They are not holding these accounts hostage. You can export mail from Google. You can change your MX records to different servers.
I've been bit as much as anyone by Google killing products, but honestly, it's amazing they've kept this product free for so long. And in this case, the product isn't being killed; they've simply decided to start charging for it.
That's totally true but only if you are an employee, the business owner should have total access.
I don't see how a free GSuite account - where you are the business owner - is any less yours than a free gmail account.
It's my domain and I'm the admin on G Suite so it's just as much my personal account as any gmail account, and to follow your logic then you basically shouldn't use any kind of 3rd party service or cloud account.
>I realize people started using them like that
Perhaps that's because google advertised this as way to get a gmail address with a personal domain, offered a free basic tier to everyone that wanted, and rolled out support for all their products to use these accounts with them, without, it seems ever considering the eventuality of charging for the free tier and thereby holding accounts and data hostage in away they'd never consider for normal accounts.
But I guess that makes it harder for you to feel superior
"Google Apps
For individuals and small teams
Free"
https://web.archive.org/web/20120602004504/http://www.google...
Just move the accounts to the free version of "google cloud identity.
Really? I remember them saying these early adopter grandfathered in plans would be free for life.
That's how they'll see it.
I've already moved my email and contacts from my GSuite account to Fastmail, but that's a tiny part of the story.
Say you make a choice between equivalent services, A or B. Over time you are locked into your choice because you make decisions that fit your choice. The benefits and costs/risks of choosing A or B are often indistinguishable over time. Yet later, changing between the two can be unfeasibly expensive: e.g. changing banks (mortgage lock-in), changing health insurance (existing condition lock-in), changing careers, etcetera.
The years go by and the fanboyism in him dies a little bit more every day. Then this came along. He is completely screwed, and pissed at Google about it.
The issue isn't moving mail, it's the rest of the ecossystem and accounts. He can move mail somewhere else, but his account is also his Youtube account with all his business videos and playlists, several domains, and several other services which he has used under the PROMISE that they would all be free forever. He actually used the word hostage when talking about this with me. He is a hostage.
Google has all the right to price their products, but it is "typical shit google" to go back on their word, destroy expectations and basically scam their users. If the service hadn't been offered as "free forever", many people would not have used it.
I don't like Google. I used to. But I can't, now. There are a couple of amazing Google-owned products (Maps, Youtube come to mind), but the company, to me, is just the Microsoft of the 2000s. Seriously, it seems like they intentionally make themselves look bad (it's 2022 and some of my youtube videos still appear translated to the language of the country I'm in and there's no place for me to change this without screwing something else).
I've tried to do it on some old G Suite accounts that got suspended and no, you can't.
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.
Can't log in? Can't take out.
https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?article_ur...
"After 60 days in suspension, you will no longer have access to Google Workspace core services, such as Gmail, Calendar, and Meet."
I'd really like to know the full list of the "core services" that become unavailable. I've moved my email to Fastmail, but I still use Google Calendar and occasionally Google Meet. What else is included here? Chat? I use that too.
Calendars are very easy to migrate from one account to another (or even to other services). You can download one ics file that describes your whole calendar and import that file to a consumer Google Calendar account. That would probably be the least disruptive path for you.
You could import that same file at least to Apple's free iCloud, though I imagine it would be more disruptive because that service is different in many ways.
Now as for those who want gmail but can't afford the $6, I think it's as simple as you'd need to add Gmail to that "non-gmail" account, which would restore your access to the consumer version of Gmail. Hosting your domain's email does usually need to be done for money now, but with the money one has saved for the last 17 years or so, you should be able to do this for $30 a year or something - and simply configure consumer Gmail to pull messages in via POP from your "personal domain" email account, so that you get the Gmail UI and the pretty generous storage space. I know it's possible to configure gmail to send "From" the other address too, but it does so in a pretty conservative way that some clients show as "Bob Smith on behalf of Bob Smith" and both addresses are visible in the headers.
There is sinking cost fallacy of setting up all of this through them. Like I have 100 domains that I've setup to be able to receive emails through Google. So much work + damage to fix everything. Will probably let it die.