectively), but not for domains set up on 2007-07-03 or 2012-01-24. I think they're still getting around to it.

No communications to my account from '06 either, first read about this here.

Mine is also around 2008. No e-mail, nothing in the billing section, and nothing in the dashboard.

I have not received an email, but logging in to the account there's a notice now that tells me about the impending changes.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's finally time to migrate away, I've been putting it off, but so far the accounts I created seem to have mostly become dormant, so only one user has to change, and I'll just re-create them an IMAP account for their mail, they don't use any other services.

> Basically every bullet point you listed is wrong. The remaining pool of users is likely 99% vanity users who would have used Gmail+custom domain forever at no real cost to Google over free Gmail none of which will migrate to Google workspace.

Why do any of your issues in any way contribute to the decision wherever someone should invest their time to create a migration tool so users can switch from the old legacy product to a free account which doesn't have any of the domain features to begin with?

I get that you're unhappy that Google discontinues their free service for you, but that wasn't what the discussion was about.

My point was that you listed 3 factors and asserted that the overlap in a venn diagram would have little overlap. In fact the venn diagram ought to look more like a circle.

All users who signed up for google apps at your domain are in A people who initially signed up. People in B are those who haven't switched away. C are those who are unwilling to pay $72 per user per year.

A->B Very few users change email addresses very frequently because we accumulate 100 or even hundreds of pages with signups under a single address, phones set up under our google account, oauth sign ins, apps and games purchased under our google account. Google accounts are much more sticky than regular email accounts and people rarely abandon those. I would venture to guess the list of active accounts in B is most of A.

B->C Very few people who signed up for $10 a year for 10-50 addresses are going to be onboard with paying between $720 and $3600 a year. C includes 99.9% of B.

Why would it be a paid tool? I would assume it would be free.

> Its not just googlers, the legacy accounts where available to everyone at the start.

Right, but only (some) Googlers are in a position to solve the problem by applying 20% time to it.

This would not be a 20% project, it would require at least 2 engineers full time for several months. I'm not even a web developer.

Its a man year to migrate per user 10 Google app accounts to 10 Gmail accounts?

That seems... wrong. Do you actually work at Google?

I do, and I'd encourage you to try to ship a user-facing feature that transfers control of user data between different authentication users at a big tech company if you're skeptical.

Presumably just leaving users with 10 accounts not attached to a company would cost zero dollars.

Someone else in the thread mentioned that Education users can migrate their accounts out of the organization to free gmail amounts. Surely some or all of that workflow applies to these legacy free accounts too.

That was me, I'm sure some of it would apply but you still have to build a web app, test it, test the transfer stuff, implement anything that wasn't already implemented for EDU, etc...

Not to mention maintain it against the constant library churn.

Anyone who was ever an Xoogler knows this is basically a non starter. The privacy issues alone are radioactive as far as desirability to chase.

Pardon I meant that question literally not sarcastically. As in is this an actual estimate based on understanding the nature of the problem or an estimate from the outside.

So, how many Googlers using their 20% time would it take (I know it would be more than 10)?

Right. I think what's lost in translation is because it was free, a lot of early adopters used it in ways that are impractical to transition to paid—extended families, hobby projects, etc, and have been using them for a very long time.

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.

They are creating a LOT of issues for people if they don't provide a tool to migrate the account to a non G-suite account. I'll be moving email elsewhere, but losing that account and all the services it's connected to will result in a lot of annoyances for me over the years as I discover to what services I've authenticated in this manner.

Not to mention Android devices and software purchases tied to the account, what happens to those unless Google provides a migration tool?

Oh man, I didn't even think about Single Sign On. Changing your email on every service you've ever interacted with is a huge project, but if you used SSO, a lot of those can't be changed to conventional emails, and even if you can pick up your domain and hop to Fastmail or something those are going to break.

I was already livid about this change but this is the piece de resistance. Holy hell. Even after migrating to a regular Google account I've still been using my custom domain as my identity.

Google employees are entitled to a discounted tier ($0.75 per user per year, I think), and that will continue even if you leave the company.

oh lol should have checked first, thanks!

"that will continue even if you leave the company" - yeah, just like the free email on custom domains forever...

It's not guaranteed, but it's going to last longer than the current free tier, so?

Look, I'd gladly pay something but 60 dollars per month, every month? I'd be happy to pay 120 dollars a year for the service I'm getting now. Like one of the parallel commenters, I have given out accounts on my domain.

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.

Exactly the same boat here. No email notifying me of the change either.

Plus, what about all the third party web sites that offer nice buttons that say "Sign in with Google"?

If you used your legacy Gapps domain to authenticate, do you think they all provide easy implementations to migrate your Google-one-click-authentication account to a same-email-new-local-password account? Hell no.

I haven't looked at it but I would hope that "Sign in with Google" provides the service using it with a stable ID other than the email address. But I can also see services ignoring that and just using the email address anyway...

If such a service only saved the email address when the user account was created it might be very difficult for them to fix this unless the do it really quickly and I happen to sign in to their service before all of this goes down.

> I don't need the full google workspace

It's honestly just a chore, many things don't work using G-Suite accounts, like taking part of a Google Home family with Gmail users, or signing in to Android Automotive (yes, I had to make a new account to be able to sign in to my Polestar 2 because my account is a G-Suite account), I would be HAPPY if they "downgraded" me to Gmail with custom domains and charged me a few bucks a month for it.

Agreed.

This is exactly how I feel. I'm not against paying for hosted email, but that's not what they're trying to charge us for. They're trying to charge for hosted email + a million other 'Workspace' features we don't want or need.

If Google introduced a "Legacy GSuite Mail' plan at say $20/yr to retain all existing mail functionality and accounts, and disabled every other Workspace feature, I'd gladly pay for that.

"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further".

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.

You're not roped in (good, albeit not free, alternatives exist), but yeah, this is just a fuckover.

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.

Not _absolutely_ roped in, but practically, yes. The cost of switching is ridiculously higher than the cost of just paying up - it's not a realistic option. Which, considering they also control how hard it is to switch, is a bit artificial.

It would be a little different if they did this to _everyone_ and completely removed the free @gmail plans. But instead they're targeting GSuite users when @gmail plans are _right there_, because they know they can get it.

Honestly, if it weren't for the alternatives setting somewhat of a market price, little could stop them from charging triple. The only comparable plan is the lowest tier of 4 tiers as it is, and I doubt it's gonna get _cheaper_ over time.

Not really - that was the whole point of getting my own domain, so I could move it over if something like this ever happened. Mail to me gets sent to user@domain.name, both before and after the switch. You can argue the other services like google drive and docs are harder to move, and that's true, but those also have their own alternatives that aren't quite as reliant as email is in having the same user@domain.name forever.

No, the domain is irrelevant now. Technically, I can keep my email going to my own domain. But this is the least of my concerns. The only "way out" is to completely de-Google-ify. But short of that I pretty much have to pay them.

The entire Google account will be suspended unless there's payment. I'd have to audit everything my Google accounts are used for, find alternatives, train users on the N new services, and deal with all the migrations. Which frankly is impractical. Some stuff is not easily migrate-able (YouTube subs/history, Android purchases, ...), and unless I don't need a Google account again ever, I'll probably end up migrating to an @gmail one at least partially.

But at least I keep the domain?? Which I'd then be paying a mail provider about the same amount for. Plus probably more for any other paid services.

To say nothing of convincing and migrating my family/other users.

If I could only keep the Google account going with my own mail/services that'd be something. They say I "may" retain access to YouTube and Photos, for now. And the account will be in a 'suspended' state that requires payment to get out of.

It's not exactly a surprise, and I know "that's what I get" for using Google services. But it's still scummy.

I completely agree.

I'm running through my head thinking of all the things in my domain account. Email archive/filters/rules, contacts, calendar, docs (mine and things shared with me), Drive, photos, Play purchases, Google One subscription for extra space, Android, Google Cloud.

Then I have stuff on a plain @gmail account that didn't work with my domain account - family library, links. That was already annoying. Don't want to mess that up either.

Should I merge the accounts or create a new @gmail account to hold everything?

My estimate is that it will take days of migration/backup/testing to move over, then extra time to ironing out issues that crop up. Hopefully I don't lose any content or purchases...

Even with email forwarding I believe I'll lose cosmetic things like using your domain as the owner of calendar invites, photo sharing, etc.

This is for 1 email account/domain only. I think I'll probably pay up.

This is that moment where I feel really good about always making sure I didn't use my custom email domain address as a google account, and have maintained a gmail.com account all along to serve that role.

So for my situation, I can just use IMAP to move the mail to a new provider. Easy peasy.

To be fair to yourself, you signed up for one of these grandfathered plans before Google became a toxic brand.

> The cost of switching is ridiculously higher than the cost of just paying up - it's not a realistic option.

On "the cost of just paying up" side, also tally up the cost of dealing with whatever other shenanigans Google decides to pull later; knowing that you will be equally powerless and option-limited at that time too, and even more entrenched with them and hence with even more to lose at their whim.

I will literally go pay someone else more money a year, than pay google for the same services, because of how difficult they make it difficult to migrate my data out.

I am curious which other provider has a better, easier migration. Any particular you can recommend ?

Paid gmail.com would be commercially equivalent to a wholesale prepaid deal for Google searches.

I guess Google feels it has enough of a monopoly they can afford to piss off any finite number of people (even very early peer-to-peer evangelists of their product) and write it off as business as usual.

I mean, how many people _really_ are using this feature? And what added benefit do they provide to Google for being "early evangelists". Not defending Google, just a little surprised people think that being an early adopter would matter to a company as large as _Google_.

Exactly. What does Google expect to earn with this move? The increased revenue they're pulling with this must be _marginal_ compared to the rest of their product lines. Is it really worth it to annoy lifelong customers for pennies?

Conversely, how much could it possibly cost Google to keep this little band of early adopters pretty happy? Seems like cheap advertising.

> If 15 years ago you made the mistake of wanting gasp a domain for your email, you're basically roped into paying now.

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.

There is no need to nuke all Google accounts. You can switch to the free edition of Cloud Identity - https://support.google.com/cloudidentity/answer/7319251?hl=e...

You will still need to find the replacement for gmail etc though

Can confirm. Went through the process for two domains.

- one that never had google workspace (had to signup for Cloud Identity Premium, then cancel right away, and add Cloud Identity Free from the Admin)

- one that had google workspace, removed the subscription to workspace form the Admin, then added Cloud Identity Free

So far it looks like you don't have access to Mail and Calendar, BUT you do get access to Google Play, Youtube and Google Drive and Docs!

Can this be used for an account with Google Play Developer and Adsense/Admob account?

All I see when I go to the Cloud Identity part of the Admin Panel's "Get More Services" page is a happy little coffee cup unhelpfully stating "You're getting the best out of Google. We will notify you when new subscriptions become available."

So I guess I'm not able to use that then.

Yes, you need to "upgrade" to "workspace" first then the "Cloud Identity" option becomes visible and after that you can "downgrade" to "Cloud Identity".

I created a free account many years ago for my family. We've all been using it ever since for everything. So I have a lot of purchases and history in there. All of my YouTube stuff, all of my Android purchases. Everything to do with Google.

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.

How are you calculating $70 per family member?

I guess it's $70 per user per year?

"Plans start at $6 /user/month" - $6x12months = $72 per year.

Oh I see. I thought you were saying $70 per month.

>> Plans start at $6 /user/month

$6 * 12 = $72

Yup, I'd pay $10 per month for my family. But I'm not paying $50 or $60 per month.

The only difference over the free Google Workspaces is the domain name.

A more reasonable approach would’ve been to offer custom domains as part of Google One, whose pricing is far more family-friendly.

Eg, Google One provides 100GB of storage (shareable with your family Google accounts) for £16/year. Just let those who want that to link it to custom domains — Apple (iCloud+) and MS (MS 365) already offer this.

Please do this Google.

This is what I'd imagine most of the people on Legacy Google Workspaces want.

Exactly! Or provide a migration path - I went back to a standard gmail account, but the vast majority of my purchases, photos etc are in my old GAFYD account.

Google are going to lose even more goodwill without a migration path.

That would be perfect for me!

That would be a great solution. I would imagine many "legacy free" users are old GMail for Domains users who just want the same Google One functionality of @gmail.com addresses but with a custom domain.

I don't even use my domain name for anything but email anymore, but I certainly don't want to give up the address I've been known by for a dozen years.

As you can imagine, my username @gmail.com gets too much spam to be usable.

This should be done.

(full disclosure, I work for Google but have no special insights here other than reading the article)

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.

"After 60 days in suspension, you will no longer have access to Google Workspace core services, such as Gmail, Calendar, and Meet"

From https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217

Exactly, since Android and Youtube aren't "workspace core services" (the next sentence after the one you quoted explicitly mentions YT and Photos), your purchases are probably safe past the deadline.

However, now what do you sign into your Android device with? Google's products work... poorly... across multiple accounts. I needed to change my email address a number of years ago, which is impossible with Google's apparent use of email addresses as a primary key or something, and my Google account has had to live in a very messy state ever since... the old address has to be the core of the account for all services, even if I'm handing out and sending as a new address... and that account is an extra security vector into it... (Meanwhile, Microsoft just lets you add and remove email addresses from your Microsoft account, including changing and removing the primary.)

I wonder if Google will support a workflow for users "leaving", whereby the can keep their "Google Account" under the same email address, but with Gmail disabled.

This could be a reasonably low friction way to keep the system working without breaking the "email address is unchangeable per-account" assumption - the underlying Google account can continue to exist, even if the associated MX record disappears, or Google Workspace ceases to provide service.

This is how Google accounts work today if you ignore the "default" sign-up path, and take the route where you create a Google account under an existing external email address.

Not sure if this applies: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/27441

Thank you. I was panicking and clearly not reading clearly.

That "May" still worries me, but hopefully it will still work fine.

It will work fine until “may” is no longer profitable for Google. I am 100% done w/ the Google ecosystem.

I think that depends on how much storage this person is using. Google includes Photos against the billed quota, so if you have more than 15GB of photos then Google will surely do something, either restrict access or eventually delete the data.

Glad that’s your interpretation and not an official statement from your employer who is interrupting a lot of peoples workflows and digital lives.

Dealing with the cloud will always be like dealing with Darth Vader. ("I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further.") The idea that anyone actually chooses to depend on this when alternatives are out there is incredible: It's simply a horrible arrangement for both consumers and businesses.

True, but it's a compromise most of us are forced to make. The vast majority of people know that a custom domain name makes their email more professional, but wouldn't have the faintest idea of how to even begin to manage one if it weren't for services like this one. (Or, at the very least, wouldn't have known how to do it in 2007-2010 which this service was marketed as "free forever.") These cloud services are basically just "linux admin done for you" since most of us don’t have the expertise.

use google takeout to take backup of your data asap.

Google Takeout is kind of a nightmare.

Fortunately I already went through the hassle of extracting my photos a while back. It was something like 45 downloads of 2GB zip files, with really chaotic organization of photos.

But I tried to do Google Takeout of just a few things, including Email (which is under 2GB usage) but not including photos. Somehow it still created 63 files, each 2GB in size. I just threw up my hands and gave up. I got my email using IMAP + Thunderbird, and I exported my contacts. The rest is going in the bin.

At least the history bit can be saved thanks to Google Takeout.

Depending on what your family members do with it, you may be able to get by with one paid account and some aliases, routing, etc, to forward emails somewhere else.

Same here, and I'm running it for extended family so I'm not planning to take on the cost (and neither are they).

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?

I’ve found Zoho to be fantastic. They offer good value, some extra shit if you want it, and you can bring your own domain. I think it’s about $35 USD a year.

Zoho offers a "Free Forever Plan" which allows one domain. It's excellent. I actually prefer their web UI to Gmail.

"Free Forever" somehow isn't legally binding, every year many companies renege on their promises or surreptitiously find ways to de-grandfather their customers plans via BS semantics or outright deceit.

Free Forever*

* - while the current Terms of Service last

Likewise I also use Zoho mail and it's good.

But, after auditing a number of their enterprise products, dealing with their security team and seeing the quality of the code they produce I have to say they are a very significant security risk.

I used Zoho for an event's domain, and didn't like how they removed POP/IMAP for their free version without any prior notice.

I'd trust them not to pull the rug any further even less than Google.

To be fair, they stopped giving it away for free 10 years ago (I asked Urs at the time, and he said “it’s too hard to support and test another edition”, whatever). But I’m pissed as well, probably just gonna pay.

80,000 fucking software engineers and they can't handle an extra SKU on their multi-tier product line?

Nobody gets promotion for maintaining free SKU.

with verbose userbase.

Putting everything into the hands of an enormous corporation and being surprised when they do things to benefit themselves. insert picture of shocked but not that shocked fry meme

That's not an excuse to actually be complete assholes.

I've posted this comment a few times in these threads. I'm in a same boat and did some digging with support and through the docs.

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.

This is about people using G Suite legacy, not Workspace. You can't cancel Workspace if you don't have it.

The point is you will have it.

G-Suite Legacy gets converted to Workspace.

Once you stop paying for Workspace, you lose functionality (GMail, Drive etc.).

Nothing stops you from *still* using that account for purchases and moving your e-mail somewhere else.

For a highly techy audience, you'd think people could have figured that out, but I guess outrage is better.

You don't have to lose access to anything except the core products - gmail, drive, docs, calendar. You still get to log on with your Google Account to access your purchases.

Looks like you can add "Cloud Identity Free" to keep using Drive and Documents. They give each user 15GB free.

https://support.google.com/cloudidentity/answer/7319251?hl=e...

For a new domain I had to signup to Cloud Identity Premium then cancel. For an existing domain on Google Apps, just remove Workspace and add Cloud Identity Free.

Huh. I thought that was what I had, but I haven't heard this directly from them. It's the first I've heard of it.

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.

> 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?

I mean they can, but it'd be kinda foolish, we're the people who've been pushing people into their service.

O365 looks pretty decent.

I haven't heard anything yet either. I spend about $5k/mth on GCP so I wonder if they might be making an exception for spenders....

Same. I think they aren't actually emailing us. Lucky I saw it here! We have until May 1st.

It definitely applies to you, if you think it might. There aren't different legacy things like this, just this one. Go to to admin.google.com, click on Billing / Manage Subscriptions. You'll see your subscription is "G Suite legacy"/"Free plan". And you'll see a message "You are on the G Suite Legacy free edition. Consider upgrading to Google Workspace Business Starter [Learn More]".

Click on [Learn More], you'll see the message that "you need to upgrade to a paid Google Workspace subscription to keep your services. The G Suite legacy free edition will no loger be available starting July 1, 2022".

Also the confusing message that "Support availability is rolling out to our G Suite legacy free edition customers oer the coming days. If you do not currently have access to Support, please check back in a few days."

I don't even know what that means, or how to check if I "have access to Support". (I guess I have literally never had access to Support!)

This comment was very helpful, thank you!

Yeah, I' in the same boat you are.

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.

Six bucks a _month_, per account.

Six bucks per month, per account, you mean.

$6 a year, or $6 a month?

This is the first I've heard of this as well. I went to admin.google.com and verified that this does impact me. Glad I check HN I guess??

Thanks for the tip. I went to admin.google.com and I don't see anything there, either.

Maybe it's rolling out?

Sorry I wasn't clear :).

I went to admin.google.com -> manage subscriptions and saw that I am on G Suite legacy, so therefore inferred this does impact me.

Ah, I see it now. Thank you very much.

yeah i also did not receive the email. first i was thinking, maybee because i pay for extra storage with those legacy accounts (100 gb extra) they maybee would not disable if for me. but it looks i just did not get the email yet.

Looks like the information has been added sometime since 2021-12-07 (the most recent web.archive.org snapshot [1]), so maybe it's brand new and the emails are still forthcoming.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20211207200137/https://support.g...

I've been meaning to migrate but am more than a little leery of the potential for gotchas and disruption. Any advice from those who have gone through this already?

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?

Oof, this sucks. I'd forgotten about losing all Android purchases. That totally sucks. You still need to get out though, as it will only get worse. I personally migrated by downloading and uploading over imap.

