GSuite legacy users can now get a free personal account, includes Gmail | Hacker News Reader

GSuite legacy users can now get a free personal account, includes Gmail

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238 pointstekni5185 comments

I closed my GSuite account and migrated to Fastmail when the free tier shutdown was first announced. I’m glad I did. Fastmail does several things better than GSuite/GMail. It has a very nice UI. I was expecting a UI downgrade, but was pleasantly surprised.

Also, migrating (including setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) was fast and easy.

The $50/year price difference is well worth it. I’m sharing this because I wouldn’t have switched on my own. But I should have migrated even before Google’s changes were announced. The competition has surpassed Google’s offering.

I like the UI other than no popup for new message

100% agreed. I switched from Google to Fastmail about 8 years ago and it has been wonderful.

In that that time:

* I have not had to worry that I’ll inadvertently trigger an account ban and lose my email account/all my email with no recourse.

* UI updates have been gradual, subdued and useful.

* Support requests have been answered promptly and have been extremely helpful, including one case where the web UI wasn’t loading through the corporate proxy, we determined it was the proxy (not their service) and an engineer STILL helped me with a fix after the ticket was closed.

* No significant (if any) price changes.

* No significant outages (that I can remember).

what prevents account bans?

Nothing _prevents_ it, but

1. Fastmail doesn't have the same reputation as Google of banning accounts with little to no recourse (presumably because their customers pay, thus significantly increasing the cost for spammers to abuse their platform).

2. Even if Fastmail bans me or the company goes under, I still will own the underlying domain and can move somewhere else.

Is 2. not true for GSuite regardless? It's one of the reasons I find the risk profile acceptable despite Google's ability to ban me.

I believe GSuite supports either @gmail.com or custom domains, so it can be true for it.

Edit: my bad, this is apparently untrue.

G Suite doesn't support Gmail, but I think one of the bigger problems is that other aspects of your online profile (YouTube, Play Store) are tightly coupled to your Google account.

Your account can be banned, but unlike Google you can get in contact with a human being and get an explanation or sorted the issue out if it's a mistake. With Google you never known when an algorithm will ban your account, and if/when that happens, there's absolutely NO way to get it back, your account is gone for good.

I finally made the switch last month and I have to agree - it's totally worth it and I should have done it sooner. As an added bonus Google no longer gets to snoop my email to figure out what ads to serve me.

> I ... migrated to Fastmail...

Never heard about Fastmail, but I was even more intrigued to learn they developed the JMAP standard, https://jmap.io/.

Agreed about Fastmail. Very happy with switching over.

I also tried ProtonMail before switching to Fastmail. I liked some of the security advantages of PM, but being forced to use their client due to E2E was too difficult in the long run. I missed seamless calendar integrations, managing multiple emails from one UI, etc. Also Fastmail is slightly cheaper.

I've also completely switched over to Apple native Mail/Calendar clients. Both apps I used to despise, but all alternatives I tried have failed to match feature parity (or have serious data privacy concerns).

You use Apple Calendar as a client for calendars actually hosted on Fastmail, via iCal?

I do. Works great.

Fastmail ditched their family plan and cranked up costs a couple of years ago as well.

It's pretty steep if you want a handful of mailboxes for close family on a vanity domain, especially when these days personal e-mail is just a glorified password recovery channel

> These days personal e-mail is just a glorified password recovery channel

I disagree, most of the Mom & Pop businesses I deal with are all in on email to communicate because they don't want to deal with fancy ticket systems.

I'm considering that same switch. What things do you find Fastmail does better? Is there anything at all you miss?

This is a relief. I might still move some of my personal domains off of GSuite, but the fact that I don't have to is honestly a real relief.

And I wouldn't even mind paying. If you wanted to charge me just for email without any of the other stuff and not offer support, I'd pay $100 a year if you could give me unlimited (or even 25 or whatever the original number of email addresses was) separate inboxes. But when you insist on charging me $5 or $6 a month per address and domain (which for my completely personal use case would be $24 a month), and I'm not ever going to use any of the other stuff -- then I get annoyed. Especially since I could have just set up an alias on a free account, years later, when that became an option.

