Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

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> All I ever wanted was my own Gmail domain

You don't need Workspace to use the Gmail UI with your custom domain. All you need is a regular free @gmail.com account. First switch your domain to an email hosting service that provides SMTP and IMAP, you probably get one free from your domain registrar. In Gmail settings for your @gmail account, add your custom domain as an alternate address for sending mail, using your SMTP server. Also configure Gmail to fetch mail from your IMAP server. Voila! Gmail is now a frontend for your custom domain, absolutely free. You can continue to use your existing custom email addresses, and you can forget about Workspace forever.

If you have purchased content such as Play Store apps that are tied to your Workspace account, you can downgrade it to a "Cloud Identity Free Edition" account, and continue to use it. This is a pain, and I think they are finally working on some kind of migration tool to move that content to another account. Hopefully that happens soon.

This definitely works in a pinch but it's not quite the same. Things never work quite right, for example calendar invites, push notifications for email and Google Sign In. Also, most clients will expose your custom domain AND your gmail address when they receive the email. If you're using it as a semi-professional address, this is probably a deal breaker.

You are trivializing a migration that involves more than ten times as many components. Here's my todo list for the same problem:

- gmail - drive storage - calendar - contacts - keep - photos - music - domains - Pay - adsense - webmaster tools - analytics - authenticator - Home - maps - chrome - youtube - Play - email at external sites

Can you explain your idea about using Cloud Identity Free Edition in order to allow an email at a third party to own Play Store apps?

You don't have to transfer ownership of the apps. I'm not 100% certain but I believe that you can just login to the phone with both your real account and the Cloud Identity account, install the apps from the Play Store using the Cloud Identity account, and once they're installed you can use them with either account. That's how it works with other Google accounts. And of course you only need to do this with paid apps previously owned by the Cloud Identity account. New apps or free apps you can just get in your real account.

Is there an in-depth howto guide to do this?

FWIW, this is literally exactly how my product PretzelBox (https://pretzelbox.cc) works. We are looking for beta users, if you care to take it for a spin.

A few issues:

- The braced hamburger menu — your logo, actually, on your blog home page redirects to bulma.io.

- There’s no way to switch from the "Very Cool" template back to the original.

I’ll get these fixed asap! Thanks for highlighting.

Fixed! Thank you so much for pointing them out. Also added a couple of more templates to the menu.

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