IMO, this seems like a lawsuit territory. "Start paying us or we'll hold your purchases hostage".

I went through this last year. It was relatively smooth, but I did do a factory reset and spent a couple hours on the project just to be sure.

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.

Did you successfully go from having yourname@yourdomain.com as the primary Google account on your phone, with the account setup under Google Workspace, to an end state where you had a "new" Google account for the exact same email address with no connection to Google Workspace.

I understand it's a given to lose the purchases. I'm semi-dreading the prospect of being presented with an error message preventing the creation of a new Google Account for an email address previously under Google Workspace. This may be irrational...but it seems like a case where Murphy's Law would rear its ugly head, and typical of the "gotchas" that these legacy accounts have had to deal with when interacting with certain Google products.

And I guess the worst-case downside is that I might need to create a new Google Account with a different email address from my primary email address just for the phone and Google apps, which is awkward but isn't the end of the world.

Provided Google doesn't disable "too much" of these accounts, they ought to act like normal "Google accounts", which don't have Google-provided email service associated (i.e. a free Google account that was created with an external email address).

You might miss out on some things like Calendar/Gmail, but a free Google account using an external email should preserve things like purchases. Failing to do that would seem likely to push them down the path of lawsuits and PR fiascos, and also embolden what's likely a disproportionately tech-savvy (and influential in making purchasing decisions) audience fitting the demographic that set up a domain for email 10+ years ago.

I went through exactly this 6 months ago and am now signed in on Android with exactly the same email address as I had on my paid workspace account

though I advise leaving it for a week or so after deleting it as it was pretty glitchy to begin with

> 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?

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'm actually rather salty about this, as a long-time G suite user: google has considerably degraded the service over the last few years. For example, since a couple of years ago you can't rate apps on Google Play and leave reviews if you use a G Suite account. You also can't use family subscription/space sharing plans, which is especially ironic given that many years ago Google was promoting G suite (or whatever it was called back then) as a way to run your family emails on your own domain.

So the paid account is in several things worse than a free Gmail account.

Yes and I also suspect that android backup works worse for GSuite accounts (can't confirm). It looked to me like it would backup less so I switched to @gmail.com for all non-email google services some time ago. Now I can review PlayStore apps and I know backup works as good as it can.

Is this for real? I've not received that email from Google.

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.

[0] https://yandex.com/support/connect/add-domain.html

Email is increasingly difficult to do yourself with the proliferation of anti-spam and anti-malware protection, combined with consolidated usage of SaaS apps for email across the board. Most of the IP address space in AWS and Azure is blacklisted by spam filters (as is customer IP space from most ISPs if they don’t already filter SMTP traffic), so unless you want to roll the dice on config settings for everyone you send email to, you’re generally going to need an authenticated relay for outgoing mail — and your best option will be one of the big cloud providers.

If you want a secure mail service that won’t read your email, try ProtonMail.

You can set up an email server to receive mail typically (assuming your ISP doesn't block it). For outbound mail, you can create a dedicated regular gmail address, and instruct it to accept sending emails out with an alternate email/domain in the From address and set up all outbound mail to route through that. (I haven't tried this yet, but it looks like all the pieces are there under the "send mail as" setting on gmail).

This works, but when people receive your emails, they'll show up as "From: yourname@example.com via gmail.com"

You can setup an external smtp to prevent that, using amazon ses or another provider (eg where you register your domain, like gandi)

Everyone is so attached to big tech on all levels that no matter how hard you try to escape, it all comes right back. You can set up your own mail server and still get screwed over. So sick of it.

I'd honestly rather roll the dice on emails than contribute to the monopolization.

If you want something lightweight try SpamHero. Not quite as good as Postini was, but unfortunately Google bought and killed the latter.

Very easy with maininabox.email.

>Yandex Mail for Domains [0] which [at least last time I checked] was still free

It looks like it's not free anymore. I used to see a free plan, now there are only paid ones.

It's still free, the link is a bit "hidden" under the paid options

Does this even work for non-Russian businesses? I tried to register a business in "Yandex 360" and it asks for a Russian phone number and some identity numbers?

UPDATE: Well, I've still not received that email from Google and, when I log into my Gsuite admin account, it's still showing "You are on the G Suite legacy free-of-charge edition. Consider upgrading to Google Workspace Business Starter." at the top of the Admin Console page. And, underneath:

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.

I knew something like this would probably come, but it doesn't make it any better. Complete BS.

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.

> And now we're being forced to pay for something that everyone else gets for free.

> 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.

That's what I'm doing. I wanted a vanity domain, but didn't want to deal with email server BS so I got a Google Workspace. The 1TB of cloud storage helps too.

You can have this exact thing cheaper if you set up a server and forward your mail to Gmail. And you'll also have a server to host a website or whatever else.

Isn't it a pain to avoid getting your outgoing emails marked as spam, if you aren't using one of the established providers (google, microsoft, fastmail etc)?

So, what I did for a similar use case:

-Buy domain from name cheap

-Setup email forwarding to my gmail account with namecheap

-Setup gmail to optionally send as dtparr@domain.name (I forget the steps, but I think it's under settings -> accounts)

So although the email comes to/from my custom domain, gmail is the real sender so I've not had any trouble with delivery (that I've noticed, at least)

Oh cool, didn't realize that last step was possible with free gmail.

I'm planning a similar setup. Cloudflare now as email forwarding in beta and then use my personal Gmail account to send mail as by custom domain. Here's a tutorial on setting up Gmail's "Send Mail As": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEheS8gM4Xs

I've had issues with Outlook (or whatever Microsoft calls their mail service) placing my emails in the spam folder, so YMMW. Works fine when the receiver is using Gmail, though.

Most things are cheaper if you do them yourself. I'm not sure that is much of an argument against what Google is doing.

Back in 2010 this was reasonable. Now? Anti-spam functions have become quite the specialty, with DNS and email strongly intertwined. And that's all on top of the already significant burdens to run a non-relay hacker-proof server. There's a lot going on to operate reliable basic services on the Internet today.

This is true. I tried forwarding email going to my domain to Gmail, but it keeps getting flagged as spam despite setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC. I ended up just setting up a filter to never send email addressed to @mydomain.com as spam and hope SpamAssassin catches most spam before Postfix forwards it.

> Anti-spam functions have become quite the specialty, with DNS and email strongly intertwined.

Hmm, almost like Google have managed to make non-Google email impossible to do (excepting a few other very large outfits like Microsoft). What a happy accident that the de-facto answer is "give all your email to the advertising company".

IIRC you can send your outgoing mail through google too. But I'm not sure — I haven't set up the outgoing part in any way so I can only receive mail on my domain but not send.

Regular gmail supports pop for this. I set up the email accounts on my web host, and then put the credentials into gmail.

100% this... there is a product definition and the free bring your own domain model is not part of the free product definition any more. I'm having trouble understanding how technically literate people are grumpy about this. It was only a matter of time. Google is a business, not your friend and you should treat interaction with them in this lens. It's not 2002 when Google was the cool hip thing to use and they seemed to demonstrate the do no evil mantra. It's a publicly trading business, one of the largest in world by revenue and market position and financial tactical decisions will trump your feelings for what you think they owe you.

People got a decade or more of free email hosting from Google and now need to pay for it. I know one small business that sells physical products and got 200 free accounts through this program. To this day they never delete old employees accounts as a result because it had zero cost to them to keep it around (not that they cared about security).

I kind of chuckled reading this thinking about how Google even bothered to spend resources closing this legacy service. I wondered what metric they used to determine it was worth spending effort to shut this down.

I recall at one point they were offering large (unlimited) storage quotas for these business accounts. Some groups were using rclone to interface for Google Drive to store warez and other large ticket items like pirated audio/video.

Even if the cap was 1TB I imagine there is a large amount of unused but occupied hot storage that is part of the equation. Not sure what others but in general there has to be some financial sheet indicating that this is costing money and offering no value so it is time to sunset it.

I wish mine had 1tb - I was already considering paying as I'm forever bumping up against a ~20gb limit with Google photos contributing most.

To be fair I think that was per user on the domain, so probably could've created additional users to cycle through.

Main thing that was holding me back was losing the grandfathered free plan should I change my mind / find an alternative for photos (I'd quite like to keep Google docs etc), but I guess that's no longer a consideration

> 100% this... there is a product definition and the free bring your own domain model is not part of the free product definition any more. I'm having trouble understanding how technically literate people are grumpy about this.

People often react badly to bait and switch tactics.

The solution is to offer people a way to revert to a free personal account without losing access to their files, data, and digital goods they have purchased.

How is ten years of free a bait and switch? Free is free and when things are free the giver of free stuff owes you nothing beyond what was already given for free. It may suck but I don't think someone giving out free stuff owes me more?

> the giver of free stuff owes you nothing beyond what was already given for free.

What they gave away for free included the promise "This will be free forever" (as linked in comments by others here).

> I don't think someone giving out free stuff owes me more?

But this isn't "more" then, is it? It's taking back what was already given.

Same here. Set this up for my family, and really the only thing I wanted was a gmail account with my own domain.

Ideally I'd like to have some self-hosted solution though - will be looking at options...

Same boat. I set up a Google domain for family many years ago. It's been somewhat convenient when it comes to sharing Google docs with each other and managing their email accounts for them, but that's about it. Everything else has been a continual pain in the ass. So many services are not supported by the custom Google domains or if we're lucky we get access years after they're introduced.

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.

Well, the movie/app purchase story is the same everywhere. You don't buy anything, merely rent it under extremely restrictive conditions.

I've dug into this through the documentation and in discussions with workspace support and its not as bad as we fear, at least in terms of purchases.

If you cancel your workspace account, then the individual user accounts will still have access to non-workspace services [0], which importantly includes Google Play and all access to your purchases will be retained. Any other google services which aren't core apps will also work as normal.

Any former GFYD account becomes a semi-account with access to a subset of google services but not all. Since the account exists, it cannot be used to sign up for a free personal account, and you can never use google docs or have google docs shared with any former GFYD account.

Overall, this is a better resolution than I'd feared, but it seems ridiculous that being a loyal google customer for over 15 years leaves you disadvantaged.

[0] Core workspace apps: Calendar, Currently, Drive & Docs, Gmail, Chat, Meet, Groups for business, Jamboard, Keep, Sites, Tasks

Do you have a link to this? Does this mean that say Google Play, Youtube Music, and Youtube will keep working but just limited in what it can do?

You keep posting this but without an actual link to what it means for services not mentioned.

From my comment: "Any other google services which aren't core apps will also work as normal."

Reference: https://support.google.com/a/answer/1257646?product_name=Unu...

So is there any way to delete the account permanently such that the email can subsequently be used to sign up for a free personal account?

> Since the account exists, it cannot be used to sign up for a free personal account, and you can never use google docs or have google docs shared with any former GFYD account.

OK, that's actually terrible.

Is there any way to delete the account and start fresh clean slate, so you can use that email address for an ordinary free google account that's just like any other?

The whole reason I had a custom domain was to be able to keep it even if I switched my email provider, of course. I planned to use this email address for everything forever.

Yeah, I'm wondering if I can rename my workspace account so that I can add my primary email to my old account.

Of course now I'll have split-brain because my photos are locked into the old account (trying to share and save doesn't work because Google forgets that they are supposed to be zero-rated because they came from a pixel).

I'll see if this rename works, then I can slowly migrate off of the other Google services. For services that I still want I think you can transfer YouTube accounts between Google accounts. Same with Play accounts (you need to pay but apparently you can ask for a refund for a transfer).

You can add Cloud Identity (Free) to get access to Drive & Docs, Keep and Sites. Mail and Calendar are lost, not sure about the other ones

I'm in the same boat as you. Including being unable to use Assistant features or access my calendar on the Google Home devices. When I worked there, there was a google doc that outlined all the different features GSuite users like us didn't have. and the list got longer, not shorter :(

What's the alternative? Can I switch to a personal gmail and keep my personal email/domain?

I mean have you used Microsoft suite these days? If you don't renew your subscription they lock you out - terrible business practice but I guess a "brilliant" way to ensure you get paid for your product. Drives me crazy because my parents are confused and then I have to go rescue their documents. I think that's one reason why everyone was using G-suite ... now where will they go. Latex (/S .. latex is great but not practical for business users).

That's an interesting decision on Microsoft's part. If you're locked out from your email, it makes it really hard to get into the system in order to pay your bill.

> 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!

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.

I am kind of in the same position. I have 4 people using our custom domain for email only given the pain google put on these accounts. They've each setup their custom domain email account to forward to their individual free gmail accounts. Does anyone have a recommendation for a new email service I can point my domain MX records at? I only need email forwarding for these 4 users using my domain and a catchall email forwarder for the rest.

Some domain registrars provide this service for free.

I've always used a this setup, have my personal domain forward all mail to google, and I have my address with domain set up in gmail. Also, I think that's no longer an option - I realised a while ago, I couldn't add any more...

I forward emails for custom domains from my registrars (Namecheap and GoDaddy) to Gmail. Then you can use a free Zoho account that lets you send email from your custom domain from within you Gmail account (sent via Zoho's email servers). It's a bit of work to set up but then you can do everything from within Gmail seamlessly.

I think this is the tutorial I followed years ago: https://medium.com/@raymondgh/how-to-set-up-a-free-custom-do...

Do you have any problems with email delivery (being marked as spam) using this technique?

I've been very happy with https://forwardemail.net but I'm planning to migrate over to Cloudflare's email forwarding service if it ever comes out of beta or I get accepted as a beta tester.

> Google spent so many years blocking Domains accounts

This wasn't "blocking". IIUC the problem is that these accounts have tigher data use restrictions so a lot of Google services never bothered to support them.

For example I believe that one restriction is that data can't be used to train ML models for other users. So if a service created one big ML model it needed to exclude these accounts. Instead of doing that and an audit they often just blocked those users.

Yeah, I’m sure there were some internal issues behind it but as a practical matter it meant that a lot of Google’s biggest fans were unable to try new services, often for as much as a year after launch. This was a staple comment on tech forums and I think it was a factor in their reputation faltering, similar to how Reader was especially impactful because so many journalists, tech bloggers, etc. used it. Losing the people who used to get their friends and family on board was probably not worth whatever they saved delaying that work.

Are they holding your domain hostage somehow?

They make it incredibly difficult to manage domains. DNS is managed via a third party like enom. Enom itself just had an outage recently that affected all G Suite users [0]. Transferring your domain to another registrar is opaque to say the least. Arguably, these things, in combination, could be considered a dark pattern.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29963713

My email provider doesn’t have control of my domain. In my registrars settings I just put my email providers server addresses where they told me to and I’m under the impression that if my email provider ever jerked me around I could just go in there and change those server addresses to someone else’s with no input needed from my email provider.

Did google do something different with these accounts? I didn’t even think they offered a registrar service when they stopped letting you register free custom domain gmails accounts.

Google is a domain registrar since 2005 [0]. But that service was launched for public use in 2015. Before that though, Google used third parties (mainly Enom and GoDaddy) to provide domain registration for the public.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Domains

The rant is probably around convenience. How hard is it to offer one-click migration of your data from one account to the other? I guess pretty hard, since they don't support it.

My example is Google Play Music, which they migrated to Youtube Music. They probably offered to merge accounts at the time, I don't remember, but I ended up with two Youtube accounts with different playlists that I couldn't merge or transfer data easily. I had to do an annoying dance to recreate my playlists from one account in the other.

No, the domain is trivial to move.

The problem is Google Docs which you have shared with many people, Google Photos which has zero rated all my Pixel uploads and will become crazy expensive if manually migrated to a new account. My YouTube channels are tied to this account and a couple of Android Apps.

Calendar is maybe slightly difficult to move. But Email contacts and calendar aren't the problem. In general the problem isn't actually the "Workspace Core Services" that have the lock in. Somewhat funny because they are the ones going away. It is all of the other services attached to the Google account that don't have a migration path like Webmaster and Postmaster tools and Play purchases.

> 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.

Same exact story, although we have been using it like this closer to 20 years now.

yep. Set mine up in 2004. I would gladly switch over to a normal gmail account with a custom domain name, yet there is no way to preserve any of my existing google identity.

> And now we're being forced to pay for something that everyone else gets for free.

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.

> 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.

As I understood it, that -- yourcustomer@domain.com or something like that on top of Google's infrastructure -- was exactly what GFYD users were supposed to get for free. Forever, according to Google's original promises.

If you still want the domain email address you can register the domain with either google or cloudflare and then set up email forwarding to a personal email of your choice.

> personal accounts with custom domain, iCloud offers that feature now.

For $1/month

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238

Cheaper than Google's $6/month but not free.

I'm in the exact same boat.

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 don't want Google Suite. I don't want Google Workspaces. I want plain old Gmail with a custom domain.

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.

This is exactly how I feel, and now I'm not sure where to move because I have 8 domains configured and services like ProtonMail want me to pay them for every domain (which just makes no sense to me, I can't figure out how the code that makes this a costly problem looks, my guess is it's a money grab tbh).

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?

Highly recommend Fastmail. Fantastic server side search and web app (plus has calendar which is essential for an email app imo). There also is nothing holding you back from bringing your own mail client (that can actually interact with the server eg tagging). They also allow connecting to other accounts such as gmail letting you have a single inbox on Fastmail itself.

Favorite “hidden” feature is the ability to do sieve scripting which combined with wildcards and send from identities lets me auto sort emails by path. Eg apps-tech-hackernews@example.com. Also the standard account comes with 100 domains and are real easy to setup.

Been using it for a year now and I haven’t had a single issue. Also the pricing is very reasonable.

I've been using Migadu for years: you only pay for a single account and can link as many domains as you wish.

Also they're pretty cheap and support was helpful when I messaged them.

Oh this is a monster pain in the ass. All 5 family members are using this service for mail, Android phones/apps, TV, movies etc, plus I have a couple of extra accounts (e.g. separate email account for e-commerce orders). I already pay for extra Drive space and I buy movies frequently enough.

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?

Yeah, our kids got regular gmail accounts from the start because of family link and google assistant issues.

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.

What are some (paid) alternatives to using G-Suite for emails?

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!

I am happy with MS 365

I already pay yearly for the apps. I can roll that cost in and it might be fine.

Fastmail.

Seconding Fastmail. I pay about £45/yr for it and I am very satisfied with all the features it provides. What I most value however is the no-bullshit attitude from the Fastmail team. No random killing of features, no ads, no sudden UI changes.

It might feel simple and old, but I like it simple and old.

Heya we're looking into migrating to Fastmail based on the recommendations here (including yours).

Have you had any issues with your outgoing mails being flagged as spam?

That's a (perhaps slightly paranoid) concern of ours, given Google's clout.

And to be clear, I'm not talking about spammy / bulk emails. I mean your standard day-to-day personalised emails (customer support etc.).

I use Fastmail for personal e-mail for myself and two family members and where I work uses Microsoft's Office 365. I've never had issues with mails I send from Fastmail landing in spam, even to Google users, and I prefer their webmail UI over Outlook for the web or whatever it's called these days.

I've been a Fastmail customer for years and have never had an issue with being flagged.

I just moved my domain mail to Fastmail, and everything arrives perfectly. I'm annoyed that I was bullied into this by the fact that 'unknown' mail servers are third-class citizens, but at least the problem is solved.

Some paranoid thread in me fears that Google will find a problem with Fastmail's IP range and credentials this spring (among others), in order to consolidate the Gmail upgrade cash avalanche, but I'm hoping that's just me with my tinfoil hat on too tight.

Fastmail is great. Clean, simple pricing. Efficient, stable. It never gets in your way.

Also looking for recommended paid/simple alternatives. Email only. Been using it for family email on a custom domain and am not looking forward to funding a dozen accounts every month for eternity.

We have migrated 150+ accounts from GWorkspace to M365 last year. Better price, more features.

I used zoho for a long time, free tier.

I use Zoho for some personal projects, and enjoy it. It's very full featured with a la carte pricing for additional services.

I used Zoho for an event's domain, and didn't like how they removed POP/IMAP for their free version without any prior notice.

I'd trust them not to pull the rug any further even less than Google.