I understand these types of plans keep getting shut down because businesses or spammers or moochers abuse them, I do. But a personal/family targeted plan for hosted email with a custom domain should be something someone can offer that doesn't charge people $25 or $30 a month.

I seriously doubt GSuite legacy was a huge spam vector. You still have to send mail through Google's gmail infrastructure and be beholden to all the spam, abuse, etc. mitigations in place there. GCE is probably a bigger source of spam with people spinning up a VM, cranking out millions of SMTP requests, and dipping out.

GCE blocks outbound port 25 (https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/firewalls#blockedtraffic)

Well, it wasn't just Google. Microsoft cut out the free custom email domain for OneDrive, Zoho cut theirs way down -- so my feeling is that it had to have been abused in some way, even if it wasn't strictly spam.

That's the thing though... it doesn't need to be free, it can have some cost - just not $6 per user per month. That's difficult to justify for fun/vanity/family email addresses.

$6 monthly with unlimited (or some high number) of family member users would be fine.

Any cost at all will limit spammers.

It looks like Microsoft 365 Family will get you 6 users, 1 TB storage each user, a custom domain, plus a bunch of Office apps for $99 a year. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/microsoft-36...

Yeah, there’s been mixed success on the custom domain part of that I think, otherwise I would have moved long ago because I get Office for $20 a year (former Microsoft employee), but I’ll definitely look into that.

I’m happy to pay. I’m not willing to pay $25 - $30 a month for basic email just because I want separate inboxes and a custom domain.

The custom domain option is only available for those who use GoDaddy as their registrar (which is not an option I'm willing to consider), plus they imply only the free domains (outlook.com, hotmail.com, msn.com, etc) get attachment screening, and email encryption.

You also don't get aliases with O365 Personal - you need to subscribe to a business plan for that.

https://account.live.com/AddAssocId

I agree. And given that it's legacy, surely you can just weed out the abusers and leave the legitimate users that signed up when you promised it was free?

Given nobody has been able to sign up for one of these legacy accounts for 10 years they should really know who is who by now.

Google block outgoing SMTP on port 25

Yeah this has been insanity. Really poor communication and rollout -- I swear I was one of the last to get notifications within email/admin.

I'd gladly pay for the personal service if it wasn't per-user.

Though, I'm sure google got a lot of value out of this. I switched myself and many others onto gsuite early on. It was some of their first introductions to the "google apps" that have now become the structure for their "Workspace".

The fact that such poor communication and process can come from a giant employing so many clever people really makes me wonder. Is it more likely to be incompetence or intentional?

I have a few domains aliased to my main one on GSuite Legacy, with aliased email for friends and family that I brought in with the understanding that it was always free. And now I have to shoulder monthly costs for these people. Or push them out and be doing tech support to help them set up elsewhere.

This is great news for those folks that already were on the GSuite Legacy plan... but it's of zero help for folks looking to set something like this up now for personal reasons.

I own my last name as a domain, and always thought it would be fun to use it for my primary email as firstname@lastname.com. Well... $6 a month for an individual "vanity" email address is already hard enough to justify once you realize Workspaces doesn't give you a "real" gmail account (google assistant, google one, etc... meaning you still need to maintain another gmail address, defeating the point), and then once you have 2, 3, 6 family members also wanting a vanity email address, the cost is just insane.

How is this not something anyone at Google have thought of? Gmail or use business accounts that come with a ton of strings attached.

You can easily get hosting for ~$20/yr from classic web hosts like Hostineer and just set up email forwarding to people's personal Gmail and get the same functionality with a little bit more control and flexibility on your part.

Email aliasing is more annoying/error-prone than directly hosted GSuite. I've done both.

Ya, aliasing is certainly not a replacement - particularly for non-tech savvy family members.

I've also been around long enough to know not to try running my own email server anymore... been there, done that (Zimbra & Exchange). While possible, it will consume more of your time than you want.

It's just beyond me why the likes of Google and Microsoft have not come up with a Family plan for bringing your own domain name... one that doesn't cost $5-6+ per month per user.

I'm not suggesting running your own mail server. Hosts like Hostineer do that for you. Setting up forwarding takes three seconds in a web UI.

I understand, but forwarding in my experience is brittle and rife with it's own problems.

The point of paying an email service is to make me not have to worry about it anymore. Gmail is free, and Workspace is $6 per user, Fastmail is $5 per user, etc.

