Migrate G Suite account to a Personal Google Account (2017)

Somewhat related to the long HN discussion [0] on Google at last ending the legacy free custom domain accounts (Apps For Domains > G Suite > Google Workspace now). This doesn't help the people with lots of purchases, "Sign In With Google" usage and so on who are the most legitimately screwed by all this, and personally I'm moving to a different service entirely since I primarily used it for email. But for those who mostly want to stay within the Google ecosystem this might be another useful alternative.

It's unfortunate Google didn't make this a one-button downgrade/convert option internally and have a blessed more straightforward migration path along with the shutdown, but at least there is some option for some continued use I guess. Would be nice if the law mandated the ability to transfer purchases between accounts within the same service as a basic minimum, that at least is not a unique Google problem in the slightest. Seems more the rule than the exception for digital software stores of all kinds. Going between services is reasonably more complicated, but within the same one shouldn't be impossible.

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0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29996432

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Edit: From Ars @mrsilver:

I notice that the author recommends using the Check mail from other accounts functionality, which uses POP3 to import your emails from the Legacy GSuite into the new Gmail account.

When I did this (which, I admit, was about four years ago), it removed all my labels and stars, marked every email as unread, dumped a load of emails into spam and silently deleted a small number of emails. There's nothing worse than seeing that your new account has less emails than your old account - with no easy way of knowing what the missing ones are.

Things may have changed in four years, but I would recommend some caution with this approach.

As an alternative, I ended up using Thunderbird instead. There I connected both GMail accounts to it and then dragged and dropped emails across between the "All Mail" folders. I still lost the labels - but stars and read status were kept.

I've seen some people on forums recommend http://gmvault.org as a method to migrate your email from Legacy GSuite to GMail whilst preserving labels, status and stars. I've never used it, but it might be worth a try.