If you’re not using the productivity suite (docs, drive, sheets and whatnot) why not go with the little guy and use Fastmail? $5/user with 30gb or 100gb per user for $9/month

Their support replies faster than google :)

Fastmail looks great, thanks for the recommendation.

And I see they support custom domains too:

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058753394-Cus...

Ticks all our boxes (admittedly our needs are very basic).

I switched from gmail to Fastmail a couple of years ago and the gmail import worked really well, too!

This is a really helpful tip, thanks!

Does Google support ever reply???!

Rarely if ever, AFAIK.

I think they have always replied to me (as a paying customer). Now, whether their reply has any relevance to the question I asked, let alone solves my problem, is another issue entirely. I have at times wondered if they just have a random reply generator that doesn't look at anything except the subject line of the request.

Not unless you work for google.

They also take action if you can get your question/complaint to the HN frontpage..

+1 for FastMail, been a happy user for a while.

Yeah I'm happy with fastmail and it just makes it less confusing when I'm doing stuff online. Instead of having 2 google accounts, one legacy and one custom domain. My custom domain is a completely different site unattached to the entire google ecosystem.

I already deal with this enough at work. I don't like having to switch between g accounts all the time.

Why migrate to Fastmail for $5/user, if one can keep their installation of G Suite for $6/user?

1) You can stop feeding personal data into the Google (advertisement) ecosystem

2) Google is notorious for killing off services or changing their agreements at a moments notice like here so there is a chance they'll drop their offering or increase prices.

3) Google support is either terrible or nonexistent (unless you're lucky enough to get your complaint to the HN frontpage).

I'm an affected user and I plan to put in the effort to migrate -- I only use it for email on a custom domain and have been doing regular backups (using gmvault) in case Google changed their mind so moving to a new service should be a breeze.

1) valid point, but how can I be sure another email provider won't do just the same, or even worse? At least Google is sitting on it's data using it to profit for itself. Smaller actors are just wholesaling everything they can reach.

2) I don't agree with "moments notice" sentiment. 3 months are quite enough for most users (and they can buy more time for a relatively small price). The free lunch was off the menu for more than nine years, I am actually surprised they gave us so much time.

3) There are replies around this post that for paying users Google support is significantly better. Good opportunity to check if it is really so.

Because the other service only does email as a service, so if they do the same their business folds, and the other service is likely to have far better support (which tends to 0 at google)

It is far more likely Google will decide to change the terms unilaterally on their customers or discontinue a service altogether - their business is advertising, not email.

1) Business accounts aren't used for advertising.

2) Not paid business accounts.

3) Not for paid business accounts.

For 20 years people have complained of 1,2,3 for free accounts, and said that they'd prefer to pay to avoid these issues. Now that there's an option....

https://workspace.google.com/learn-more/security/security-wh...

----

Our philosophy Google Workspace customers own their customer data, not Google. Customer data that Google Workspace organizations put into our systems is theirs, and we do not scan it for advertisements. We offer our customers a detailed Data Processing Amendment that describes our commitment to protecting customer data. Furthermore, if customers delete their data, we commit to deleting it from our systems within 180 days.

No advertising in Google Workspace There is no advertising in the Google Workspace Core Services, and we have no plans to change this in the future. Google does not collect, scan or use data in Google Workspace Core Services for advertising purposes. Customer administrators can restrict access to Non-Core Services from the Google Workspace Admin console. Google indexes customer data to provide beneficial services, such as spam filtering, virus detection, spellcheck and the ability to search for emails and files within an individual account.

Limited data use

Google does not use any of your data for any purpose except to provide you with the relevant Google Workspace service. For example, when customers use the Cloud Translation API, Google will not make the content of the text that you send available to the public, or share it with anyone else, except as necessary to provide the Cloud Translation API service.

Does Fastmail do mailing lists? That's the one thing I use in GSuite other than the basic email.

We do, but it's a separate product: https://www.topicbox.com/

I love that you guys are monitoring this :-)

Fastmail discounts for longer terms. I'm on the 30GB plan because of a custom domain and it was $90 for 2 years in Nov 2021, or $3.75/mo. Now I see it's $95 for 2 years so they've had a recent price increase apparently.

Fastmail does give you access to your 30GB via FTP or WebDAV. It also has a web-based file uploading tool. Then you can create links to share files or folders with others, like a picture album. I did this a little just to try it out, and it was very straightforward. Whereas I could never figure out how to do it with iCloud and gave up.

In my case for a personal email account I'll try DNS email forwarding:

https://improvmx.com/

Also an https://improvmx.com user.

Recently Cloudflare also started enabling email forwarding. I believe it's still in Beta, and with the sites I've got in Cloudflare I got approved 2 weeks-ish after applying.

As for sending emails, I think you can use something like how ImprovMX suggests https://improvmx.com/guides/send-emails-using-gmail/

This looks a lot like a direct clone of https://forwardemail.net/, except that ImprovMX isn't open source. I wonder which came first?

I like simplelogin.io (also open source, so can be selfhosted) because the aliases can be used to send and receive, though you do have to set the domain up on their platform first.

I can answer that easily (I'm the founder of ImprovMX). Forwardemail was created well after us (ImprovMX goes back to 2013).

We are not Opensource, but that doesn't mean we track user's email (we don't, we wrote about it: https://improvmx.com/are-you-reading-my-emails/). On the contrary, screaming to anyone that one uses Opensource doesn't mean they respect user's privacy (like Forwardemail does): take their way of forwarding for instance: you need to add your email in the DNS settings, publicly available... they have a odd definition of privacy.

And don't get me started on their homepage full of misleading messages ... ;)

[Basecamp](https://basecamp.com/) + [Hey](https://www.hey.com/)

I found there are very few mentions about hey.com despite here's HN. Anyone still use Hey?

I think we all signed up for a trial, thought it was cool, but didn't want to spend $100/year.

Pretty satisfied with Postale.io

https://protonmail.com/

Thanks will check this out. Hand't heard of them before.

Slightly more expensive than Fastmail but seems like better security / privacy considerations.

That said, the space per inbox seems far more limited.

Seems we have some interesting options here!

Didn't proton's compliance canary die not too long ago?

Sure, but let’s also be realistic that any service large / secure enough to trust your email to will also be large enough to have drawn the attention of entities that can force them to do things against their will.

Amazon WorkMail, part of the AWS suite of tools, $4/month/user last I looked. If you host your domain on route53 setup is painless. It's an exchange server compatible service and provides some MDM functionality.

Thanks, will check it out!

For those that are reading this too and are curious:

https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/

Aruba. Biggest hosting provider in italy has a very competitive mail service. Domain + 5 mailbox x 1gb each at 9 euro/year. At 20 Euro year you can create unlimited mailboxes x 1gb each. https://hosting.aruba.it/en/email.aspx

I don't think you can compare in any way Aruba mail service against Gmail. Even just for the webmail or the mobile app.

Why not? It's an IMAP service, you could use it with the client you prefer. Obvius GMAIL far way better for mail classification (promotional, transactional, spam). But I doubt any other service can do better than GMAIL with features.

gmail webmail client and spam/classification filters are already something above by far any other competitor. This is the added value I would like to see in a mailbox, not just another IMAP service.

We're switching over to Zoho for our latest startup. If you have more than one Google account the switching between personal and business is a nightmare. Some features are unavailable for one or the other, and it keeps switching between the two accounts seemingly randomly. It constantly asks for a password when you want to switch back. It's more headache than it is worth to be signed in to Google.

The only issue I have with Zoho is that their calendar solution falls well behind Google's. Between the scheduling, the Android widget, and notifications, it just really doesn't feel to have the same clarity as Google's.

Could just be my experience, but I'm considering moving back to Google for my personal email just for that.

G Suite Business Starter is $6/user. Even if you find something viable for, say, $3/user (and I really doubt so), it just not worth the fuss with migration.

From what I've read, Rackspace Email is $3 per user per month.

And iCloud+ is $1/month for up to 5 users for 5 domains with up to 3 addresses per domain per user.

Is it available for customers without iPhones?

You'll need an Apple device to set up Family Sharing (for the 5 users part), but if you don't need that you can set it up in a browser.

Fortunately one of my 5 has an Apple device.

I haven't gone through the process yet, but it additionally looks like I will need to borrow a Mac or Windows machine to start up iCloud Email. Once it is enabled I should be able to use IMAP or their web client.

Okay, so I have to count the device cost in. And I don't see an official Android client in Google Play. Seems like showstopper for me.

From what I've read, on Android you just go to Settings / Passwords & accounts / Add account / Personal (IMAP) and you can use ICloud email through IMAP.

That said, if you don't have anyone in your family with an Apple product, this iCloud+ thing may not be right for you.

Rackspace has a 10 user minimum.

Highly recommended against m365 unless you are a big company with a separate IT department.

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.

iCloud+ purelymail mxroute Migadu Mailbox.org

I've had exploring mxroute as a low-priority todo item for a while, I like that pricing is roughly per gigabyte, not per domain or per user. Do you use it? Does it deliver to gmail and others ok, or does it go to spam?

I've used it for years, no issues with delivery to gmail or outlook.com / o365. They've got a bit about their delivery system mentioned here: https://mxroute.com/docs/#/Presales/ipreputation

It's pretty basic in terms of webmail/core functionality but it receives and delivers mail well from the various IMAP clients I use, which is all I need.

IIRC migadu.com is $9/month, but that includes essentially unlimited domains and mailboxes (but only mail, nothing else, which seems to fit your use case).

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.

It's actually only 19 dollars a year :)

>but they stress that they don't consider themselves mission critical

I'm new to shopping for email hosting and using your own domain. I know sending emails and not get flagged as spam is a hard, but is there any risks when it comes to receiving emails?

Only operational risks as far as I know (uptime, routings, network speed, tls certificate validity, ….)

How hard it is depends on how many nines you want in the uptime guarantee.

I am old enough to remember that Microsoft also had a similar free email product for custom domains called Microsoft live mail or something like that. In fact, you can still find articles on the internet about how to move from Microsoft to Google workspaces when Microsoft killed their free product.

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.

Regarding Google voice, voip.ms is lining up the features to replace that (sms/mms/voice transcription/forwarding/etc.). For $20 (paid to google) they will release your GV number so you can port it to voip.ms, and then you pay as you go there.

The frustrating thing is I think many of us would be perfectly happy paying for a custom domain in plain old regular gmail, but $6 per month per user is waaaay too expensive when all we care about is email.

I think I pay $60/year for Protonmail, and at least $30/year for my email forwarding service.

$72/year for gmail seems reasonable given it includes drive.

Zoho has a lite email plan for $12 per year per user. I can put my whole 6 user domain on Zoho for the same price as a single Google Workspace user and the loss of things like Google Drive aren't really a loss in my opinion because I don't trust Google enough to use them.

The $6 per user per month price point is pretty high for users that want basic email.

I can second zoho. They have a decent service for the price.

Your ProtonMail account most likely includes access to ProtonDrive. Proton's services are also encrypted at rest. So for cheaper, you support a company fighting for user privacy. $72 for GMail is unreasonable considering you are also the product by merely hosting your data with Google.

I wish they'd charge me for Google Voice. That's the only product I find vital from them.

I loaded up $10 a few years ago just in case I ever needed to pay for a Voice call, and it has dropped a whopping $0.02 from one 23 second outbound international call. It’s great that it’s a free service for domestic calls.

in the spirit of never touching a google product again, I'm planning to use mysudo instead of voice. Might be worth a look? It allows you to create up to 8 identities with different numbers.

https://mysudo.com

I still have an old Exchange Friends & Family thing that a buddy working for MS set me up with ~14 years ago; I just pay for the domain and set up some DNS records at that time. I haven't really used it for anything, but checked now and it still works, though appears to be half-broken once you venture beyond email & calendar (presuming the SKU is long gone so they did a half-ass migration to something at some point).

I have four active email users in my free "legacy edition" vanity domain workspace.

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.

https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/email/

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.

Zoho Mail si probably the cheapest you can find for limited users and custom domains

You might want to consider iCloud+ as well. It starts at $1 / month.

You get 50 GB of storage, custom email domain, etc...

iCloud price is affordable. One problem I noticed, though, is the process to create a family account. You must have an Apple device to do it. There is no option to do it through the browser. I don't have an Apple device, so I cannot create a family group associated to my individual account.

I was subscribed to paid g suite for more than 2 years and only used custom domain email. When Apple released iCloud+ [0] or whatever it is called, I immediately migrated there and am really happy with it.

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.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212514

Does iCloud+ support wildcard catch-alls?

No :( And it has a 3 address limit per user + domain which is annoying.

Good luck with that. For home accounts, you’re tied to GoDaddy. Or rather Microsoft via GoDaddy? Who knows. I would NEVER use GoDaddy after reading various experiences around the net.

Also, no aliases. Are multiple domains even possible?

Their help admittedly is professional-tier centric and suggests that if you can edit your DNS record to add the "I own this" file they give you, you can use any domain. Do they explicitly not support this for the family edition? I guess I'll have to test it with a free month and a spare domain.

The FAQ explicitly answers this question:

> Q: I already own a domain that's registered with a provider other than GoDaddy. Can I set up a personalized email address in Outlook.com? > > A: At the moment, we only support connecting domains managed by GoDaddy with Outlook.com.

There’s not a lot of room for workarounds here. If you read some help, be extra careful it’s not for Microsoft 365 business, which offers a lot more freedom. For a price.

I've just moved a small business (25-50 users) off of GoDaddy 365.

Every horror story about other GoDaddy products is equally applicable to their 365 offering.

Their support takes hours to get to, and has hung up on us multiple times when the problem is anything but wanting to purchase more services, putting you back at step 1.

They force you into their own god awful auth instead of Microsofts usual OAuth and it breaks so many things, making you sign in constantly and you can't even use 2FA.

For anyone reading this, never use GoDaddy 365, I am so glad to be free of it.

M365 family doesn't let you manage users as part of one "organisation" in the same way that Google Apps does. It's effectively 6 copies of M365 Personal. And you can only add a vanity domain if you happen to manage it with GoDaddy. The closest to G-suite is M365 Business Basic which is cheaper than G-suite and only includes web and mobile versions of the Office suite, but it does come with 1TB of storage per user which is nice.

As someone else mentioned - the cheapest per user hosted service that is close in functionality to G-suite is Zoho.

I know all this because I've also been bitten by the impending decommissioning of free G-suite so did a bit of research yesterday. I've signed up with M365 Business Basic and am in the process of moving my domains over to it now. I only need one mailbox but I have a bunch of domains and email aliases that I manage.

(edit - changed "Starter" to "Basic")

I've given this some serious thought and I'm considering using Cloudflare Email Forwarding [https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/email-forwarding].

This will allow one to continue to collect usual emails/mailinglists, albeit forwarded to your other personal gmail (for example) account.

The only downside I see is that replies to any emails will originate from the redirected email address.

Apple's iCloud+ is cheaper. I pay $1/mo ($12/year) and that covers a few domains and a handful of email addresses with 50GB of storage. $3/mo ($36/year) will get you 200GB of storage and a family plan that lets you set up different accounts with different logins.

I think Microsoft 365 is a great value if you're looking for everything it offers - it includes Office, 1TB of storage per user, etc. Oh, one downside of Microsoft 365's custom domain email is that you have to use GoDaddy as your registrar: "Domain sold separately. You must maintain an active domain with GoDaddy to use this feature" (https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/p/microsoft-36...). So if you're using Cloudflare and paying $7.85 for a .com and need to move it to GoDaddy at $18.99, that's another $11.14/year, $0.93/month to use Microsoft 365.

I moved my email over to iCloud+ and I've been happy. It was easy to set up and pretty cheap at just a dollar.

Zoho is another option. $1/mo per user with 5GB of storage. It's less storage than iCloud+ and more money (and it's annual billing, not monthly), but you might like it better. Zoho also has a free plan that doesn't include IMAP access (and lets you use custom domains).

Note, these prices are USD. iCloud+ is $1.29 CAD for 50GB and $3.99 CAD for 200GB.

A quick google suggests that you can use/administer iCloud through the web and can access email through IMAP (though not POP).

But can it do four different users (Apple IDs) all getting email through the same vanity domain?

The problem I have with iCloud+ is that it is tied to family group, and my own nuclear family is 7. Let alone all the extended family using my domain.

Holy shit, this is pathetic. I should be grateful for the years I’ve spent on a grandfathered plan, but it’s mostly the same as a plain old free gmail account (for anything I use and the hundreds of small businesses I helped setup on it) and that’s not going anywhere. I’m slightly above annoyed for my own personal setup (just using it for email, guess I’m going to have to look into setting up forwarding instead) but for the hundreds of small businesses I setup and have been enjoying it and relying on it (and often wouldn’t be using it if it was let free) I have no idea what to say to them. Most of them are so small $6/month simply isn’t worth it for the low volume of email they get and now they’re also going to have to deal with migration.

Have been a G Suite legacy free user for over 10 years now, given my usage it costs them basically nothing, especially with the revenue they've made from my usage, purchasing via adverts etc.

Fairly recently Google suddenly remembered ~$15 in adwords spend from just over 7 years ago, for a now defunct business I worked at where I had (presumably by accident) used my personal adwords account as a quick test.

The problem is this was the first I'd heard about it, and in the UK it exceeds the statutory limitation period for debt recovery. I stated very clearly that what they were attempting to do is illegal in my jurisdiction and I'm more than happy to take them to the small claims court to recover costs and damages related to dealing with alleged non-payment and any subsequent account closure etc.

While the fee eventually got waived, it was impossible to talk to anybody on the phone (as I had been advised) and I kept going in loops until finally being able to 'chat' to somebody who was more useful than a chocolate teapot. It seemed they wanted me to input some billing details so they could auto-upgrade me when the time comes.

I won't be paying $6/mo, due to a spotty history I've had to rely on paying for domains for years in advance and relying on free services because the absolute last thing I want is one of my most important daily tools (e.g. account recovery, 2FA) being turned off because something unexpected happened - the amount of hassle that would cause is immense and could have some very serious knock-on effects that effectively lock me out of many other things.

I know, Google can decide to block and terminate your account across the board, so far they haven't, but it has been on my mind for a while now.

It's time to step-up my de-googling to the next level, and work on better continuity plans.

On a quick read of this the move seems pretty to have a pretty considerable impact on me, while I appreciate the free service it sounds like it’s been a trap. I’ve had gsuite for a while, primarily using it to host a custom domain for email for my family. Effectively I view my use of these services as mostly a free (gmail) user, just with the added benefit of a custom domain. I’m not sure $6/month/user is really worth it just for a custom domain; but I don’t really think I have a choice as the accounts also represent google accounts with other services hanging off them (digital purchases, other subscriptions such as YouTube premium, additional storage, etc).

Either I need to continue to pay to not loose all the items I’ve accumulated in the google world on this account, or after this experience choose to migrate my whole family somewhere else and deal with whatever other complexities that means, but cement my final departure from Google’s products, including finding alternatives for the other products I currently subscribe for from Google

> As of December 6, 2012, Google stopped offering the free edition to new customers.

10 years of a free product is not bad

Nothing against you, but a clarification here: this is a service, not a product.

For the free service, the user was the product.

Now, the service is the product. Only since it's Googs, the user will still be a product too. Googs needs to re-watch the Seinfeld episode on double dipping.

Yes, and Hacker News calling it "killing for existing customers" is ridiculous. No service or access is being "killed" here - they are simply asking to start paying for it like everyone else.

One of the problems is that people who paid for Google Play purchases and other services have no way of migrating them to a free Gmail account.

Or from free into the Paid ones - either move you pay twice.

Wait, we'll lose our purchases even going from gsuite to workspace? Is that confirmed somewhere?

I think the parent company misunderstood the process as being required to move to a new Google account. That's not the case as far as I can tell from the support document. The account remains the same, just have to pay for the service.

"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."

That "until" is really ambiguous - does that mean services terminate when you self-upgrade?

No, it means that you upgrade to a paid Google Workspace account. If you don't want to pay for it you can cancel it: https://support.google.com/a/answer/1257646

If you cancel it, your account is converted to an ordinary external domain Google account AFAICT. You need to migrate your email out of Google/Gmail to get service messages over email, but you can continue using your Google account as an ordinary Gmail-like account - only difference being that you handle your email yourself (because you didn't want to pay Google to do it for you.)