If I'm anywhere near $20 monthly, I'd rather pay it to someone to have proper email and no "hacks". I just think it's absurd there is no "family & personal" option for any of these services... particularly Google where they could hoover up everyone's inbox like they already do in Gmail, plus make a few bucks monthly for the privilege of allowing me to use my own domain name.

That's literally all everyone wants here... GMail + Custom Domain Name. Google One should have this an a paid option and support X number of other users you can invite (family members with their own Gmail accounts). Families don't need retention policies, GDPR accreditation, etc.

https://www.migadu.com/pricing/ $19/year

Microsoft has a family plan, it's 99/year, includes five or six accounts and a few TB of onedrive storage along with a vanity domain.

The vanity domain must be registered with GoDaddy, and doesn't provide attachment screening nor email encryption.

So... It's artificially gimped for no real reason.

It's not supported but apparently it's possible to use a personal domain for Microsoft email without using GoDaddy as your registrar.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ft15pk/use_perso...

Sure, but unless your family is growing rapidly, it shouldn't be something you have to do very often.

cloudflare is doing forwarding for free now.

I haven't had any trouble with Google Domains' built-in forwarding but I don't do anything complex.

I don't think you should conflate those two things. I've run GSuite for a number of vanity domains since they started offering it way back when and have always had my actual Google account tied to my OG Gmail ([name]@gmail.com). In this way I don't have to worry about dealing with a split-horizon type situation if I ever decide to pull those vanity domains down and move them elsewhere. That and I don't trust Google to not do something evil (intentional or otherwise). I don't want to be in a situation where I'm locked out of things I paid for or payment accounts AND be locked out of the vanity domain(s) email.

The other nice side effect is I only use my gmail.com address for Google account related things. I don't get personal email there anymore and that inbox is pristine which is impressive since I've had it since Gmail launched.

My GSuite account, on the other hand, is quite a dumpster fire from years of personal email, aliases, and adding in other domains from time to time. Part of me would just like to walk away from it but too many things are tied to a number of email addresses in those domains.

I really do prefer Fastmail at this point, but I don't want to move these particular domains given how much junk gets sent to those addresses.

But... I wouldn't suggest using a vanity address as a primary Google account. Managing the two is worth the overhead and risk avoidance.

I did almost exactly the same thing.

You might be interested in Migadu or MXRoute. They both offer email hosting but billing is based on total storage and sent messages instead of per user, which makes it feasible for things like family vanity addresses.

Yah, I totally agree. As I said, I’m willing to pay. I’ll even pay $100 a year. Shoot, $150 if you want to include some cloud storage I won’t touch because I hate how Google Drive works. But $25-$30 a month, is just obscene for this sort of thing. Because I’m not a business. I’m an individual who would like my own domain name, the same way I’ve been using my own domain names since I was 14 years old.

If in 2007 or 2008, Google had positioned this as a business product (and they didn’t. It was literally called Google Apps For Your Domain, promoted as a free service, and people were told to sign up their families or use it for their websites to get all the benefits of Gmail (which was and remains free) but on your own domain), that would be one thing. If in 2012 when they made it a legacy service, they’d told us, you can continue to pay but it’ll be “$X per domain and you won’t get any of these extra business features,” that would have been fine.

If in February or March or whenever this was announced, they had said, “if you want to convert this to a personal Gmail account that has aliasing setup” or you want to again, pay per domain (not per account) and not get certain Workspace features and zero support, that would have been fine.

Instead, we were told a bunch of conflicting things, we were encouraged to upgrade to accounts we didn’t need or to migrate to other providers, or those of us procrastinators (me) held out some hope we’d get a solution like we got. And I’m genuinely thankful for that decision.

But I still agree that there is a market — maybe not a huge one, but a market, for hosted email on a custom domain aimed at individuals and families that doesn’t charge per address.

I’m sure you would risk cannibalizing some business sales for people who would want to be cheap and claim to be a family, but businesses too cheap to pay for email accounts usually just use regular gmail accounts anyway. And with the right restrictions (on number of accounts and of message volume sent), I think you could still have a profitable endeavor. At least I’d like to think so.

Alas.

