Google Is Holding All Your Old Free G Suite Accounts Hostage

> 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.

https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?article_ur...

IMAP just works; at least as long as the account is active.

As @Freak_NL noted, IMAP can help here.

What i have been doing for years now is to setup Thunderbird leveraging maildir...Now, the majority of the time i do read my mail via google's webmail...but on occasion i do use Thunderbird for reading mail. But the benefit of having my mail locally accessible - as indivudual files under maildir - is that things are snappier for going through all of my messages...But the secondary benefit is that i can (and have been for years) backing up my email as files...In essence all the files under thunderbird's maildir can be copied/pasted to some other storage place/folder/network share/whatever...so i get speed and protection! Plus this (having all my email messages locally-accessible) makes it trivially easy to "re-import" (if you want to call it that) my email from GSuite over to any other IMAP-capable mail provider...it is as easy as dragging files from my GSuite-account in thunderbird over to the other, non-GSuite account within said same Thunderbird view. (Granted it takes time to push up email to the new provider this way if you have tons of messages...but its easy.) I'm sure there are more efficient methods to get your messages from Goolgle and shifted over to another mail provider...but this is what i've done, and it works. YMMV depending on the number of messages you're dealing with, and any constraints your new/other mail provider might have in receiving loads of "new" messages.

You can use takeout.google.com to export your entire inbox.

G Suite accounts are by definition not supposed to be personal accounts: they are for when an organization wants to own someone else's account, with the ability to do stuff like managing it and revoking its access; and so, just like when you are using an account given to you by your employer, you should not consider them "yours". If you want to complain about this, it should be that businesses that were using this system for free are being locked out, not personal accounts: if you were buying stuff for your personal use from Google Play using a G Suite account that was never a good idea. I realize people started using them like that, because they wanted a "personal" Google account with support, and I also realize that Google kind of caved on this a while ago when people were whining constantly about why they couldn't use Google+--a social network--with their G Suite accounts (with some resulting changes that completely messed up the model of how these accounts work, muddying up the namespace by mixing the various kinds of accounts together, which broke the ability to have a true personal account with the same email address as a domain owned by G Suite... something which awkwardly made it more difficult for the people who did understand this difference and who were making damned sure not to do something like attach a Google Developer account to a Google Apps account, lest I later decide to switch to a different workspace and email provider), but the mental model of using a G Suite account as a personal account never made sense.

You don't need to pay anything to google or to use googles mail functionality to keep licenses connected to an account.

Just move the accounts to the free version of "google cloud identity.

Sounds like Google was providing you a bunch of valuable services for free for a long time. Not defending Google but your argument is not compelling.

Source?

And they were. For the life of the product.

That's how they'll see it.

I check this page every week or so:

>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.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217#data&zippy=%2Cif-i...

I'm kind of counting on that being available before they start charging me.

I'd be willing to pay for it if it's actually good value, because the current G Suite sure is not.

You need to pay $6/month, or $72/year to get 30 GB of storage + custom domain. If you're on Gmail and pay nothing, you get 15 GB of storage. If you're on Gmail and pay $20/year (or $1.99/month) towards Google One, you get 100 GB of storage.

Basically, the custom domain part of G Suite costs quite a lot considering how little of anything else you get in comparison to cheaper Google One plans. No idea how expensive that can be, since Apple will sell me a 50 GB iCloud+ account that has custom domain emails, iCloud Private Relay and other features for 0.99 €/month.

My understanding was that it was something approaching your last paragraph that they were looking at offering, either converting your Workspace account to a regular Google account, or offering some sort of thing to pull over your content: I have a regular Google account already, and would rather not keep around a neutered one in perpetuity for access to apps.

I would think that having such an account would also just be trouble down the line: being on a Workspace account already affects time of access to features routinely (and the new Pay never came to those accounts... though I feel like that's somewhat dead in the water already anyway?) and being in an even more limited non-paying weirdo customer subset can't possibly help any of that out.

I tried this in 2018, and had problems with notifications under iOS, and there wasn't support for syncing contacts and calendars. Also, Zoho its offering is pretty huge, so for example grokking the settings screens takes some effort. Perhaps someone can give a more recent update?

It takes some getting used to. There are some rough edges, mainly with the UI and figuring out where things are hidden behind deep menus. Calendar sharing is not as straightforward. Otherwise it's been a good experience so far. I have 8 custom domains for about 8 users. Transition was easy too, you can do it from within zoho for the most part. The only thing that takes a bit of time is domain propagation.

I'm actually in the middle of fully migrating to zoho from my grandfathered GSuite accounts. So far, going quite well. I actually had already planned to move away from Google about 1 year ago...so had spun up a paid Zoho account and associated it to an old domain name that i was not using...Just to see how zoho performs...And, you know what, they're pretty damn good; especially for the price! I should caveat that my needs (and those of my family) are very meager. My family and I do not share calendars, so don't know if the issue that @bbertelsen noted is hitting others. (I guess I'll be testing that!) I do agree with @bbertelsen that the UIs for many settings can be quite deep. It is clear that zoho wanted to keep adding lots of bells and whistles...but i guess because my family's needs are pretty simple, once i figured out where to do whatever was needed...sort of set it and forget it...at least so far...and again, at this point working great! (We'll see how things go once i complete the mkigration.)