Well not to a Gmail account (since you can't change your Google account email address), but your Google account and associated purchases is not deleted: https://support.google.com/a/answer/1257646

Just set up your MX with some other service if you are not happy with Gmail, or start running your own SMTP server.

99% of the users of the free product just wanted to have their group/family/etc to use gmail with a custom domain.

That product is still free at other providers. We'll just be moving.

It will cost you dozens of hours to move your 10+ years of digital stuff. The big G has done a real pinch here.

Google Takeout is not even that bad...

Yes but for my family of 4 it would cost me 4612= 288$ per year! That's about 50% of my yearly unlimited fiber internet access (that also come with a free email).

For me that's the last nail in the coffin, will make sure in the future to keep away from all Google product (private or professional).

What is strange is how in a few year Google went from the cool company where everybody wanted to work to something that can almost be compared to a tobacco company.

In my case it won't, because, of course, it's all backed up locally. This Google outfit can be pretty sketchy at times - needed to make sure they didn't close down and take my stuff.

rclone FTW!

I adore rclone and am shocked every day when it just keeps working. I figured Google would have staked it through the heart years ago.

What are those other free providers?

What providers offer 10 years of email (guessing many GB in size), plus allow using your own domain name for free?

All the one's I'm seeing are paid options, some of which get very expensive if you have more than just one or two users.

It's not just that I can't use them for email anymore. I wouldn't mind that.

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....

Maybe it's just a relic of me holding out for the Google Plus migration so long but my youtube account is a "brand account" which is definitely a thing I can transfer to another google account (indeed there were a few youtubers who got famously scammed last summer into doing this). Maybe yours is set up similarly?

Android apps will be a pain. I have apps that are no longer sold, or am grandfathered on a premium 1 time purchase for stuff that is now subscription based, etc.

> Maybe it's just a relic of me holding out for the Google Plus migration so long but my youtube account is a "brand account" which is definitely a thing I can transfer to another google account (indeed there were a few youtubers who got famously scammed last summer into doing this). Maybe yours is set up similarly?

Could be. I'd have to figure this out, thanks for the heads up.

Looks like that may not be possible for people in my situation. From the youtube docs:

> You can move your channel and its videos over from one account to another. Note that if your account is a supervised account or a work or school account, you cannot move your channel.

So it depends if g suite is considered a "work or school" account or not.

This.

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.

Except they promised it would be free forever

I figure all play store purchases and similar content are now taken hostage.

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?

This is my worry. Also device support, etc.

Historically, they've not been able to migrate purchases from g suite to Gmail - I've been asking on roughly an annual basis for the last 5 years. I really hope they are going to change that, although I don't buy much anymore thanks to a phone with very little app storage space.

YouTube channels can be converted to a "brand account" then you can link it to a different email address.

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.

This is really pissing me off because of this. I've dealt with annoying limitations on my Google Account that I created back when it was just "Google Apps for Domains" to have a custom email domain for myself and my family. The service has been plagued with limitations as Google has added new services, but I've dealt with it as a nuisance - now my account is being held hostage?

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.

Since you can have a Google account with a non-Gmail address [1] they should at least provide a way to switch to a non-Workspace account. I have a ton of app purchases tied to my account that are going to get stolen if I don't pay the extortion money.

1. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/27441?hl=en

I'm just like so many others here: I've had these services for years and now they pull the plug.

Here's an exercise in how to piss off the world.

I will never recommend or use google products in the future if I have a choice. Never. Reason: you just don't know what Google is going to do next.

Here's a highly successful, multi-billion-dollar company. They don't need the money. But they want it, because apparently, there just aren't enough billions.

I'm a G Suite legacy user that is affected by this change, primarily using it for personal email.

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.

This is what I'm planning to do. Hopefully Apple's anti spam is as good as Gmail.

"Free forever"

I swear that we woke up 20 years in the future and that Google and Microsoft traded places.

Those of us who were awake for that time noticed that they didn't; Google just moved over to where Microsoft was and still is. The only difference is that Google got worse and Microsoft much better at PR, so many people are now under the misapprehension that Microsoft moved in the opposite direction.

The problem I have with iCloud+ isn't the product or price, it is how terrible Apple's web/cross-platform experience is.

Say what you will about Google/Gmail, but it has always worked extremely well just in a browser let alone all their app offers.

Not since they redid the gmail UI, it's _intolerably_ slow. Granted, the only thing iCloud has going for it is the speed of the interface compared to gmail, the overall interface is rather poor.

fwiw I use Fastmail, it's relatively inexpensive (~$100/3 years). My only real gripe is the app passwords tend to break, but the fastmail client is pretty good.

Fastmail's UI is so nimble compared to the beast that is now Gmail. Normally I get IMAP or whatever set up on my laptop but I get email so infrequently that it's really not a problem to open the web version.

Do you know how it would work on iCloud+ if you have more than 3 people in an iCloud family sharing group?

Fastmail was my refuge from google services many years ago. Infinite aliases on a single personal email.

I am going to migrate to Migadu. I have already given them a try and they were perfect for my needs (multiple domains and mailboxes).

I’m on them now, but run into send/receive limits fast and gets expensive. Only really useful for rarely used accounts, not regular use email

Why do you think you'll lose your Android app purchases? This comment thinks otherwise.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29997504

I am affected by this. I am sorry to hear that Google is running low on cash to pay for the bandwidth consumed by my two-user email/calendar suite.

Yup. The multi-billion-dollar company is low on cash and just has to do this.

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 anyone have any recommendations on _easy and inexpensive_ ways to migrate an entire family off this (6–7 users)?

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.

Same here. Was an early GMail for Domains user with my entire extended family (10 users). Have had problems with many features not working because "Workspace" (for example, adding a user to Google Home devices). Only did GMail for Domains for the custom address, would just be on GMail otherwise. Hate that there has never been a migration path, and will lose 13+ years of app purchases, pictures, email, youtube history, etc. without a migration tool.

I started using Zoho mail about a year ago in a very slow effort to migrate away from google services. I'm paying $75/yr for their 10GB plan, but they offer other options as well.

https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html?src=hd

I am using MXRoute.com. They have a lifetime account with unlimited addresses and some limits.

Looks like the price has gone up since I signed up, but so did the storage included.

I've wanted to explore them for a while, but haven't gotten around to it. Does it deliver to gmail and others ok, or does it go to spam?

It’s even worse than I thought. The Google suite is almost CA$700 per year for 6 people. I can pay about CA$100 less than that to Microsoft and get copies of Word &c for everyone. I can pay less than half the Google cost and get a similar suite from Zoho for everyone.

Best free way I know would be to move everyone to their own Gmail account, forward your mail via something like Cloudflare's new free email routing.

To migrate your emails across you could use the POP email feature in Gmail (set up an app user on your Gsuite first for the POP authentication and make sure you don't tick "keep emails on server" as this seems to prevent it from working).

If you interested in Cloudflare's Email Routing https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/ we're mass enabling the zones that have asked for Beta access and will be going GA soon. Email me at celso@cf if you can't wait; we'll try to prioritize.

This is a very interesting option for handling incoming email from a personal domain or two (especially since it's from an established company, rather than a random individuals's email forwarding service :)

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.

If you were to use free Gmail, this allows you to send via other email addresses (so you could forward youremail@yourdomain.com to your Gmail and send emails as coming from that email address). See https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en

Can that completely hide that real sender (me@gmail.com) without setting up a SMTP server? Seeing "me@gmail.com on behalf of me@example.com" or ending up in spam would be a deal breaker.

No I don't think so

Actually, I was wrong: it looks like there's no longer an option to do that from Gmail :(

Wonderful timing! I already have one domain approved and can confirm it's an awesome tool thanks :)

ps. I suspect that this will provide people a very simple way to migrate to using free Gmail as their email solution. (though in my case, I've taken the free Gsuite product closure as an incentive to fully de-Google).

Agreed. Time for me to move to something that I completely control myself and can keep it running as long as I want.

Does Cloudflare Email Routing support Sender Rewriting Scheme (SRS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Rewriting_Scheme ?

If your main use case is to keep using Gmail with a custom domain, then it’s still possible to achieve it using our service - improvmx.com. We’ve prepared a guide that explains how to migrate step-by-step: https://improvmx.com/guides/gsuite-legacy-free-edition-alter...

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.

this is lovely thank you for posting

You are welcome, I'm happy if it's useful!

This is perfect, thank you!

I'm glad if I can help! :)

People are talking about their purchases on Google play, but that's not the main point. All the web services where you used Google as the IdP are going to be toasted if you move. You will to go through all the services you use to see how to transfer your account there. It will teach me one thing: never ever use an external IdP and always create local account.

Some people learned this lesson few years ago, when Google started locking out accounts for whatever transgressions were punishable at the time.

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 think almost all of these will allow password reset by email. So you should be able to get in again.

I'm more worried about the Google services that provide absolutely no support for migrating between different accounts.

I hope they make a tool to migrate accounts into individual Google accounts. I've been using G'Apps to back a family domain and will be moving to Fastmail which will leave anyone whose made purchases on the Play store or the like in the lurch. Hopefully no one has but I'm expecting some awkward conversations over the next few months.

I find the outrage here quite amazing. This tier has been deprecated for about 10 years already.

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...

I find ~$1000 a year for just email accounts for three humans to be egregious (the non-humans are service accounts for things like NAS, printer, or TeamCity/Jenkins).

Wow. Why is it so much?

I saw the $6/month per user plan, which would be $216 for three humans.

Is that a massively discounted (80%) introductory price?

There is a $30/person tier, maybe they are using something that requires that? For myself I'm doing a data export then I'll purge the backup accounts and automated email accounts (for email alerts for self-hosted stuff I have home@mydomain.com). I'll move all my alert sending to AWS SES and get away with $6/mo for myself.

$6 is the real price and not introductory. Even the most expensive standard plan (Business plus) is $18/month and would be $648 year for 3 ppl. Not sure where they got $1000.

the $6/mo isn't discounted. cosmotic has 14+ email accounts for some reason.

You saw correct, but user != human. User = email address. Two NASes, a bug tracker, a CI/CD server, printer, a catch all for either of two domains, it adds up. The combined disk usage is about 3GB, well under the limit for a single user.

I think if you're the kind of person to have an email address on their domain for their printer, you shouldn't feel bad about putting some effort into hosting your email outside of Gmail.

If all you need from GSuite is email, then hosting yourself with https://mailinabox.email/ is an alternative that worked for me, until I realised that https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/ on a yearly plan was cheaper than the cheapest hetzner VM I could get for hosting it myself.

Leaving a $6 per user Google service which includes email for a $5 per user Fastmail service which is just email would be an odd cost-saving measure.

Well for almost any service, people would rather prefer it to be free than paid, so it's almost an instinctive emotional reaction. Google being huge makes it a particularly easy target.

Also many of us _do_ pay Google quite a bit already, e.g. via YouTube Premium, Google Drive storage space, YouTube Music, Android application purchases/subscriptions, Google hardware purchases, etc..

Some others may even be Google's suppliers, such as operators of Youtube channels, devs on the Play Store, etc. etc.

The cost are high considering pricing is per user which can add up from something that was free - this is in addition to issues about if you made purchases under accounts for these domains which force an upgrade to keep apps

I find the inability to transfer my paid Android apps and Youtube purchases to a free Gmail account quite egregious. GSuite already had lesser consumer functionality than regular Gmail accounts, at least let us transfer over our purchases.

It is quite egregious that purchases in app stores cannot be migrated but as far as FAQ states, you don't lose access to that Google account and as such you don't lose access to the purchased content. You just lose access to the email and productivity suite. Think of the scenario where you sign up to a Google account using a Hotmail account: you can make Google apps/content purchases in that account

The FAQ didn't say that when the news first came out; it must have been updated due to backlash.

As a side note, I still haven't gotten an email notification of this days later. If it wasn't for HN I wouldn't have known Google was cancelling legacy G Suite at all.

I have one simple rule. Never rely on Google for anything. Not email, not cloud storage, not infrastructure, *anything*. If you're going to use one of their products, cost-in the expense of moving everything out at a moments notice and keep constant backups of your data. My advice to anyone is to just avoid using Google for anything you expect to use long term.

A lot of us have been using it for more than a decade. I'm going to look around, but $6 / user / month doesn't seem outrageous to me.

I'm sure they are banking on people just ponying up the cash because they've been with them for so long. It's basically mafia protection payments. Pay us or we'll break your legs (delete all your data).

Not at all, they actually would be happy to get rid of all these low value accounts. They don’t want to maintain separate SKU, and given that this option is not available for 10 years, any potential revenue is so tiny, they just don’t want to bother.

Do you know anybody else who will give me free hosting for the next 12 years before demanding payment? I think I'm okay with moving once every ten or twelve years.

I wish most places would even let me pay for 10 years at a time like you can do with domain names, when it comes to peace of mind in the event of unexpected circumstances (which is incredibly relevant now given COVID-19, losing your job, ending up in hospital for a few months etc.)

How fragile is your infrastructure if one or two missed payments will wipe everything or even let somebody else take over your intangible identifiers because they're now 'inactive'.

As a personal rule I don't recommend anything "free" for long term use or anything you want to really depend on.

I feel like it depends a lot on what you're using it for. I have a personal domain attached to mine with one or two email aliases that I use for a few things - I get maybe 5-10 emails a week there, so super low volume.

I feel like I would comfortably fit into any sane "free tier" they wanted to offer with some restrictions and low volume limits.

I have been planning to move more and more of my personal email over to my personal domain (currently mostly all running on my @gmail.com address), and eventually would have been happy to pay for the privilege once I started consuming more and more resources.

I'll see how I feel in 6 months if I've bothered to migrate over, but I might as well now look at alternative options.

$6/user/month is $6 * 12 * 100 = $7,200 a year if you have taken up their grandfathered offer of up to 100 accounts.

This is for a service which is basically identically (except in some ways where it is less functional) to their free offering but linked to a custom domain, and a service they told us they were planning for to be free forever.

I wouldn't mind paying something, but this charging per accounts is ridiculous for something that was free.

I would have used the service differently if I thought it was going to transition to a paid-for service.

For example, I have an elderly friend who I hooked up to the Google ecosystem using my domain because I thought it would be slightly easier to troubleshoot any issues he had if he had problems. He wasn't costing Google any more than if he had an @gmail account. (Presumably he brought in the same amount of money, rather: if he was profitable under a free account, then I imagine he was just as valuable on an Apps account).

He doesn't even use email, so the custom domain doesn't really help him. He will be just as happy to use a free @gmail account, but I will have to spend an afternoon some time in the next few months driving out to see him and updating his accounts and devices. And then doing the same the next weekend when I've missed something. And then doing the same for some other users.

If you want to keep the google accounts working for things that free (photos, YouTube etc) you can switch first to the business essentials plan and then to the cloud identity plan. Then you can move the email elsewhere but the google accounts still work.

This was essential for me as I used g suite for my family and some are using it for photos.

Yes, this is the way.

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.

So say your custom domain is example.com and you have a user who logs in with me@example.com that has data in Google Gmail, Drive, Photos and Calendar. What are the migration steps? I'm finding this really confusing.

Backup Gmail and Calendar, switch to business essentials plan, then cloud identity plan, set up email for me@example.com with some other provider and you can still use me@example.com to access your old Drive and Photos?

Yeah, those steps seems about right. But you'd probably want to set up the new provider as your first step and upgrade from the legacy free edition as your last step. I also like to point the MX records to the new provider before doing the backup so there will be no incoming messages while the backup is in progress.

Disclaimer: i haven't followed the steps myself since i'm paying for a personal Workspace account since a few years ago.

Thanks! I was wondering if there was a way to do this. I don't really need calendar on a personal account, and for email I was thinking about shuffling over to somewhere else anyway.

Some people are being told "you'll keep photos", and others are being told "You'll lose everything".

https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuite/comments/s7t45q/g_suite_lega...

There's only going to be one correct answer!

Google is really on a killing spree lately. Can any insiders give us insight into whether the people at the top of Google are aware that they have a strong reputation in the community for killing things off?

not an insider but I don't think they really care.

also not an insider, but it's obvious that Google is running out of runway and needs to start making money on its products lest it should shutter its doors. /s

Do you really think they care about that reputation? It's simply binary: Product makes money, product does not make money. Did you think Google was giving away free stuff for "the community"?

I'm not necessarily just talking about this particular instance, just in general that's definitely been the overall theme of the discussion when things like this happen. We're a paying G-suite customer so we're not affected, but we HAVE been affected by features that users adopt as part of their workflow and productivity that Google decides to axe on a whim.

It makes us as an IT organization look stupid when our users come asking us where the feature they rely on went. I just want to know if leadership at Google has any inkling that this is their reputation or not.

Loss leaders are a thing. I've had a free GSuite account on my personal domain which effectively acted as free job training and contributed to choosing them as an email provider for two companies I've worked for and clearly contributed to vastly more revenue than it would cost to host my personal GSuite account for my next 10 lifetimes. Over the last decade I've slowly but surely stopped recommending Google for anything they offer. It's been a slow attrition but I've wound up at zero.

They've very effectively taken a good chunk of their best evangelists and turned them into detractors. I have no idea if they've done the math and decided that was worth it, but I sure hope they have and it's not just total incompetence from one of the biggest players in the industry.

Exactly. As an early adopter, I brought who knows how many souls to gmail. I set up a couple small companies on Google Apps, or whatever they want to call it this year. (Mine is called GAFYD...)

When Google gave me a free HTC Magic handset in San Francisco, I showed it to everyone. I performed tricks with it. I made people want one.

To this day, three members of my immediate family use newer models of my old Pixel phone.

I told a man with a lot of CPU heavy jobs that GCE exists.

I'm talking about "influence" a lot.. but let's be clear, that's not all.

Google knows me--or at least it had the opportunity to. Somewhere between all those referrals and the emails in my mbox files at gmail and GAFYD which pre-date the launch of those services by a decade or my bug reports, or working in one of their datacenters for a while, they should know that I helped them be what they are today.

Maybe they do. Maybe this kind of treatment is what I deserve.

(to reiterate what others have posted, it isn't about the money. It's about the major unplanned migration. Which they still have not notified me about.)

Haha! Just yesterday, that is exactly what Google was promoting as their first defense against antitrust regulation. That “these free services provide thousands of dollars a year in value to the average American”.

So if they’re going to kill the free stuff, then they have no ground to stand on.

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/the-h...

I wouldn't really rank this one under "lately" since it's been a legacy version for a decade. The writing was on the wall for this a long time ago.

I apologize for believing them when they said it would be free forever. My bad.

Frankly speaking, most people out of HN don't care.

Not this is a good or bad thing, but this news make no sense to 99.9% of their customers.

Well, this is an unpleasant surprise. Most of my family has been on G Suite for nearly 20 years, under a grandfathered-in free account with a custom domain. Six dollars a month is at least $24 a month. Time for everyone to switch to a free account, or look for an alternative that's just as easy. The hard part will be getting email addresses changed, which is why I chose a custom domain to start with...and weaning people off the Gmail client.

I've also been used to the free tier of GSuite...but honestly, i can not complain. I got to use my own custom domain for my family for several years...so i can't be upset really. That being said, a few months ago i started testing zoho mail...because i had planneed to move away from google anyway (for reasons that are not about cost, but more about principles)...and so far my tests are pretty good with them! Zoho's performance and cheap pricing means that i will be hopping to them very likely. At least...that is my plan...we'll see. Also, i;'ve heard that mailbox.org is pretty good and low cost; so there are optins that won't break the bank.

Do you know if one can enable the catchall with the Zoho cheap plan (€0.9/month/user)? I have a single mail account, but I use the catchall to provide distinct email adresses to corporations (so if I ever get mail from foo-corp@my-domain.example.com, I know who leaked it).

@pygy_ Not sure what happened to your comment...but as far as supporting a catchall...while i do not use that feature, the follwoing help pages seem to indicate that it is supported: https://www.zoho.com/mail/help/adminconsole/catch-all-setup....

https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/mail/adminconsole/article...

https://www.zoho.com/mail/help/adminconsole/org-settings.htm...