> But I still agree that there is a market — maybe not a huge one, but a market, for hosted email on a custom domain aimed at individuals and families that doesn’t charge per address.

Migadu, MXroute, or one other which is a YC company that I fail to remember the name of (ImprovMX I think?).

Cloudflare is doing forwarding too now.

I have an Mxroute account. And I like them a lot. Very good people. But it’s a small scrappy operation that I don’t put in the same tier as a Fastmail or a Gmail. For its price, it doesn’t really need to be, but I’ve also had downtime (totally understandable), and it didn’t solve the ancillary problems of any accounts I’ve created with those Google Apps for Your Domain SAML/SSO. Which Google claims would/could still work, but would still require a lot of auditing on my part that I’m frankly happy to avoid.

Cloudflare’s email forwarding was also a consideration. I prefer having separate actual inboxes, but I could create new gmail or Outlook accounts to forward to. I may use that for a new family homelab project, where my husband doesn’t want to monitor a new inbox.

Fastmail really is a grest alternative.

You can't rely on Google. This is your shot across the bow, use the extra time to prepare for the inevitable.

This is the answer. Google is a bad partner. Learn from this.

I mean, I’m not relying on them. But this is at least a few more months of me not having to consolidate to single inboxes, to a different platform, or to have to pay $24 a month for low-volume personal email accounts that I dared to want a custom domain name for.

based on their turnaround on this and willingness to reconsider support for the legion of free users who want to stay in the ecosystem and already have tons of stuff stored (this isn't just about email. photos and files are a huge deal.), it seems you can rely on them somewhat still.

I'm still holding out for an account conversion to a non-GSuite personal Google Account without Gmail.

I've been constantly annoyed over the past few years over features that are missing from GSuite accounts. To name a few: you can't invite people to your Google Home household, you can't start or join a YouTube Premium family plan, you can't add Nest devices to your account. I think some parts of the calendar integration still don't work with Google Home if you're using a GSuite account. It's been pretty frustrating, honestly.

And you can't really use Takeout to download data, delete the account, and then re-create it as a non-Gmail Google Account without it being super lossy. Things like docs and photos sharing settings would have to be manually recreated (or I suppose I could try to write a script that uses the GDrive API, but who has time for that). YouTube watch history and subscriptions can't be imported. The worst bit: Google Play purchases are just gone. Etc., etc.

So if they actually offered the ability to convert my account, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I've already moved my email over to Fastmail, so I don't need Gmail anymore.

It seems like the subtext of the way this has gone over the last few months is that they tried to develop a process to migrate users in a Workspace to individual consumer Google accounts, but it turned out to be too difficult to do losslessly, and so now they have thrown in the towel and recommitted to free Workspaces having a future.

You reminded me that I canceled my Google music and moved to Spotify because it was impossible to use the Google music account I had on my own domain instead of Gmail with a Google home.

I was really happy with the service. I liked not having ads on YouTube. Still dumbfounded by that.

What a fucking mess. You make the whole world panic, your migration tools are not ready, and then you say "actually, just kidding" and tell everyone who believed what you said that you would delete their accounts (because you basically said their accounts would be deleted), to "contact support".

It's an overused trope, but this was so poorly planned, executed, and communicated and it can only be explained by decision makers actually being on drugs.

Promotion culture

How much impact did you have :/

Multiple people should get demoted for all aspects of this "launch".

Just moved my legacy plan over to the 'new' personal use/free plan and it seems fine. Good grief how this wasn't the plan from the very start is just beyond me. I hope the complete trashing of trust and perception with the earliest and most tech connected users was worth it, Google.

I guess you weren't a Google Reader user. Join the club :)

Oh I was, and I still have never forgiven them for it lol.

I still remember the day when I read that, when in a bus.

Funny how some (arguably futile) memories stick in.

What changed? Does it put an additional limit on users or are you still able to add as you were before (up to your existing limit)?

Maybe this really was supposed to be some sort of "shock" to push a certain group over to google's paid services. Or maybe it was just a mismanaged mess.

I don't have any extra users, other than like a few oauth app keys for random integrations. I just use it for my personal gmail and custom domain, and (unfortunately) all of my Android purchase history over a decade plus of mobile phone usage. Everything seems to be working just as before.

yeah, theory 1 was they thought they could get some money out of pushing users to Workspace and didn't get the conversion rate they hoped for.

