G Suite free edition no longer available starting July 1, 2022

A fun hack is to run a captcha-free fake forum and allow random bot signups to generate outbound mail volume and trust.

But pretty much everything else is super fun to self-host, especially if you get comfortable with docker and reverse proxies like nginx.

https://yunohost.org

It is possible to encrypt file system on VPS. Maybe you could look into it if you choose to go with cloud provider option. The main reason I avoid them is because of the uncertainty around pricing.

Encrypted volumes need to be unlocked, and that needs a key in RAM somewhere. The hosting provider has full access to RAM if they want to, and can extract the keys.

I’m not sure if people don’t understand this, or don’t care, but the tsunami of people using the Cloud points to it being some mix of both.

Sadly there are too many things I have tied to Google that I am not sure if I can make that switch to Microsoft. But it is getting more and more tempting.

I am holding out a tiny hope that maybe if there is enough negative PR, Google will create a cheaper plan or perhaps provide an off ramp for people that want to switch/migrate to consumer accounts.

My web host for my website gives me “free” SMTP services with my hosting so I did initially setup smtp for sending and receiving though gmail, but I ran into a problem where the web host’s smtp servers were often flagged as spam for outbound email, so that sucked. I could get email, but felt like I had to reply using my gmail address to guarantee delivery.

However, I had previously setup outbound email using AWS SES (Simple Email Service) for a different website that sends out transactional emails and had an idea. I setup AWS SES to send out my personal domain emails from gmail and now delivery is great. I rarely have emails flagged as spam. Unfortunately, AWS SES is outbound only, so you cannot use it for both inbound and outbound. I get inbound email to gmail by having it setup to check the web host’s smtp (but you could use forwarding like you mention), and I send outbound email through AWS SES with great delivery results, all through the gmail web client.

Now, this is not a route I would casually recommend. It is arguably a pain in the a* to setup AWS SES. But since this audience here on Hackernews is more of a geek/DIY crowd I thought I would mention it. You can setup AWS SES to send out emails from a personal account for pennies a month. You could arguably setup a Free tier AWS account and never go over the free limits. If you are willing to do some upfront work, it can be dirt cheap to do, and you get to learn the intricacies of email setup like SPF, DMARC, and DKIM.

You can configure a regular gmail account to send from the custom domain. Visit:

Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Send mail as

You'll have to confirm ownership of the alternate email address, but it works fine. Even if the alternate email address is associated with a Gsuite domain.

https://www.eforw.com/

The next higher plan would already have me pay almost five times as much and apart from the higher limits just enables business features that are unnecessary for families.

If the administrator left the company, can a user become an admin?

Yes. Current users can ask to become an administrator on the account by completing this form. Users will be required to prove domain registration ownership by creating a custom CNAME or TXT record. If the domain registration verification is successful and none of the existing administrators object, the user will be promoted to the super administrator role.

Until Google mails me mitigation strategies, what can I do?

Google doesn't really understand what a lot of folks are even using this stupid product for (custom email domains and that's it).

The trust that the product will remain is gone. I guess I need to start packing my bags too.

First, yes, what they've been offering us has value, however, regular Google accounts are free. So asking us to pay $72 per year per user over the standard $0 just for a vanity domain is a little steep. Especially when many of these installs aren't businesses, they're just family domains.

Worse, the bait and switch here is unreasonable. There's no documentation or tooling for migrating from the legacy accounts to vanilla Google accounts. Suppose I don't want to pay $864/year for my family domain. What am I supposed to do with the gigabytes of emails, google docs, photos, app purchases, etc?

Is the choice here really either A) pay up, or B) all your shit goes in the digital dumpster? That's a rotten fucking way to treat somebody that's been advising people to use Google services for over a decade...

Switching service is neither easy nor free for most users. I wouldn't mind a world where businesses limit free to much longer time frames (say, 5 years) but make it blatantly obvious at sign up. The user can then make an informed choice on whether they are okay with your offer or not.

The program was designed to get family mail admins to bring users to gmail en mass. See this: https://imgur.com/a/wQdMCIz

For many of these users, Google is asking them to pay for... not really anything in return. Maybe they only used the custom email domain, maybe not even that. Maybe they're just asking them to pay for the continued ability to pay for other services like Android apps, YouTube Premium, extended drive storage etc, and continued access to things like Docs/Hangouts that other users will continue to have for free.

The fact that google/alphabet is a ad company meaning, all their service is target at mining your data email and everything!!! Nothing on google ought to be charged in this case, in fact they really ought to be paying us for using their service, because they are making money from our data.

9 years ago, which was the last time this was available to sign up? It had a few other features, like docs/drive but regular consumers had access to pretty much the same.

12 years ago when it was first available? Yes, it was just email at your custom domain.

So for a lot of affected users they've gradually been dragged along as it becomes a more and more business focused product, then Google turns around and wonders why it's giving us these business features we don't care for/use for free. But because in that time Google has pushed to have everything Googly linked to a single Google account, we have a lot of regular consumer stuff linked to the same account.

Once this happened to me, I had to re-register the expired domain.

Yes, of course. How embarrassing.

I already have a VPS for many years and it didn't change IP addresses ever. I need a simple way to make it my email server when I have to get away from Google.