Good luck!

There must have been a caching glitch...

Many thanks for the info, I had seen the first two pages, but I wasn't sure whether it applied to that very plan. That seems promising :-)

@pygy_ So, i just checked (because you got me curious too)...and the Zoho Mail Lite plan (I'm U.S. based, so i pay $1 USD per user per month) does indeed have the catchall feature available. But, please note, it is present within the admin console...so not within, say, the user's mailbox. If you were a single user, that would not be an issue...but i think i recall you saying about needing for your family...so not sure if/how the set up a catchall at the admin console level interacts with each user's email address/identity...hmmm...Likely it only activates assuming, say, amazon@your-domain.net is not being used by one of your family users...but it merits a little more research on your own, if you in fact use this feature alot. Good luck!

No, it's me alone. Thank, I know where I'll migrate to!

Is it a surprise? It's been almost a decade since Google stopped offering this as a free product. The writing has been on the wall for over 9 years.

Since they stopped offering new free accounts, which I have no problem with.

It’s the retroactive nature that pisses me off.

It's an extremely unpleasant surprise that they'd do it without offering any form of migration to personal gmail accounts. I've been waiting on a proper migration route for the past decade, with some unhappiness given Google Apps was originally marketed as suitable for personal or family use.

My phones, browser history, payments, purchases and more are tied to my GSuite account, and I can't leave without losing all of that. The fact that you apparently don't think we deserve to keep any of that stuff without paying a monthly tax forever doesn't fill me with joy.

Put another way, Google has had a decade to build a migration path from the product they decided would be business only to their consumer product, but didn't.

same, what a pain.

maybe improvmx will help you? it provides email forwarding to any alias + domain you own.

(not affiliated or anything, just like and use this service myself for similar reasons)

It's free for 1 domain.

https://improvmx.com/

Uh, Google Apps started in 2006. Not quite twenty years.

I'd say it's reasonable to call 16 "nearly" 20 years. It certainly rounds off that way.

It launched August 28 2006. I'd say it's reasonable to call it fifteen years. This is tech.

Fifteen years is nearly 20 years. So, both is correct. I'm not sure what your point is other than splitting hairs.

By this logic, five years is almost ten years, and fifteen years is almost ten years. Go figure.

Same here, what a royal PITA, personally I could migrate pretty easily, but the rest of the family that is not tech-savvy won't be a walk in the part.

Please correct me if I am wrong but you control your Google Workspace domain, am I right? There's no need to change your email address, and reading Google's documentation it seems like you can also keep your Google account: https://support.google.com/a/answer/1257646

Google has for ages already supported Google accounts for external domains whose email is not handled by Google.

I find turning "at most 16 years" into "nearly 20 years" egregious!

What I hope is that Google will at least have an option to turn those accounts into regular Google accounts instead of being in yet another limbo state where they exist as part of a management that isn't free.

The article title is "G Suite legacy free edition", and is about a service which hasn't been available for 10 years being finally sunset, last day of access 30-April. Wouldn't "G Suite legacy free edition ends May, 2022" be a less editorialized title?

Seems like the "real" deadline will be July 1st - and possibly to the end of that month.

Source: https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/08/google-launches-hos...

"A standard edition of Google Apps for Your Domain is available today as a beta product without cost to domain administrators or end users. Key features include 2 gigabytes of email storage for each user, easy to use customization tools, and help for administrators via email or an online help center. Furthermore, ORGANIZATIONS THAT SIGN UP DURING THE BETA PERIOD WILL NOT EVER HAVE TO PAY FOR USERS ACCEPTED DURING THAT PERIOD (provided Google continues to offer the service)."

and

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20070222003704/http://www.google...

"GOOGLE APPS FOR YOUR DOMAIN BETA AGREEMENT [..] 18. Fees. Provided that Google continues to offer the Service to Customer, Google will continue to provide a version of the Service (with substantially the same services as those provided as of the Effective Date) free of charge to Customer; provided that such commitment (i) applies only to End User Accounts created during the period when the Service is considered a beta service (the "Beta Period") by Google (such Beta Period determination at Google's sole discretion), (ii) does not apply to the Domain Service described in Section 4 above, and (iii) may not apply to new opt-in services added by Google to the Service in the future. For sake of clarity, Google reserves the right to offer a premium version of the Service for a fee." --

Class action lawsuit?

-np

At some level, it's been sort of nice that Google has been nudging me off of their platforms one product at a time, while reminding me to not become overly reliant on the ones I continue to use.

True, Email and docs were their last products I used to do anything real.

I probably have no problem paying for the service (gotta become a customer after being a product for 15 years). However, the service needs to start being on par with the regular Google account offering. Most of current users me included have setup family domains, but that's one of the areas which does not work with GAFYD/G-Suite/Workspace properly -- no Family Link, not Family Sharing in Android etc. The solution according to Google? Create a @gmail.com account for these cases. Speaking of which: same goes for children's accounts for Family Link -- you can only create a @gmail.com one for children, not an account in your domain which you control. This needs fixing.

Cool, finally an excuse to spend some time to completely exclude Google from my life. Get f***ed.

It’s been bothering me for years how nothing about Google Apps is smooth, the accounts are consistently not treated like “normal” Google accounts (for example, you can’t buy Youtube Premium even if you wanted to), and I guess I should have seen the writing on the wall.

I find it interesting that there are already 79 comments and no one remembers: this was advertised back then as "FREE FOREVER". Even before that I was a beta user, quite sad that Google is not wealthy enough to keep its promise.

I think that is exactly why people are pissed off about this.

Yes, the original ToS [1] for Google Apps:

17. Modification. Except as provided in Section 18, Google reserves the right to change or modify any of the terms and conditions contained in this Agreement [...]

18. Fees. Provided that Google continues to offer the Service to Customer, Google will continue to provide a version of the Service (with substantially the same services as those provided as of the Effective Date) free of charge to Customer; provided that such commitment: (i) does not apply to the Domain Service described in Section 4 above; and (ii) may not apply to new opt-in services added by Google to the Service in the future. For sake of clarity, Google reserves the right to offer a premium version of the Service for a fee.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20090211101551/http://google.com/...

Damn. I've been using the free version to host my personal email with a custom domain for, apparently, over a decade. I have no need for the rest of gsuite - I just want `myfirstname@mydomain.com`. Guess I have to decide if it's worth $72/year for that, or look into alternative email hosts.

'Google kills' is the information technology equivalent of 'Florida man'. Always a fount of disappointed amusement.

I've had this for 10+ years. I use it for a family domain. Everyone in the family has a user in the legacy G-suite, but it's really only set up as an email forwarder to their personal gmail account. No one logs in under it.

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.

Sounds like you need something like:

https://improvmx.com/

https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/email-forwarding

(I have no idea if they work as advertised, as I have never used these services.)

If GP isn't too angry at Google, you can get mail forwarding via Google Domains as well.

Unsure if this is true or not as I haven’t received anything as of yet.

Finally, actual motivation to get off google. Probably will go to Outlook premium for my own domain’s email.

Indeed, I have been putting off migrating, but this surely is a great motivator to finally get off gsuite.

Agreed.. do you know where you will end up migrating to? I looked into FastMail a long time ago, at that time it was the best replacement for just the Gmail component with custom domain, not sure if it still is.

I looked into FastMail as well about 1-2 years ago. I’d like IMAP PUSH support for iOS, to replace the polling needed for gmail. Good support for iOS search is also needed, I haven’t investigated how FastMail works in that regard yet.

I moved from gsuite to fastmail about 6 months ago

I'm pretty wary of any "automatic import from $previous_service" tools (having been bitten in the past)

so I ran the fastmail importer against my user's accounts, then later reconciled this against the gmail/fastmail APIs with my own code

... it was completely byte-for-byte perfect (other than "muted" conversations, which weren't imported at all, that I dealt with separately)

I was very impressed indeed

Thx for this. It's reassuring to hear.

Same here. What side-effects such migration would have? Would I lose all the files in my Google Drive? Sure my email@customdomain.com email will still exist as a Google, YouTube account, right? It just won't use Gmail as my email provider?

> Unsure if this is true or not as I haven’t received anything as of yet.

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

Yes, it's true. I think Google rebranded it as part of Google Workspace. I received their email detailing their policy change back in Dec 2020; been an extremely frugal user of it back when it was simply called Google Apps Engine for basic domain email hosting.

> Probably will go to Outlook premium for my own domain’s email.

Microsoft discontinued that and increased the price under O365.

Really? I just looked at Microsoft 365 pricing, and it comes with Outlook Premium.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-a-personalize...

> As of February 28, 2021, the specific "Outlook.com Premium" and "Ad-Free Outlook.com" subscriptions no longer include the ability to use a custom domain with Outlook.com.

> To continue using a personalized email address and custom domains with Outlook.com, you will need to subscribe to Microsoft 365. Learn more about Premium features in Outlook.com for Microsoft 365 subscribers.

From: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/premium-features-...

Which causes a price increase.

ah boourns

Yeah thinking the same. Microsoft 365 most likely the best switch for me. With 2 users and my custom domain, for cheaper might as well get 1TB cloud storage and Office as well.

iCloud+ may also be an option.

I just hate that you have to move your domain to GoDaddy.

I don't understand why they do this. Microsoft used to have a service called Windows Live Domains that used your normal TXT-record validation and killed it off in 2014; the shift to requiring GoDaddy be your registrar for outlook.com premium just baffles me.

Don't panic. You won't lose your purchases.

So, to check what happens I cancelled "Google Workplace" subscription in one of my burner G Suite free legacy editions in the "Billing" section for one of the domains I own. Upon the cancellation in the section with "Apps" there were 44 services left in "Additional Google services" and 4 in "Google Workspace". The latter includes Google Drive and Google Keep—both still active for all users. Though I didn't see YouTube in the former section.

After activating Cloud Identity Management free edition subscription there are now in "Additional Google services" 55 services (up from 44) including YouTube, Photos, Google Play, Pay, Books, Maps, Chrome sync, Web Store etc. All active for all users in the account. I checked and I'm still able to access and use them.

It appears in general the account for the organization and all registered users are active and are able to access all services—though with no access to all Google Workspace services except Google Drive and Google Keep. They are still active.

I'd like to call myself wise because I've alwayed used a "genuine" Google account (@gmail.com) when I needed to purchase digital goods. Not that I knew they would stop offering the free version of G Suite, but there have always been some strange inconsistencies between a genuine Google account and a G Suite one, like feature differences and regional availability.

But I'm still using G Suite to forward emails sent to my domain to my primary Google account, so I must find some alternatives to it.

I have a hard time remembering the last time something positive came from G. - a former Internet darling company that could do no wrong.

Their maps and turn-by-turn navigation are still the best.

Not where I live: it often tries to lead me on the one way lane in the opposite direction. In Russia, Yandex Maps navigation is far superior.

Check out HERE maps. Solid.

Guessing you’re not a cyclist!

Over the last year or so I've worked to remove any dependency on my google account. After seeing this I decided to rip the band-aid off. Mostly because I didn't want to accidentally get charged for something. Like others said I had to upgrade my account to the new plan and then cancel the subscription, I then added "Cloud Identity Free" as a subscription.

I can still access the handful of things I purchased and my android device is still able to to use google play with the same account.

If I try and go to google drive, gmail or calendar I get: "We are sorry, but you have cancelled your subscription to Google Workspace. You will need to re-subscribe to Google Workspace in order to use Google Workspace services like Gmail."

For those not trying to host their own, you might want to look at Migadu[1]. I have quite a lot of domains still running on the legacy GSuite, and a few others on the paid workspace, and the remaining on Migadu (not relations but a happy customer).

1. https://www.migadu.com

I really like how they present themselves - with Pros/Cons link in main top nav - with first link being to the drawbacks.

"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.

A large and important CC/BCC should probably be done through a mailing list, no?

A lot of us have one-off use cases to email 80 people. There's that one time you need to email everyone on your kid's sports team even though you're not the coach, etc.

Migadu is great overall. I've been using it for probably 3-4 years.

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.

My retired mother and retired father are both considered "users" and so are my numerous service accounts. This will cost me almost a thousand dollars a year for three actual humans that use the service for nothing more than gmail.

I'm in the same position, except 5 warm bodies. Thank you HN for this story - at least now I've got a few months to start migrating & consolidating these 'users'.

I don't have a problem with Google eliminating the free tier or charging for use but the lack of a migration option hurts.

In my case, I only have one user, so it's not a big issue paying for it. But I also use Google Voice which isn't part of the standard Google Workspace package and I have to pay $10/month/user to add it.

So I would go from paying $0/year to $192/year ($6/month for Google Workspace + $10/month for Google Voice) is a bit of a pain. I am OK paying $72/year for email, etc. but $200 is a bit steep.

And if I want to migrate to a non-G Suite account, none of my history will transfer over.

I /wish/ I could migrate to a regular gmail account from me@mydomain.tld. I've put up with a crippled account for years that can't access arbitrary features or leave store reviews because of my play store purchase library. My email was moved to another host years ago for privacy reasons.

Do they not realize the downstream effect is they are removing the lock-in that kept has users like me from switching to iOS for all these years? When this keeps me buying a new pixel every other year there is a revenue impact even thought the account is 'free'.

A long, long time ago I registered a domain name for a close group of friends, and the 4 of us have been happily use the free Gsuite for email @thedomain ever since.

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?

do the friends only email each other on the domain, or use it for all things email? if doing it just amongst the friends, you can drop to just one account, then share the credentials amongst the group. use it like freedom fighters to just write drafts to each other.

It's their primary personal email account for everything. Mine too.

As an admin of a number of legacy G Suite accounts I have yet to receive any email about this/pointing to this

Likewise.

Same boat. Ugh.

Likewise. Multi-generational family account. Around 17 users. Huge cost - i suspect many individuals just stop using it; a few may want to stay. Will one of us want to pay for it, and then collect subs from others - no - not really.

Hmm, if you're using x@example.com via G Suite, how do you transition away from G Suite but still use x@example.com to login to your Android phone and other Google sign-in related stuff? Anything you need to be careful of so you don't get locked out?

Either become a nonprofit or delete the account in G Suite and recreate it as a free regular Google account after the domain name has been removed from G Suite.

> recreate it as a free regular Google account after the domain name has been removed from G Suite

How though? Create x@gmail.com and copy your old emails into it, change your domain settings to stop pointing to G Suite and forward x@example.com to x@gmail.com instead, cancel your example.com G Suite and your email should still be working....

But then what happens to apps and Android login that are connected to your x@example.com Google SSO login? You can connect this up to x@gmail.com?

> But then what happens to apps and Android login that are connected to your x@example.com Google SSO login? You can connect this up to x@gmail.com?

At this point you cannot. You will have to create a new Google Account, and none of your purchases will go across.

I'm guessing that whoever signed off on this didn't remember that Google sells movies and Android apps, or else they would've put a FAQ telling people this on the page.

It is said that the core services will stop working. Google Photos, YouTube and purchases/subscriptions are not considered as core services.

When you cancel GSuite you can enable Cloud Identity Free. That will keep all your accounts, just the GSuite functionality will be dropped. At least that was the way it worked a while ago.

Thanks, can you explain "keep your account"? Don't you use lose Gmail access? How would you get email receiving and sending working again without breaking any Gmail logins?

Thanks Google, this is the push I need to leave your God damn platform for good. Good bye.

I'm so happy for having moved all of my content from G Suite to a self-hosted Nextcloud instance long ago. Now that Google has come up with this announcement, I simply decided to remove those services from my account (I had even forgotten that I still had them). All of my data and cloud services are safely stored somewhere else. Google's ransom strategy doesn't apply to me.

If you haven't don't so yet, move to a self-hosted solution. Remember that there's no cloud, it's just somebody else's computer. And if the guy who runs that computer decides that you have to start paying more for it, you don't want to find yourself in a situation where you have no options but to accept - unless you want to give up your data. Google's ransom policies have started to become so obvious: the more evil somebody becomes, the more banal and predictable their actions.

This is good. I host a family email domain with G Suite, and every time I've brought up switching away from google I get big pushback from family members on spending any money for email hosting. Google forcing the issue is good, because now I'll have exactly the excuse I needed to switch to Fastmail.

Shit! Shit, shit, shit, shit!

Both my wife and my son have their Android accounts set up through our GAFYD account. Untangling that is going to be a mess.

I would have no problems with this if Google just provided a way to convert GSuite accounts into personal Google accounts. In fact, I'd prefer to pay if it means no ads/data gathering in GMail.

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".

park your vanity domain on some provider that gives you free or cheap email forwarding. (cloudflare is promoting their offering at the top of this thread)

make a plain old google account with a new address. forward your old address to the new one. then set the old address as the send address in your new gmail account. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en

Unfortunately that means losing all of my purchases and other data associated with my original account.

I've got multiple domains on "G Suite legacy" which the admin console claims have been around since March of 2013. Given the article references December 6, 2012 as the date they stopped offering this I'm wondering if I somehow have a different product that wasn't sunset?

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?

I'm pretty sure the date shown in admin.google.com is incorrect. For me it also shows March 2013, but in reality I've had it since 2010 - and I've got e-mails still in my inbox to prove it.

The more disturbing part is that I, like you, haven't received any notice from Google themselves.

I haven’t received a notice either. I do however use Google as my domain registrar, and I purchase storage from Google. Is it even conceivable that either of those has spared me? Or is Google just lagging with its termination notices?

I also don’t see a notice on the admin panel, but others in the comments here seem to suggest they do. So…yet another layer of confusion.

Google, this is a bait and switch mess of your own making.

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.

The accounts don't disappear when you cancel. Only the Workspace features. https://support.google.com/a/answer/1257646?hl=en

Did you notice that step one of that link is "Save your data"?

The _accounts_ don't disappear. The data linked with the features you're cancelling does. So, apps and purchased digital goods don't seem to disappear. Files that you need to pay for storage costs for do.

> Yes. If your needs have changed and you don’t want to upgrade to a paid Google Workspace subscription, you can use the Data Export tool to export your organization’s data.

This is such a half assed answer. Data Export won't export my android purchases for example.

I think you can keep your Play Store purchases. If you do not upgrade to a paid subscription, your account is just converted to a free account under an external domain: https://support.google.com/a/answer/1257646

Just make sure you set up working mail for your domain, e.g. run your own / use some other MX service.

I don't think this affects the android account, but even if it does you can just add an alternate email address to your android account to maintain access.

Bummer the only value I get out of the service as an individual user over Gmail is a custom domain.

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.

I switched to Migadu a few years ago, as I realized that having a personal account with Google Workspace was a bad idea. All Google features kept getting delayed for Workspace users. Google removed the free tier (huge red flag on its future). Fortunately I just had to migrate email and calendar. You're in a bigger mess.

Yep. Get out. Stop relying on Google for anything important.

Migadu starts at $20/year. Like everything else, almost all services with free tiers went crippled or paid-only with the pandemic, and last I checked all the SEO listed the same outdated options.

You probably also get 65GB of storage for free, but you may not be using it.

It would be cheaper to go with iCloud+ service which offers custom email domains. I am now considering that after being on the free legacy plan for all of these years.

https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/add-a-custom-domain-m...

Can you use it for things like e-mail if everyone doesn't use Apple stuff?

For setup you may need iOS device at first but I don't think it is tied to it. I am using a lot of Apple devices so not a problem for me but maybe if you dont and do not have Apple ID.

I looked at this a while ago. But I discovered quite how tightly looped the apple eco system is. Without an iPhone or a Mac I can sign up for a free iCloud account, but bizarrely I cannot have a paid one.

Did you install iCloud on your Windows PC?

Is catch-all supported yet for custom email domains on iCloud+? That's really the only thing holding me back from it.

If you're an iPhone/Mac user and already using iCloud+ for files/photo storage, this is a good solution as it won't cost you anything more (assuming you're happy to rely mainly on the iOS and Mac OS apps as the web-based mail client is terrible to use).