Yes I'm using custom domains and yes I migrated from free Gsuite. I just use the email only on Zoho, which is totally fine for me. It does also include other services which I haven't investigated. Migration was fairly painless. The domain setup on Zoho is quite good. I was able to export my contacts from google and import them into Zoho. The main feature I wanted was catch-all support, which Zoho does support and works fine. Spam detection seems fine. No issues with email deliverability. I have set-up SPF and DomainKeys. Seems OK generally.

i know people who manage free GSuite accounts with 3000+ members. that’s $60k / mo in lost sales and at least $500 / mo cost to operate

Which is weird given that the term that allows them to modify the terms explicitly referenced number 18 as an exception.

The only valid argument for it being legal to discontinue this on you is that G-Suite is not GApps, and both are discontinued services anyway, with Google Workspace being the current offering. Which is presumably what they would argue if sued over this.

I love the idea of maddy. (I swear it's inspired by Caddy but I have no proof.) I do kinda wish it was just made into a Caddy module, though.

In theory this shouldn't be a problem if you aren't using a known-trash IP and have SPF and DKIM set up, since the only thing the major inbox providers want is a way to verify and associate spam reputation with a domain instead of an IP. If this really hurts you can just set up Amazon SES use that via SMTP, you'll get 62k free emails a month (always free, not just first 12 months).

This even works if you want a mostly-free setup: you have MX forwarding via some provider (Cloudflare, your registrar, etc) going to a personal address, and SES operates as your outbound SPF that works with Outlook/Gmail in terms of allowing you to set your domain email(s) as aliases within their interface.

The hidden cost of me keep using google is that all my mail is stored who knows where, can be take away at anytime, is read by who knows what and pricing may change at anytime as it has with this "will always be free" version...

I am surprised that people here still have this all-or-nothing approach when it comes to managed vs self-hosted e-mail despite it being covered countless times.

If what you mention does turn out to be an issue, or you decide it's a worthwhile tradeoff to not have to care about IP reputation, you can choose to route all or a subset (depending on destination domain) of your outgoing mail through a provider like mailroute/mailgun/sendgrid/fastmail/posteo. Or even gmail/AWS. You can still self-host the rest even if you don't want to hother with outgoing SMTP, which you can always add later should uou choose to.

> If you stay on top of all the best-practices for running your own mail server, your hidden cost is the mind-share that that takes.

Are you actually speaking from experience here? Over the past 20-30 years it's been like, what, 4-5 new things to learn?

> Worked great until one provider, Outlook.com, blocked me. Do not try cause you may run into an issue like me and get upset and quit. Now I use Outlook.com instead.

Microsoft are the worst (and the only ones that ever posed a hassle for us).

I recommend raising the issue with support of your cloud VPS. They most likely handle cases like this routinely and have channels to MS that can get this resolved much smoother, IME. It's their IPs, after all.

I maybe mistaken but I believe you can create additional aliases under the same account -- I seem to remember doing that a few months back when I got auto-updated to Google Workspace.

No it doesn't? You can set up unlimited aliases, afaik. If you want to have separate access however, it does. I'm currently planning to migrate my script-sending email address to mailgun or SES instead of using a separate gmail user.

As others have said, you can set up aliases / groups and those do not require additional accounts.

Also if you’re the only account then you can just configure a catch-all in the routing section so that anything@your domain goes to you. That’s no additional cost even on these basic accounts I believe.

I use this so I can also track by using a new address for each service (e.g. twitter@mydomain.com, ebay@mydomain.com, etc)

Indeed. I can hardly blame any company for shutting down a free tier of service. I think many people would've been happy if Google Reader would've stuck around for a monthly fee.

You don't really think Google services are really free, right? Nobody paid me for my data.

Google doesn't operate "free services", they operate services in exchange for user data and advertising views.

A lot of the times it's a bait and switch. They give you a service in exchange for your data, then they pull the service away once they've got it.

Doesn’t google harvest advertising data from all of their “free” offerings?

Google has a monopoly and are part of many dupolies in many areas. Offering free services to create lockin and switching the terms is the basis of the complaints here.

Many small companies had a business around maps. Google's free products kill most of them. Now that they are gone google starts charging to embed maps.

What free services has the parent offered killing a market only to require payment short after? None..

Yes, and I've wanted to migrate my GSuite account to a regular personal/free Google Account for years, but Google has offered me no way to do so. Google even has what I need as a product: "Google Account without GMail". It would let me use my email address at my personal domain as my Google identity, and work exactly like an @gmail.com account, except no GMail. This would be perfect, but Google hasn't bothered to give me a way to migrate.

And no, Google Takeout doesn't work here, because a lot of the data on the account can't be imported into the new account. Think stuff like Chat history, YouTube subscriptions and watch history, sharing settings on Docs, albums and sharing settings on Photos, purchases on Play, payment methods and transaction history on Pay, and a whole host of other things.

So yes, the writing has been on the wall, but there's been no migration path out of the dead-end product. I see in another thread here that Google is working on a migration tool, but I expect that will just migrate me to a fresh @gmail.com account, which is not what I want.