This impacts me and my family for sure. I'm not so worried about the business implications of going to paid, but I have been providing my family with firstname@ourfamilyname.tld for decades and they now have deep ties with that as their primary email addresses for all manner of things and for Google ecosystem stuff. Am I so generous to pay $72/year per family member and/or I am going to have to figure out out to rebill/resell services to them. This is a major change and is one of the use cases Google marketed this to and has subsequently forgotten about.

The bad thing isn't that Google wants me to pay for a service.

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.

The GDPR-compliant export tool they offer should also encode your albums, I don't think it will be easy to port them somewhere else, but it should be possible

That’s about the last shred of trust. I was such a fanboy for so long.

I’ve paid Google a lot of money when the price on the tin was upfront. I’ve used the free services as well. They generated huge goodwill and lock-in all over the place. Now it’s an extraction machine to pump the stock price and I’ll treat them like that.

FML.

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.

Imapsync maybe? I haven't personally used it, though I did previously buy it thinking it would download to local machine -- it transfers between accounts using IMAP which wasn't my intent but sounds like it is yours.

https://imapsync.lamiral.info/

Thanks.

I realized that I was just reading about GMail backups a few days. Here are some repos that I happened to star on GH.

  * https://github.com/gauteh/lieer
  * https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync
  * https://github.com/joeyates/imap-backup

Thank you!

Found a review of iCloud's custom domain: https://medium.com/empty-coffee/three-months-with-apple-iclo...

TL; DR: Seems to work BUT may have issues with SPF/DKIM etc.

Looking for anyone else on HN to chime in with their experience using iCloud custom domains.

To get the emails over, run Google Takeout, which exports an mbox file, then import into Mail (on your Mac). Then gradually copy over emails from that local mail folder into your iCloud inbox (takes a wee while, but works).

I'm young enough that I missed the free tier however I later eventually came across MXRoute [0] which is still offering the lifetime promo. Looks like it increased to $175 since I bought it. I haven't been disappointed and it is faster than Gmail from my experience. I host Cypht [1] for the front-end instead of using their webmail.

[0] https://mxroute.com/ [1] https://cypht.org/

Does anyone know of an email provider that will handle billing the users directly?

Shared pain as the rest, have been hosting email for people with the same last name since 1998, and migrated to G Suite for Your Domain in 2006, and they graciously increased the max users for the free account, and I have 147 users (almost all are active). From 1998-2006 I ran the email server, and it was a pain to deal with issues and complaints (mostly poor spam filtering). I can't go back to that, and I can't afford $10,584 a year to offer free email.

I've researched some other paid options, but my biggest issue is that I just can't deal with invoicing and collecting money from 140+ people. What I really need is an email host that will direct bill all the users. I don't mind paying for email as a service, I just need someone else to deal with all the money stuff from the other users.

For others assistance in research if you will be paying the bill for the full domain, here are some options I looked at: Google Workplace - $72/year/user - advantage being no impact on users Microsoft 365 - $60/year/user - less expensive, probably equal in quality to Google Fastmail - $50/year/user - cheaper still, great reputation Rackspace - $36/year/user - cheaper still, not best reputation Namecheap - $11/year/user - most likely a get what you pay for situation

Honestly I think email is worth $72/year, and I would go that route if Google would bill each user directly.

Long-time user of "Google Apps for Your Domain".....what's the easiest way to migrate 10 family members to regular Gmail?

I don't think there is a good option here because I don't think you can use the same domain. You would need to switch to a service that can have multiple mailboxes on a domain.

I can handle setting up new email that still uses the domain. The issue is all the data/purchases/etc with the Google Apps account that can't be transferred to a regular Gmail account.

Ah yes. That is also the problem I have and I don't think there is any option here. There was an internal experiment but I guess that didn't go anywhere before they decided to just close all of the accounts.

The wording sounds like non-"Workspace" services will still be available so i guess you can theoretically still access purchases. Not great, because now I have half of my stuff in different accounts but not too bad.

Add "Cloud Identity Free" to your subscription, seems to have let me keep all my purchases. (I canceled my legacy subscription today to avoid future charges)

It seems it's not possible to add "Cloud Identity Free Edition" to your account while the legacy subscription is still active, and I don't want to risk cancelling it before the deadline in case it has other unintended consequences :(

If you told me when I signed up for gsuite that Microsoft would turn into Google and Google would turn into Microsoft and I would have to migrate to o365, I would have laughed at you.

You're only half right: Google turned into Microsoft, but Microsoft didn't turn into Google. They only turned into Microsoft with an old-Google image.

I've heard that it's possible to strike a balance by self-hosting incoming email and outsourcing outgoing email to Amazon SES. SES provides SMTP credentials which should be fairly straightforward to use. Anyone has experience with this kind of setup?

SES for outgoing works pretty nicely, I don't think I ran into any gotchas.

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

Thanks! Your solution may be best for usability. Researching further I found another solution that is perhaps best for privacy: https://github.com/markushinz/aws-ses-pop3-server

SES -> S3 -> aws-ses-pop3-server -> desktop client with POP3 and SMTP

Using this option, email is only really usable from a single device, but it avoids sharing private emails with yet another cloud, especially a free cloud that would share email with advertisers.

EDIT: Wanting a minimal implementation, I instead made a script:

1. List email files in S3

2. For each file, download into a local maildir-style directory, then delete original

3. Use `mutt -f ./maildir` to browse

Hmm you could probably use the AWS CLI's "aws s3 sync" command for that right? Sounds pretty practical

You can probably make that work, just have to be careful deleting from S3, make sure to only delete those emails you imported and not accidentally delete an email that arrived during the import process.

My personal setup makes heavy use of rclone so I used that instead of awscli:

https://gist.github.com/boronine/661fd24ba6671f687ff714969d9...

More discussion on other post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29996432

Mods: maybe a merge to this one since it's the 'official' Google post

Whether Google Workspace costs $6 per user/mo. of 6¢ per user/mo., that really isn't the point. When Google Apps started, to attract users and gain insight for product development, Google offered free service to anyone who was interested.

A lot of us have friends and family in our Google Workspace. We have years worth of email with Google, and now Google is saying, "Too bad. We want money. We know it will be really, really difficult for you to migrate all of your email and the email of your friends and family members to a new provider. They all use the email address you created for them to login to their bank, Amazon, social networks, etc. They'll never be able to change all their logins everywhere. They don't keep track. Most of your relatives don't know where they even have logins. So, we've got you. Pay us. Pay us for yourself. Pay us for everyone you know. You can call it extortion. It is! But we just showed you a disclaimer that lets us do this to you without consequence. Anything that's legal is morally right. We can do whatever we want to you. How does it feel to be powerless? Thanks for the money, sucker. Love, Google. :-)"

Is this google scraping the bottom of the barrel ? That would be a worrying sign

And it doesn't help that navigating "google business account" is a nightmare. I m looking how to edit aliases to an email account, there's no option to edit it.

Here's the original 2006 announcement of "Google Apps For Your Domain".

(Although personally I could swear I've had a gmail account at a custom domain since even earlier than 2006. Originally via some kind of partnership with... Dreamhost? Something like that? Anyway).

http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/08/google-launches-host...

> Google will provide organizations with two choices of service.

> A standard edition of Google Apps for Your Domain is available today as a beta product without cost to domain administrators or end users. Key features include 2 gigabytes of email storage for each user, easy to use customization tools, and help for administrators via email or an online help center. Furthermore, organizations that sign up during the beta period will not ever have to pay for users accepted during that period (provided Google continues to offer the service).

> A premium version of the product is being developed for organizations with more advanced needs. More information, including details on pricing, will be available soon.

I won't be spending 6$/month, that's for sure. I'd rather go self-hosting.

I quit Facebook. I can quit Gmail too.

Microsoft is probably happy about it. O365 for Family is $99/year total (not per-person), and allows up to 6 people, and you can use your own domain.

Some caveats. You won't be able to use your primary main_user@formerlyhostedbygoodle.com address as your login to the Office365 suite.

You'll have to manage each inbox separately (I had 4 email accounts in GSuite legacy).

>You won't be able to use your primary main_user@formerlyhostedbygoodle.com address as your login to the Office365 suite.

That's interesting...why not?

Edit: Found in their FAQ:

"We strongly recommend against setting your personalized email address as your primary alias for signing in. Doing this can create problems with signing in or even sending and receiving email." https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-a-personalize...

So it's not clear if you can't, or you can, but it's not recommended.

If they’d just let me transition my account to a normal one so I don’t lose everything I’ve purchased in the play store that’d be fine. I don’t need everything else, I just don’t want to lose what I’ve already paid for.

I used to setup bunch of these for my small business clients, I and them are going to have a bad day.

I have two domains - simply because of the failures of the google legacy tools. I have countless services that oauth dance through Google - services I care about. The problem is that I've never felt that I receive value for the Google services. The value is comparative. With a family of 6 this would cost me ~$45 per month. Frankly this doesn't have the 3x the value of Spotify (which I will pay for, forever), and value is comparative.

For this price point, I can pay for O365. With O365, I get more storage, and I get usable office tools such as Excel and Word. The real question is do I gamble - do I migrate and hope the entire universe doesn't break - like my android?

What happens with my google play purchases, are those forfeit as I migrate out a google account? Is it now time to get a free throwaway gmail account, purely for android purchases and nothing more? This is.... frustrating to say the least.

So what happens if you have Google Voice with a legacy Google Apps account? https://workspace.google.com/intl/en_us/pricing.html shows that Google Voice is a separate add-on from Google Workspace

It's still possible to port-out your Google Voice number for a fee. I wouldn't rely on keeping Google Voice after Google kills the legacy accounts. If you have to, port out to a different SMS service (you could port back in to consumer Gmail if you really wanted to).

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.

You can transfer a phone number from that sort of account to a Gmail account. I just tried it and it seems to work. Go into settings then transfer. It takes you to the legacy page to do the transfer, oddly.

Does this actually work?

The help site (https://support.google.com/voice/answer/1065667?visit_id=637...) states that:

> A Voice for Google Workspace account number to any other type of Google Account, including personal accounts and accounts using a different Google Workspace domain.

I am confused if my Legacy G Suite account is considered a Google Workspace account of if it's something different.

Yes it works, I moved a GV number from my Legacy G Suite account to a Gmail account.

Awesome. Thank you for the confirmation.

Sucks that it won't transfer the history but I am glad that I can at least keep the number and move it over.

I have a few legacy Google Apps for Your Domain accounts, but lost the domains per-se several years ago during a perfect storm of clinical depression and financial hardship (which hasn't really ended, just tapered off a bit) where I let the registrations expire. The domains are now being squatted on. The legacy accounts still work for things other than email like Drive, but I've mostly switched to using my Gmail account on Android and elsewhere.

I'll have to think hard about whether I want to start paying for the custom domain accounts, to preserve the option of eventually registering new domains to associate with them (I'm unlikely to pay what the squatters are asking for the original domains I lost), or just do my best to migrate all the old data off, finally.

Not sure if anyone has seen this but if I login as <user><domain>@gmail.com with my <user>@<domain> password it logs me into my Domain account. I wonder if they are preparing to roll out a tool where you can convert your Domain account over to a gmail account.

Can you elaborate on that? Let's say I'm foo@bar.com, what username could I give to gmail?

foobarcom@gmail.com ?

He gives the kids free samples Because ho knows full well That today's innocent young faces Are tomorrows clientele...

Time to pay the dealer... What did anybody expect?

Thanks for killing my family’s primary email addresses google!

Absolutely no reason to pay for gmail @ vanity domain. Why I thought they would offer this service for free forever and actually went through with setting my kids up this way is beyond me - now it’s just 4x the work to migrate.

It's sad that the MBA's have finally taken over at Google, and now they have to squeeze every last penny out of their customers (on top of all the ads they sell).

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.

Why do people speak of MBA as if it is a bad thing? Serious question, in India it is often seen as an extremely prestigious title and its a gateway into a high paying position.

Or is there a cultural difference I'm not understanding?

I think a lot of engineers resent that someone could get more responsibility and more compensation than they do without being 'technical'! (Obviously much work in business administration is deeply technical anyway.)

Yeah ... this dichotomy is a false one: both sides need each other. Sales needs engineering to deliver. And Engineering needs sales to have some reason to build/work on something.

Perhaps a good sales person might command the salary of 10 engineers if that sales person can bring in revenue commiserate of that salary. I read somewhere that one's salary is roughly 10% of the value one brings. So if a sales person brings in 10M in revenue common wisdom says pay them 1M. Now for engineers it is harder to value. So perhaps if it takes 10 engineers to delivery the 10M worth of revenue that sales person brought in then perhaps they're only paid 100k?

MBAs are seen as people without skin in the game. They are rewarded if things are going well, and are not punished if things go bad. The asymmetry makes these individuals look as if they are here to leech and most of their knowledge is just how to "network". Just pick any big bank and look at how the board members rotate as time goes on.

Here it's being used like the pejorative for Accountants or "bean counters" insinuating that all an accountant does is count needless things like beans. (Or so this is the interpretation I've always held).

Here I think the op is saying that Google used to be cool. It used to offer a lot of value for free because search was the golden goose that paid for everything. And now, they're seemingly charging for things they don't NEED to but perhaps the MBA grads now in positions of power and shifting the company into monetise-everything mode.

certainly in western societies MBAs are also prestigious, in that they are often in charge of large companies, and they of course make lots of moneys for this prestige. But there is a critique of MBAs that says while being an MBA might be good for the individual person, and I suppose for their family, MBAs are harmful to society because they follow harmful behaviors regarding business management that in the end cause those businesses not to serve their customers well, cause those businesses to mistreat their employees, lead to businesses destroying the environment in pursuit of profits, and several other criticisms.

my understanding as an American its not that MBAs can't be personally lucrative, it's that they are seen as gateways to overbearing management, corporate jargon and BS, profit seeking at all costs, etc.

I think it is a cultural thing. At first the MBA's bring prosperity by increasing revenues, but eventually the revenues hit the limit, and after that the job of the MBA is not to grow the business, but to optimize the profits. Optimizing profits means making everyone maximally unhappy. If your MBA is not doing that, it just means your business has not reached its limits yet, but eventually it will happen. That in India fewer people deride MBAs might just mean that India is still growing.

Since this is a predominantly technical forum, it is more popular to suggest there might be technological ways to increase revenues or for Google to simply be happy with the profits they make.

In the US MBAs are taught to value short-termism, so they'll come in, boost a business in the short term (often getting bonuses in doing so) even if it sacrifices long term viability (e.g. loss customer loyalty/repeat business). Then they'll get a golden parachute on the way out as the business starts to crumble.

So when people say "MBA have taken over" they're saying that the business is focused on short term over long term, and is in a downward spiral. It is the anti-Costco philosophy of doing business, and is extremely prevalent.

For example, the old now unfashionable idea was that Customer Retention occurred by treating existing customers well and acting in good faith, this was a long term strategy. The new fashionable idea is just to make it incredibly difficult to quit, it boosts short term retention but makes it so customer re-acquisition is almost impossible (since customers remember how hard quitting was).

It's not so much the MBA itself as it is what it represents. An MBA refers to an individual who is a general manager and typically come from sales or finance organization. They generally aren't concerned too much with research and development except they view them as cost centers to be optimized. They tend to be hyperfocused on the bottom line and will do anything needed to maximize profits, even at the expense of the product.

MBAs are seen as analogous to Soviet apparatchiks: leaders who have little to no understanding of what they are actually leading.

When a business stops growing, the MBAs drop in with their spreadsheets and metrics to optimize the operational aspects of the business to get whatever the goal is.

Consider the Google strategy; I can pay $7/mo for Google Workspace email with a small quota, or pay $8 for 2GB storage and email that they give away for free. The $7 premium is for the domain.

My guess is they are seeing revenue growth slow down as Apple slowly chips away and SMB business and Microsoft continues kicking ass with O365. Somebody will get a KPI hit, get their bonus, and take off.

It's all a matter of perspective. An MBA is nice for the person who has it and the company the work for. It is not nice for all of the users that have to pay more once the MBA starts working their magic.

If you want to use a custom domain with gmail for free do this: https://medium.com/wolfpak-labs/custom-email-with-domain-for...

The article's technique relies on the Domain Registrar providing email forwarding. But I would recommend not using Google Domains. If and when Google's AI bans your gmail account, you lose access to the DNS configurations of your custom domain. And it will be impossible to move the domain to another Registrar because Google Domains will require you to verify ownership with your gmail account, which it has terminated. You can try to do this with a 3rd party domain registrar. Just make sure that your domain's admin account is NOT gmail.

Also, the article assumes that email forwarding is all that you want from a custom domain. Legacy GSuite users may be using other Google features and products, such as Calendar, Contacts, Groups, etc.

My internal MBA is now planning an exit from Google's tightening squirrel-grip ecosystem because that's my profit-optimized path.

Wow this sucks. I thought after taking away the ability to link new custom domains that this would have been it, and it'll just stay a crippled option that some will just continue use.

I am grandfathered in. I don't actually use the account for much these days, but I have a few things like YouTube channels, YouTube premium (+ music), analytics, Android store purchases and bunch more things running through it.

Sure I can use aliases for the domain or just set the mails go to a different provider, but outside of the mails I am now stuck and need to figure out what to do since there are no migration options available. Probably means I'll have to nuke everything and setup from scratch (for the things that don't allow setting a new admin).

As many here I use own domain with free Gmail. This Google move changes everything and maybe it's time to move to Microsoft 365 subscription which provides possibility to use own domain even with personal and family plans [1]. For the same subscription Google asks, with MS 365 at least one gets 1TB of cloud and the latest Office suite. 6TB with family plan. No brainer I'd say. Just needed a motivation to finally ditch Google.

1. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-a-personalize...

I think a class action is in order here. Two claims:

1) False advertising. A lot of it....

2) All those Google purchases....

It's the purchases for me. I'd be ok with every user in my domain getting converted into standalone Google accounts.

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.

Why alternative G-mail? Pick a different company to reduce the chance of the rug being pulled again.

I am not a company and I get they want people to pay, but the amount is a non-starter for me and my wife and so they won't be getting any money from me.

Migadu is 20USD/Year for multipe domains ('almost' unlimited). Inbound (200/Day) and outbound (20/Day) message limits do apply but we probably wont't exceed those, but even if I find we need to move up, the next tier is 90/Year for a savings of over 50USD (more for my CAD) over the Google option.

I've been thinking of moving my mail there (using it for another domain already) for a while anyways, this just provides the incentive to finally move it over.

If anybody is in this boat, I can highly recommend Zoho Mail. I pay $1/mo/user and the product is really great. They do have a "forever free" tier as well but I'm not certain what all that includes. The $1/mo/user is a great price, and they have IMAP/POP3 and a pretty great API as well. You can also create as many groups as you want so if you have a company of 3 people where a mix of you need to handle support@, admin@, marketing@, etc you can easily do that.

I have no affiliation with Zoho other than being a happy customer.

I have this account. I am disappointed that I found out about it here, I don’t see any notifications that reflect this just one message saying I should /consider/ upgrading.

I’m just using this to host my personal email domain, I don’t have users, I don’t use any of the rest of it. Just email@mydomain hosted on gmail.

This is the strongest link I have to google, strange to see them shoot in the head like this. Looking through the thread, Fastmail seems to be the consensus?

Edit: As if by magic, there is a Gsuite vs o365 discussion in the leadership channel, I have an opinion now.

Been using this for longer than a decade only to hear about the service’s closure on HN… thanks Google. I’m sure the ad revenue from reading my emails in that time covered my feeble 1 account use case.

Much the same as others' experience here, I have a legacy account that has been used for nothing other than email on a custom domain, and in recent years with only one user account.

GSuite hosts my primary email address for many years and I feel like I'm being extorted to keep it. What next? Will they some day be telling regular GMail users that their accounts will be deleted unless they pay for 'GMail+'?

I feel like Eleanor in "The Good Place". I can completely appreciate that Google doesn't have to provide indefinitely free email for my custom domain, but I also feel like the other options are completely unfair. Google only seem interested in offering business plans. I'm an individual, not a business. I'm not a non-profit organisation, but I'm an individual who is not using my account for profit. There needs to be a 'Medium Place' - or in this case some way of keeping hosted email with a custom domain.

I'm not against paying something, but the long term price they're seeking to extort from me is about four times as much as would be fair and reasonable for email hosting. I'd be happy with all of the non-mail services stripped out - call it a 'Legacy Mail Plan' or something. Moreover, I'd even be happy to pay for it, if it were say $15/$20 a year. I don't need a million extra services and features for my non-existent business.

I have my personal email on this. Luckily, we have a small family foundation that is a 501(c)3. So, I've just requested to switch over to the nonprofit plan. I'm not sure if this is applicable to many other people out there, but it is, in principle, an option.

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.

How much time/money/effort does it take to create/maintain a non-profit foundation?

So for regular users, does this mean my google docs, sheets, photos will be gone? What is G Suite vs Workspace? Or will all my docs be ported over and I'll still have access?

Yes I would like to know this too. from the fairly useless google support doc:

"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?

As far as I can tell there is no way to change the owner of these files. Youcan presumably make a copy of these one-by-one after sharing with a new account?

I'm one of the people affected. Over the years I've created multiple accounts most with multiple aliases on top of that. I would have a separate account for recruiters and job hunting, separate one for logging into sensitive accounts, separate one for each of the countries in which I've spend more time, etc, etc

Now I would need to start spending ~$90 + VAT (?) per month to keep this setup going. Anyone with a similar situation? Any services you could recommend to migrate to?

Apple has a custom domain for email with their Cloud+. Guess I'll be switching to that.

This is interesting. If you or anybody else has experience moving from G Suite to iCloud+, I'd love to hear it.

After reviewing this thread, iCloud+ is top of my list for migration, and I don't even own an Apple-anything. (Migadu is my secondary choice if this iCloud+ thing falls through for some reason.)

From what I've been reading iCloud+ has some limitations, but it will fit my needs. An iCloud+ subscription costs $1 a month ($1.29 CAD), and the subscription can be shared with a "family" of up to 5 other iCloud accounts. iCloud+ supports up to 5 domains and three email addresses per domain per person. Domains can be shared between the family or not. I also trust Apple to have a competent security team.

I'll probably start the process this month.

My main problem with iCloud is that when I first started using Apple products, I used my own email address as my Apple ID. Later I registered a separate Apple ID with my desired username @icloud.com when they became free, but before it was possible to create an @icloud.com address on your existing Apple ID. Now it's impossible to merge these two and I don't really want to dig myself into a deeper hole by creating some randomword@icloud.com on my primary Apple ID just to be able to use the iCloud+ custom domain feature.

It quite pisses me off that some features they've played with, disabled, let me hanging, like Reminders, sometimes it was disabled for Google Apps accounts (even paid ones). I used to be able to leave reminders while using headphones, and one day it stopped working. These days it seems they enabled it again, but seriously, I spent like year and half without being able to set Reminders using OK Google.

Someday I stopped being able to review applications on Google Play too. This is not my imagination, I have reviews I can see I made some years ago, and then suddenly... sorry, you can't. What the heck? You're technical geniuses, if you don't really want to associate a domain that I may lose and someone use in the future, hey, use an internal ID instead, but don't screw me over.

So I'm screwed because even if I actually pay, they use me as tester for their free service. Truth be told, even if I lose these paid apps, subscriptions, images/videos, history, whatever I lose... I'll just switch to full usage of my personal, not-on-my-own-domain account. How can I be a paying customer if I can't even get same features than non-paying? Come on...

This is an affront in several ways.

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.

BTW I run a 16 core home server with 10 tb of storage accessible over Comcast home edition for the cost of electricity. At the risk of sounding old and idealistic, isn't this what the Internet was supposed to be? Isn't this where the idealists among Web3 proponents are headed?

Heh, I'm writing an essay on this topic currently. It's so strange that Cloud is worth a trillion dollars, web3/crypto is worth as much, and self-hosting is... completely obscure? With multiple global satellite internet services coming soon - do we need crypto to be distributed? Can't we just... use the internet?

I don't think you sound old and idealistic, but I am _for sure_ old and idealistic, so...

Same conundrum... I mostly used Workspace for email functions, never for the actual accounts since they are much more limited than vanilla "consumer" Google Accounts[1].

So I don't really have contents, just a bunch of lists that forward email to gmail accounts. Definitely not worth paying $72 per year.

I could move those lists to Google Domains email forwarding[2], but it only supports one recipient per alias. And by foregoing Workspace, I'd lose my ability to send emails.

To send emails I could either run my own SMTP (ew!), or use a commercial service such as Mailgun[3], ImprovMX[4] or ForwardMX[5].

If anybody has a better solution, I'm all ears.

[1]https://support.google.com/mail/thread/19229800/change-g-sui...

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

[3]The free plan includes 5000 emails per month

[4]Free for one domain but no TLS

[5]$60 per year for 25 domains with unlimited everything (fair use)

I have no issues paying for email hosting with Google (and already do on some domains), but how are people dealing with shared company email addresses with access to things like Google Analytics, Google My Business, etc.?

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)?

There’s a reply somewhere on here about something called “Cloud Identity Free” — seems like you can ditch the G Suite apps but still keep the SSO sign in.

I needed this. Finally an excuse to get off my ass and transition the last bits away.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29996432

On the other side , not annoyed.

I transitioned from free gsuite to paid a few years ago. For my twelve (12) bucks a month, i get 2tb of storage, great mail services, all the docs i can write, etc.

When i compare to individual apps wanting $10 per month, this is probably my best monthly spend on my list. Fitness apps are the worst.

My main gripe is services that don't work with a paid account, like nest and home automation.

Source: https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/08/google-launches-hos...

"A standard edition of Google Apps for Your Domain is available today as a beta product without cost to domain administrators or end users. Key features include 2 gigabytes of email storage for each user, easy to use customization tools, and help for administrators via email or an online help center. Furthermore, ORGANIZATIONS THAT SIGN UP DURING THE BETA PERIOD WILL NOT EVER HAVE TO PAY FOR USERS ACCEPTED DURING THAT PERIOD (provided Google continues to offer the service)."

and

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20070222003704/http://www.google...

Class action lawsuit?

-np

I don't know if it was inevitable, but I do not share a sentiment here. Supporting domain mail with web interface and services around is costs resources, and Google have no obligation spending it forever. It was a nice gift and I feel grateful. I also feel it is a perfect time to try out new CloudFlare's domain email forwarding service, while it is free.

It costs more for a single user on Google Workspace or MS365 than it used to cost for shared hosting that came with 50-Unlimited email accounts. Small businesses that only need email are getting royally screwed by big tech. Everything is more complex, has no additional features, and is a solid 10x what it should actually cost once you have 10+ users on email.

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.

You get Exchange with the Microsoft offering, which offers things like (good) calendars and contacts, and push email to your mobile phone, which you could do with IMAP but many of those shared hosting platforms didn't have to begin with.

Exchange is $1 per month, which is perhaps a little more than shared hosting but you get way more features.

Are you saying office365 email is $1/month? Source please as thats way lower than I recall or found in a search. Cheapest seems to be $4 US p/m/u

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/exchange/compa...

That’s what I was thinking of, sorry I got it that wrong. I could’ve sworn there used to be a frontline plan that was something lower than that, but now I can’t find it.

Where are you planning to forward email to?

My primary Gmail address.

For those running custom domains and feeling pinched, check out improveMX: https://improvmx.com/

I've been using them for a while for a side project email that sends/receives through a free Gmail account and it works well.

I've worked with email for a while and was surprised by how easy it was to set up.

Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal, Google!

Hmm… Is there a good way to export all the email across all the accounts and move it to another more sanely priced service?

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.

Email is trivial. You can either drank+drop in a client like thunderbird, Google Takeout all your mail and upload, or many providers will support a direct server-to-server POP or IMAP import.

Well, shit.

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?

iCloud+ ($0.99/month in US) allows custom domains with 5 emails. I set iCloud to forward by creating a on addressed to rule. Configured the "Accounts/Import" in my gmail account with smtp (I always used this with my vanity emails). Not exactly the same as before for your usecase perhaps (everyone will need a free gmail), but about as cheap as I could find per recommendation elsewhere in this thread.

Cloudflare email routing is a good free option https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/

Upgrade from G Suite legacy free edition Where can I get help? If you have questions, you can contact: Google Workspace support

So I click on that link, and I get:

How to contact us To get phone, chat, or email support for your legacy free account at (my domain), you need to upgrade to Google Workspace.

Well, no, you see, that's what I want to talk about. About not upgrading to Google Workspace.

Little late to the party but there is a law firm that is investigating a class action lawsuit if it's interesting to anybody else https://chimicles.com/google-legacy-g-suite-class-action-inv...

I can’t be too mad because I’ve had 15 or 16 years of free service, but I’m now annoyed I have to investigate where I want to migrate, since I literally don’t use any of the other Google services.

And now I get to figure out what happens when a Google account is no longer tied to a paid Google account for stuff like calendar and document access.

Starting to pay for something that used to be free for so long is always weird.

But I'd consider it if it was not Google.

I simply don't trust them.

This is not even about their corporate evilness or their bullying market dominance.

I don't trust their engineering values and I don't trust their future business decisions, this is not stable enough to use as a business tool.

If you have a Google registered domain don’t they throw in Workspace for free? Is that a possible way to continue keeping at least a single base account alive without paying per month?

Otherwise I guess I’m going to look at using something to forward emails to my free Google account (Cloudflare now has email forwarding…)

Unfortunately, you can't use your domain for outbound email though, right?

when doing forwarding, yeah, it doesn't look like it. When I tried to add an alias on my gmail.com it asked for my SMTP account. I guess maybe I've never done that off a free gmail before (just paid / grandfathered Workspace ones!) - so it'll work well for anything inbound that's needed. But yeah, if you need outbound, still an open. Still assuming Google Domains allows you a basic Workspace account though.

I have a bunch of users from our university's computer club going years back where the club provided emails. For 15 years it was hosted on a qmail installation on a personal box of mine.

A few years ago, as my time got more expensive and I didn't want to manage it as closely, I moved it to the free gsuite account that I had (with some headaches, as free gsuite didn't support email routing, so qmail aliases couldn't transition over, as "-" is not a traditional alias character).

So, this is screwing with me a bit. What will probably end up happening, as I have a personal 1 user gsuite account already, which does support routing rules, I will just make the old domain an alias on my personal domain and use multiple routing rules to forward mail the matches regex ^username(-.*)?@ to whatever is their personal email account.

Uh oh, I think I have one of these. I somehow have my own custom domain pointing to gmail, for free, that I don't actually remember how I even got it, I've had it for years, but never have paid for it. That's all I do with this... whatever it is, email on a custom domain, I don't use anything else.

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.

You should be able to use IMAP to move things over.

I'm trying to figure out, if I sign up for a fastmail account @mycustomdomain, which is what my "legacy g suite" also uses... I guess I can probably still transfer over with IMAP before I change the MX and try to cancel the google "legacy g suite" account.

It's pretty confusing.

I wonder if I can manage to create an "ordinary" google account with the same email address afterwards.

I love Zoho for this reason. $12 a year for unlimited domains (actually, not sure if there is a limit but I've not hit it yet...). Each user is an additional $12 but it's mostly just me. I've got a bunch of those free Google legacy accounts and will be migrating all the domains to Zoho.

Someone at google needs to have a good think about who they're upsetting with this. Tech people, who early adopted a new product to host vanity email addresses who have been in the industry for 10-20 years+ and are now in decision making positions. I don't think they thought this through.

Google Legacy G Suite – Class Action Investigation – Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith LLP

https://chimicles.com/google-legacy-g-suite-class-action-inv...

OK, this is annoying but it looks like there's a combination of features that allows me to continue using my domain as an alias for my @gmail.com account, including being able to send mail using the alias:

1. Email forwarding: https://support.google.com/domains/answer/3251241?authuser=1...

2. Send as alias: https://support.google.com/domains/answer/9437157?authuser=1

I think this will actually end up being a better set up for my usage than GAFYD was.

So, we enter the brave new world of extortion for data held hostage. Cool. I wonder if Google has factored in what this will do to their brand image, the cost in the longer term will likely far outstrip the savings and the resulting income from sign ups.

How to download your Google data https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190

Yes, Good luck using those dumps anywhere else but in Google. This isn't all that easy to deal with for some, migrating years of email, and so on is a lot of work. Besides the loss of App purchases and other financial impact.

Fortunately for once I was prepared for something like this and besides a couple of documents I'll be able to shut it down easily.

This is why I have a nightly cron that backs up from my cloud services. Unfortunately Google (and many others) only allow Takeout with a cap of 1 or 2 a year and it is frustratingly manual.

I only trust SaaS products when I know I have an alternative and can exfiltrate my data.

May be a right time to evaluate an alternative for your free '@gmail' accounts as well.

The correct answer here is takeout + rclone, right ?

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.

> The correct answer here is takeout + rclone, right ?

Answer to what? You mean for extracting your emails out of gmail?

I had some years ago great success with IMAP migration (downloaded all my emails to home computer from old GMail and then uploaded them back to my new GMail account). All my old emails are indexed and I can search them just like before, they just show the old From/To address.

I also used a label to mark those uploaded emails, so if things would go awry along the way I could always nuke those migrated old emails.

I don't understand what you're suggesting using rclone for how. I'd be interested in reading your article.

What use is my email on S3?

Am admin for such a domain; not had the email; do not see anything in my admin portal advising?

Boy, you could not dream of a better way to drive people away from custom Gmail domain accounts, and into the arms of

* Fastmail

* Protonmail

* Zoho

I'm happy I've been able to use this (for free) for such a long time - genuinely great. But I do hope the 'seamless' transition will sort the things that just fell by the wayside, like the ability to review Play store apps etc.

I already pay $99 for Microsoft Office apps. I can move to them for the lowest business account which includes that and for just a little more get what I currently have. Anyway, I have until May to figure out what I want to do.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/microsoft-36...

After finding out about this yesterday I started experimenting with using Amazon SES to do custom domain email. Sending can be accomplished using SES-generated SMTP credentials, but receiving is not straightforward.

Here is my script to receive SES emails from S3 to a local maildir folder that can be opened with mutt: https://gist.github.com/boronine/661fd24ba6671f687ff714969d9...

Not very convenient but quite private and virtually free.

EDIT: I am using rclone, but you can also use awscli or boto3

From what I've seen, the biggest issue here is that you cannot transfer purchased Google Play Store purchases. Even without the G Suite thing, this is a problem.

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.

My understanding now is that even if you let the forced Google Workspace account lapse, the underlying accounts will continue to function as Google Accounts. You will not have access to Email, Documents, Photos, Calendar, etc. but you will still be able to login to Google and use Play Store purchases.

Only until they are inevitably turned off down the road. Such legacy things never stick for too long.

If the main concern is to keep a free Google Account on a custom domain, then that's still possible. It's enough to convert all users from G Suite to the free edition of Cloud Identity - https://support.google.com/cloudidentity/answer/7319251?hl=e...

Obviously that will require a replacement for gmail, calendar, etc, but it's understandable if somebody doesn't want to pay for Google's version

Well I think this is probably the push to move my email to fastmail, though for €5/month if they've got rid of the 5 user minimum I might pay for the archive/drive space/laziness.

I don't remember the details, but fastmail was recently the recipient of some HN ire recently. Might be worth your time to search to see if it changes your opinion of fastmail. Lots of users chimed in with alts in the thread there.

I wouldn't mind this so much if I didn't have quite a lot of money tied up in Android purchases. The fact that they don't offer a migration path for this ought to be criminal.

This thread, and many others like it, is a goldmine of handy tips. We have links to providers, solid evidence of migration success and plenty more. However, it's not a great resource at the moment. If anyone has time to collate the tips, links, articles of methods etc into a wiki we (the community of g suites) can help our fellows. A collaborative tips doc will help us all out.

Also the g suite support doc now says a tool will be coming that can migrate purchases to regular G accounts. They've listened (a bit).

Just one thought (I'm not sure it's feasible, but I think it is). If I have no Google Play/other things to buy, why shouldn't I be able to:

* setup MX record with another provider (many domain register offer that as a commodity, e.g. I think Gandi does) * setup mail forwarding to my private @gmail.com account * in my private gmail, setup username@mydomain.com as an alias.

Everything should work. It may take a bit of time for the migration... but gmail.com usage with another domain should not be a real issue.

For those looking to migrate to Gmail, a story of the mechanics of doing so: https://medium.com/@buro9/one-account-all-of-google-4d292906...

The gist: You can't move everything, you lose things like purchases on apps... but you can move email, docs, map saved items, photos... the core data you can shift, the rest you cannot. Expect some difficulties along the way.

I have not received that email. Maybe this is only for some users?

Hmm, there is very little information on this. They've sort of botched the operation. I've got no problem paying, but the problem is I don't actually know if I'll keep the functionality since half of what I use is under add-ons.

Will I lose my Google Fi phone number? It sounds like I should just migrate away everything I use, but it's going to be a bit of a hassle to actually look up everything I use, hmm.

Well, I guess I have to find a weekend sometime between now and June.

If this service weren't free and weren't advertised as free forever (see the original ToS [1]), more people would run their own email server and e-mail would be less centralized.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20090211101551/http://google.com/...

Oh damn, I set my family domain up on google apps back when it was free, and am definitely not paying $X/user/month just for email.

I'd like to keep use my me@foo_family.com email address I'd like to keep using gmail.

Is it possible to somehow migrate 10+ years of email from me@foo_family.com to me@gmail.com? From there, I just need to somehow point *@foo_family.com emails to something that forwards to the new individual gmail addresses.

This is a shortsighted move by Google. While I understand wanting to charge businesses using G Suite, many of us are individuals wanting to provide family-domain email addresses and nothing more. Please reconsider an option for individuals and families who don't need or want the full suite. Just an email management option would be sufficient. Otherwise, I may have to leave the google platform altogether.

So- just got the email. Can't pay for it, as Gsuite thinks i am US based. I am NZ based, so can't use my credit card. It seems you can't change the country of a gsuite, after signup. Obv, i am not a business, but this is a family gsuite org- and yeah, people do move around the world over decades.

No way to get support on this at all - there is no support to contact for free gsuite accounts....

Ouch. This will hit my personal domain. At least they could have given us a discount plan (1-2/user/month?).

I don't really have any desire to stay on Google's services, but it's going to be a pain to move things off and I'm sure they are counting on that.

Between this and the Nest-apps-domain-login fiasco, Google has burnt all my good will. It's time for me to wind down my Google stuff.

This change is a killer for those of us using Google Voice.

Not only do you have to upgrade to a Google Workspace plan but you also have to pay separately for a Google Voice subscription. With the cheapest plan (https://cloud.google.com/voice#pricing), being $10/month/user.

I have not received an email from Google about the changes. It lead me to think that it is for accounts that have more than 1 active user. I have a G Suite Legacy with 1 account only. The change make sense to block companies from abusing the free legacy version. However, Google should allow users to downgrade to 1 account or migrate the data to gmail accounts.

I've left Gmail and Google Apps (with my domain) long ago. If you need to pay anyway and are looking for email I recommend Microsoft Exchange Online. They're doing a shit job in marketing it, but $4 a month for Exchange email with immediate push to iPhone/iPad etc, good anti spam filtering and no Google profile building is worth it for me.

So I guess that's a great way to shovel hundreds of thousands of legacy Workspace users down to Google consumer.

Honestly, the only reason why I'm even on Workspace is because of Gmail aliases, but this news is reminding me that I need to stop paying them $12/month for this (which used to be free back in the day, and it was $6/month just last year!)

Does anyone know how this works with "catch all" domain handling.

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 :(

I never moved to the free GSuite and I'm glad. I have everything at my domain forward to me@mydomain.com and that goes to my gmail address. Then GMail is set up to send mail out through my domain's email server to retain the illusion.

Good for you ;) Heh, quite jealous.

I assume this means you're running your own mailserver, which was something I was hoping to avoid.

It looks like Google does allow catch-all addresses on the new plan. https://support.google.com/a/answer/2685650?hl=en . I'm still very tempted to move to fastmail instead though. Email was all I really used the legacy suite for.

The annoying thing is things like toy apps which I have which are all with one of these legacy g-suite accounts (though, maybe those do all continue to work actually ?) What a mess (like, how does oauth work when I signed in with Google and now it's no longer a google account... it won't work.. gah!)

How did you configure the forwarding from "me@mydomain.com" to your gmail address? Just using your registrars email forwarding options?

My webhost, Dreamhost. It's a configuration option in their mail transfer agent.

My family uses it, but now we have to pay after they said "free forever". That's how much their word is worth.

I received the email on Monday. I, too, was in the boat of having friends & family using it. It was a mistake to trust their promises, but this was from back in the day of "do no evil." They said free forever, now ask me for >$1000 a year.

The insane thing is that almost everyone affected by this is likely to be highly technical, and in positions in which they have a say in how corporate spend happens.

I migrated away this week. I had to explain to my friends and family about this bait-and-switch, and have them all using Google Takeout. C'est la vie. I had not self-hosted mail infrastructure since I was a teeanger, but here I am again. Thanks, I guess?

I'm in the same boat as you, as my whole family has been using a custom domain for 15 years.

What did you migrate your users to? Did you manage to transfer emails/calendars?

iRedMail stack on a hetzner machine. Migrated mails with getmail and dovecot import, but it isn't perfect, and no calendar etc. But nobody is ever kicking me off a platform again.

This is straight up extortion. Either you start paying for a "free forever" service, or you lose access to every account you registered using Google OAuth with your custom domain email address.

You can migrate your domain and email, but you CAN'T MIGRATE your Google OAuth, and without that you lose access to all your accounts ON OTHER THIRD PARTY SITES.

> Questions about Google Workspace? Send us your questions and join live as Google Workspace experts walk through new topics in the coming weeks. Register now[1].

1. https://events.withgoogle.com/meet-the-expert-webinars/

I can't blame Google for this, but this is a pain. I'm likely a low-value customer and being intentionally churned out with this change (that's fine).

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't blame Google for this

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.

I feel like it would have been clear by now that anyone still expecting their Google account to be a safe store of any form of value was going to be dissapointed.

Moved everything off of Google a few years ago and much happier for it. I certainly don’t have to worry when one of these threads inevitably appears every 3 months or so.

Google should be the one paying ME to use their GMail with ALL THINGS THEY HAVE LEARNED ABOUT ME from my emails.

Google put users like me in a painful situation, I'm not using more than gmail and now forced to pay for everything they offering. Attracting ppl by offering free eco system and later forcing them to pay isn't something except by Google and must have to support their early adopters.

I'm affected and will move to another provider; does anybody has tips/insights how to export all those Emails and make them searchable - probably offline only, I just still want to be able to access 10+ years of mails. Moving them over to another email provider is not required.

Using Thunderbird, create a new local mail account.

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.

If we start paying, do we stop being the product? Or will Google keep collecting information about us?

Anyone got any experience and tips for migrating a lot gmail e-Mails to iCloud mail? I pay for the 2TB plan with iCloud and I don’t want to pay Google for custom email addresses for all of my family. iCloud mail allows a custom domain now so that’s my migration plan.

I'm doing that right now. Run Google Takeout, which exports an mbox file, then import into Mail (on your Mac). Then gradually copy over emails to your iCloud inbox.

It's OK, I began killing Google from my life last year. Excited for the last bits to be gone.

looking forward to more attention on nextcloud plugins!

My Pixel phone (and the wife's) uses that account. Well this is going to be a fun choice.

I made https://mailwip.com as an email forwarding solution for this purpose.

Simply point your MX records to our server, then email can be forward to your personal gmail/protonmail.

Thank you Google for providing me with a free service for a lot of my domains for so many years, and thank you for the final push to switch to Protonmail, which I was considering for a while now, but didn't do because of the price.

So, does anyone have a recommended alternative for a mail provider with support for custom domain names?

Like a lot of people this is literally the only reason I have a legacy workspace account.

Also, I guess, any recommendations for a decent IMAP client for Android?

I'm using the legacy free edition since 2010 for personal/family propose. When I signed it I don't remember any legal note that Google can close my accounts and send me to the hell. It's a really nightmare!

Interesting my free gmail domain from my company from 15 years ago is still alive and well... granted my new company from 12 years ago is now paying for gmail... but i wonder does this mean my old company email will soon vanish?

The freemium marketing method attracted enough paying customers to add billions to Google's bottom line. Pulling the freemium accounts now removes trust from the fremium marketing method for everyone, every company.

https://forwardemail.net/ seems like a decent option for forwarding email from custom domain to @gmail.com (or any other free mail host).

Searched my inbox and I cannot find anything like this. But it does seem I need to make some changes. Lucky for me I only ever used email mostly because it is convenient. Odd that they haven't sent me anything.

Thank you Google for cheap 16 Years! I knew this would happen one day and maybe it's a good time to cleanup some old stuff! But I'll stay at Gmail. But not with all the Accounts I created over the years.

Glad I migrated my email off of it to Fastmail (although still going through my own email server)

Any tips for downloading google docs and sheets? any online alternative for those? (libreoffice or Mac numbers aren’t that exciting…)

Free mail service for custom domains - G Suite alternative https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30006596

I host my family’s email on there and have started looking for alternatives. Currently testing out Zoho Mail which looks promising.

It will be weird for my primary email not to be a google account after close to 18 years.

So, does someone have a docker image that I can throw at a vps somewhere that will take over the job of email for my domains, and will also push notifications to my android phone?

Edit: I also need it to do OAuth :)

While Google has every right to do this, what's frustrating is it's virtually impossible to host your own email these days. Practically speaking, there's no free option anymore.

Does anyone know of another service that accepts the email+whatever@domain.com wildcard? I've used that feature a lot over the years and its the only thing keeping me on Google Mail

Fastmail does generally support that.

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591053-Plu...

Fastmail also supports subdomain addressing for your own domains so that if your email is user123@yourdomain.tld you can use whatever@user123.yourdomain.tld rather than user123+whatever@yourdomain.tld and it will be delivered to your mailbox. This is great because:

1. You can create a new alias spam@yourdomain.tld and sign up for services with whatever@spam.yourdomain.tld and it’s all centralized in the same inbox.

2. I’ve found some websites that don’t allow ‘+’ in their email checker/parser. Also since plus addressing is such a common pattern, when sites sell your email to marketers, they probably strip the ‘+whatever’ part anyway so you’ll never know who’s selling your info.

3. They make it really easy in the web UI to reply to emails sent to whatever@user123.yourdomain.tld from the same email address (whatever@user123.yourdomain.tld) vs. for example if you use wildcard addressing. I’ve found this helpful for the few times when an automated email system or customer support person requires you to reply from the correct email for “authentication”.

Awesome! I didn't think they supported this the last time I looked and its the only thing that was stopping me from migrating

Are they stupid or something? Are those money worth reputation loss? Sometimes it seems as if there are malicious actors in Google that are set on taking it down from the inside.

Is there a way to seamlessly migrate current email address to another email provider and what steps can be taken so that it will be even easier to switch provider next time?

hmm. cost per user approaches alternate mail providers with domains. Self-hosting would be cheaper, but the problem is blacklisting of a VPS IP range for email sending. Probably, it requires some use of a specific SMTP service for mail and do all the rest in the self-host, but then that means finding SMTP-as-a-service for $ distinct from VPS, unless you can VPS host for the same cost inside one of the FAANG and avoid the SMTP blacklisting that way?

Hmmm, SendGrid offers 100 sends per day for free and their "API" has an SMTP feature. I'm sure there are others. SMTP relay for outbound? I'm thinking of giving it a go.

I'm building out iredmail on my VPS now, to try this.

well.. to report back there are minor nits in the docs about "how to do it" but I succeeded in getting DKIM/SPF done, and google and pobox both honoured it for delivery which is something. (I used the google postmaster doorway to prove control of the domain)

I think this approach may be viable.

Did any of you who migrated to fastmail have any gotchas in the process? They do document the process, but still, maybe there are things one needs to be aware of.

I saw fastmail mentioned but where else can I do one email address and aliases to that or wildcard catch all for other email addresses not in the alias list?

Good. One decade of free service is enough.

This will motivate me to get off my ass and use my personal e-mail server, maybe set up roundcube for webmail and spamassassin.

Has anyone used iCloud mail recently? I’m already paying for Apple One, so this would be a $0 extra cost solution for me and my family.

I am, just for myself, it has worked fine with all my devices (including Thunderbird, K-9 and davx5). Calendar invitations work fine too

Thank you for sharing! I am worried because mail isn’t apples core business…

I don't really mind paying for this but I'm sure as hell not giving any money to Google. Been screwed over too many times.

Avoid converting all freemium accounts and just add the Google Apps marketing tag line to every email. I'd be good with that.

This is absurd, can't I suspend service but keep my emails? Or will they delete everything?

I still haven't received an email about this. Is it confirmed to affect everyone?

Yandex is one of the rare services still giving free mail hosting for custom domains: https://ukit.com/help/how-do-i-set-up-a-domain-based-email-a...

I am not sure to understand this completely.

What about Gmail use? Is that going to stay free?

This is about free "business" level Google accounts.

Personal Gmail is not connected to this.

it's staying free until Google announces that personal email accounts are made obsolete by offering some super email account with some killer feature, of course free with a small print: for 12 months, then some fee.

Arg just heard about this. Again a reminder not to use free. I need a plan.

So if I use gmail for personal email, I now have to switch to a paid plan?

You will need to switch if you use a grandfathered G Suite "legacy" free account, as of May, if you wish to continue to use it.

A free @gmail.com? Nothing to do with it.

If you signed up for G-Suite yes. If you were using a non @gmail.com domain then you were most likely on free G-Suite tier.

If you use GSuite Legacy for personal email, you would have the choice of switching to a paid plan, or migrating your email to a personal account (or any other email hosting provider.)

If you use a personal GMail account, there is no change here that applies to you.

> migrating your email to a personal account

I use GSuite Legacy for a personal email only. So migrating my foo@customdomain.com to a @gmail.com is fine. However, I didn't see anything in the article that indicates that this will be offered or even possible.

Where did you see this?

There are a few ways to achieve this technically, even if Google isn't going to be super helpful.

If you use Google's tedious Takeout service, you can get a big zip file which will contain an .mbox file with all of your email. But note, labels don't really apply here, so it'll be one giant folder with all of your email. (That was my experience trying to use ImportExportNG, an add-on for Thunderbird.)

You can also use an application like Thunderbird. Connect via IMAP to your GSuite Legacy account. Connect via IMAP to another account; can be Gmail or another provider. Drap and drop folders and/or individual emails between the two. Works surprisingly well, albeit not particularly fast. I copied about 100,000 emails yesterday evening. The nice thing about this preserving labels/folders.

There are tools in some email providers that would let you login to your GSuite Legacy account and import/copy all email.

> or migrating your email to a personal account

There is no such migration plan offered, it's unclear how to do it, or if it's possible.

Of course you can move to a non-google host, just by changing your MX records or whatever.

> There is no such migration plan offered, it's unclear how to do it, or if it's possible.

I think you would just create a gmail account, then add the G Suite account in the settings of the new gmail account so it will download all of the G Suite email through POP3 or IMAP.

Definitely give yourself a few days for this before the cutoff -- I've had gmail pull years worth of email from another account and it will eventually hit a rate limit and go very slow.

No. This isn’t about Gmail. It’s about G Suite (formerly Google Apps), which was a business offering from the start. It certainly also contains a mail component based on the same technology, but it’s not Gmail.

If your address is somebody@gmail.com, you are not affected.

> which was a business offering from the start

It was not exclusively a business offer from 2010 when it was a free individual tier:

http://web.archive.org/web/20101224193042/http://www.google....

to 2012 when the free edition was marketed as entirely different product ot the business one: http://web.archive.org/web/20120401000138/https://www.google...

This is still very disingenuous on Google's part.

When many people, myself and family included, first associated our own custom domains with them, there _were_ no "Google Apps" other than gmail. Google Calendar wasn't a thing, neither was Google Docs, Google Sheets, nor Google Meet. Android didn't exist, neither did Fi. Youtube was still its own property with its own separate accounts system.

Later on, when they started building new offerings, including those that became known bundled as "Google Apps", they continued to conflate the account usage with these several other services. When they decided this was something worthy of charging, they promised "free legacy" edition use indefinitely to users, calling them pioneers and champions of the service, as a way to thank them for their evangelism. The growth of periphery services continued, and now legacy users are faced with a hostage situation for all their data and purchases associated with their accounts.

gmail.com or your a personal domain name?

- gmail.com -- no.

- if you can go to https://admin.google.com and you have users -- yes

i have registered in google apps in 2007 and stil using it with my family. 4 persons is about 288$ anualy (( It's OK to pay 5$ per month for ALL G Workspace account, but not for every user.

I'm sure there is a better place in this hierarchical conversation for this contribution, but I've only got a few minutes before my next meeting. I'm sure some of you understand. :)

Some of us should be categorically excluded from this whole "free product, what'd you expect?" sentiment.

And here's why. May I present... an email that Google sent me in 2006.

Wow, I'd almost forgotten that GAFYD was *not* the first name of this thing...

Note these keywords: 2006, beta, bulk, offer, helping.

    Date: Mon, 22 May 2006 19:31:46 -0700
    From: hosted-noreply@google.com
    To: ____@gmail.com
    Subject: Gmail for ____.net beta tester invitation
    
    Welcome to our beta test!
    
    
    Thanks for helping us test Gmail for your domain!  We're excited
    to help you offer Gmail accounts with your domain.
    
    Here's how to get started:
    
        * First, click the link below. Log in with the same Google
          Account you used to volunteer to become a beta tester.
    
    https://www.google.com/hosted/____.net
    
        * Next, we'll guide you through a series of steps to register
          your domain for this service.
        
        * We'll then ask you to create a new administrative account
          for your domain. Most people choose something like
          admin@____.net.
        
        * You can then log in to the control panel (
          https://www.google.com/hosted/____.net ) with your
          administrative account. Within the control panel, you can
          create new users, modify or suspend accounts, create aliases
          and lists, and customize the look and feel of Gmail for
          ____.net. You can even upload whole lists of new
          users with the bulk upload feature, and assign
          administrative rights to multiple accounts.
        
        * Finally, you'll need to configure your DNS MX records to
          work with Gmail.  Once you log in to the control panel,
          you'll see detailed instructions on how to complete this
          step. If you get stuck, you can access our help center.
    
    Thanks again for helping us out,
    
    The Gmail Team

---

Here is the original, in screenshot form, redacted, with highlighting of those keywords: https://imgur.com/a/wQdMCIz

You see, they wanted to use my cool vanity domain to entice users to join their Gmail service. It was all about Gmail "on" my domain.

Now, let's talk about official notices and migration assistance.

You hear me, Uncle G?

I'm guessing that back then, you didn't know where this was going. But don't act like I've been freeloading... I *paid* *my* *dues*, and more. The least you can do now is help me pack.

HN is a very strange place. Maybe around a week ago people were complaining that 500K that YC puts now into companies is not a lot of money. Now they are complaining that 6$ per month per user in Google Workspace lowest tier is a deal breaker for them.

And this is where all the nerds come in and say: "We told you so!"

Spending anything more than a trivial amount of money for "cloud purchases" with next to no control over when the actual owner can change their mind, seems crazy to me.

Does anyone know if this applies to Gmail for domains as well?

I don't think there is such a thing called "gmail for domains".

If you have gmail at a custom domain, you aren't paying anything for it, and you've had it for 10 years or more like that... this is probably talking about you, yes.

The thing some of us have had for 10 years or more has been called different things at different points in Google history. Including "Google Apps For Your Domain" and "G-Suite" and "Google Workspace". Maybe it was called "gmail for domains" at one point? It's honestly been very confusing as google keeps changing how things work and what they are called and migrating my legacy free account along each time, with some services breaking etc., I almost feel like I'm finally being put out of my misery.

There was briefly a seperate Gmail for Domains that was rolled into what was then Google Apps For Your Domain.

There's also the possibility that you've registered a regular google account at a non-google domain.

I believe Gmail for Domains, Google Apps for Business and GSuite (now GSuite Legacy) were all previous names for what is now Google Workspaces.

Time to get a backup.

takeout.google.com

I'm surprised so many of you are upset by this. I use a paid email for the custom domain (not gmail) but I feel like they're requesting a pretty reasonable fee after such a long time of free usage.

I think the big outrage is directed at losing all the apps, movies, books, etc... that you purchased from Google using that account. It feels like they should provide some way of transferring those purchases to another account.

yeah that makes sense actually.

I think the issue is that so many of us were brought in on something pretty simple, "GMail for Domains", that has become so much more than we ever asked for. And in return we've gotten a lesser product (the Google accounts are handicapped in many ways) and a painful migration experience to leave (see inability to take Google Play purchases as one example). It's a terrible bait and switch now that they have years of history to amplify the pain of leaving.

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?

I'll give you my perspective. I migrated away from GMail years ago for my domain. MX records point to the other host. I have all their core services turned off except Maps and Drive (I don't host anything). I only keep the account because I have 9+ years of play store purchases attached. At the least they need to provide a way to move purchases from a legacy account to a regular account in this process.

I need to migrate away now, what a total pain.

I am more or less done moving out of Google Workspace. This is what worked for me.

TL/DR:

- Create gmail accounts for each user - Configure POP3 at their domain gmail accounts - Pull email from domain to gmail - Move their google drive and google photos from domain - Disconnect google workspace from google domain - Setup email forwards at google domain from personal domain to gmail

Details here.

https://blog.anands.net/freeing-your-domain-from-google-work...

bye bye google; thanks for all the fishes

Shit !

Poop.

Welp, it's time to pay I guess.

screw them going to https://www.hey.com/

Back of napkin calc as a sole prop:

* google has risen by over a trillion in value since I began using google apps for my custom domain w/ gmail and linked search.

* I was an early adopter of "google". Via data donation efforts as an end user, I have contributed substantially to google. Estimate: My lifetime value to google is greater than the average user by an order of magnitude.

* Avg. val of each of 10 billion homo sapiens at ~$1T USD: >$1,000 per homo sapien.

* Est. val of my data contribution over two decades of full time use: >$10,000.

* google, based on this inequity, I will settle for a lifetime of free grandfathered service per my status quo. Alternatively, I will continue to documented my grievances regarding your malicious, targeted, experimental negative emotional contagion data abuse practices -- with higher USA authorities -- until you are dismantled per long-established monopoly laws.

Anecdote: I would have paid the Google tax. I actually tried to just out of convenience. But one small bit of nonsense stopped me.

Google required me to send them my passport and photo ID for the priveldge of paying them for additional storage. I gave up on them at that point.

... breaking the camels back ...

I'm currently migrating away from my last Google piece: Gmail.

Who remembers when Google were exciting? The good old days ...

I wonder how much extra revenue would be generated out of this move? Google stock to the moon?

I hope it's plenty- I was really starting to worry about Google's bottom line with all their goodwill to users. /s

I was trying to find this discussion. How many if these accounts actually exist and how many if them do they think will actually convert.

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 no more free gmail accounts?

No, they like @gmail.com, but don't want people getting gmail for their own domains without paying.

If you pay, do they stop scanning all of your emails?

There are no ads in the paid edition of G Suite.

They actually stopped scanning emails for ads in free Gmail about 5 years though. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/26/google-wi...

Of course, both offerings still scan your email for spam filtering, as all major providers do.

Where's the pay out for G to keep free Gmail then? I never read that the stopping of scanning was for the free accounts. I had only understood it to be for those that paid for the GSuite. Are we really to believe that Googs is operating Gmail for free with no hoovering of data to offset the cost of the service?

Gmail still has advertising, it just is targeted by the standard google way of "hoovering up" your data from across the web and the rest of your google profile. Not by scanning your emails. Google's blog post says https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in... :

> Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change. This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products. Ads shown are based on users’ settings. Users can change those settings at any time, including disabling ads personalization. G Suite will continue to be ad free.

Sad but I can't blame Google to stop long-running great free service. I'll just sign up for cheapest plan but I also wish good alternative migration path is provided.

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