Theory 2 is they really were developing a GSuite to Google Account migrator and it ended up being way too messy to be workable in the deadline they set themselves.

Is there a link to official info on what the new personal use plan entails?

Edit: There's this summary, but nothing detailed so far:

Continue using your custom domain with Gmail

Keep using Gmail with your custom domain

Retain access to no-cost Google services

You will retain access to the no-cost version of Google Workspace services such as Google Drive and Google Meet, and additional Google services such as Google Search, Google Maps, and YouTube

Keep your purchases and data

You will retain access to paid content such as movie purchases at Google Play and data stored on Google Workspace

This option is for non-commercial personal use

Google may remove business functionality from this offering and transition businesses to Google Workspace. Additionally, this option will not include support.

I cannot figure out how to transition to the non-commercial/free plan. It only offers me an upgrade to Workspace. How slowly is it rolling out?

For those that selected the paid option like I did before this was available - I DM'd @AskWorkspace on twitter, and they pointed me to this link

https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213

If you follow the instructions and go to the '?' > 'Contact Support', there is an option for switching back to the legacy edition.

I can't find the option. If I go to the google admin console and click (?) I don't have 'Contact Support' because I don't have an expensive enough Google Workspaces subscription. Is there a way to switch back to legacy free from the Workspace Essentials, or do I need to upgrade to an expensive subscription so I can open a case so I can switch back to the free plan?

I think chat support is a paid option only. When I did the transition option, it put me on "Business Starter", but I wouldn't be charged $3 until next month I think.

I posted more details about this here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/comments/urb8...

I followed the instructions and got the confirmation email. But in Admin console under billing > subscription, my subscription is still showing google workspace business starter. Are you seeing the same?

Pretty sure that's how it's supposed to be, you're just supposed to not get billed for it.

Thanks for the unnecessary anxiety Google! I wish I could get back the wasted brain cycles spent contemplating how the fuck I was going to transition my family to something else.

You probably should still transition your family to something else. Google is not gonna stop being Google because they got a ton of pushback for this stunt.

Whelp screw me for proactively dealing with the situation I guess?

"If you transitioned to Google Workspace after January 19, 2022 and used G Suite legacy free edition for personal use, you can contact Support"

-- https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217?hl=en#nocost

Why would they arbitrarily limit this to 2022? I converted my account a while back because I had to in order to get more storage, but now I'm punished for giving them money for a year or two? Google is so bad at this!

You migrated for more service.

This is aimed at people who migrated because Google announced that the previously free service would now be paid.

You paid because you needed more than the free tier.

Not saying you can't feel left out, but this announced path is about undoing a very specific thing, that you were not a part of.

Ahh ok thank you, I will look into that.

Ugh, same.

Edit: I just followed the link from the other comment about contacting support…

> To get phone, chat, or email support for your legacy free account at [mydomain.com], you need to upgrade to Google Workspace

So I can’t contact them until the “upgrade” takes effect, and I get charged for it?!

You don't need to get in actual contact with support. It's not clear from the linked page, but when you go to the (?) icon on your admin page there's an automated click-through flow to revert to legacy - I just did it for my account.

What did you transition to? I recently made an exploratory protonmail account to move my personal domain to but found that their handling of arbitrary mailboxes like the +suffixes is not useful since you have to register each one, are limited in number, and can’t send from them.

Fastmail is a really good choice. I've been happy with it. I use a wildcard for my personal domains, so I haven't tested how +suffixes work.

Migadu works wonderfully, and also allows address rewriting so you can use something other than + (which is blacklisted in some places).

I'm really happy they waited until I finished the transition and deleted my account. Otherwise laziness might have kept me from moving and it really was the right choice.

(I went to Fastmail and have been mostly happy so far)

ABP - Always Be Procrastinating

Especially with Google, they have the sort of high level decision making that is only sustainable if you are constantly drowning in cash. You need to give them a little time to come to their senses. Let the bad PR soak in a bit and work its way up the reporting chain.

Why do you feel like being screwed up?

You got rid of Google, you migrated to something that suits you better, you will not worry next time Google try to pull this stunt again.

In my book, those are 3 positives, not a screw-up.

Load of my shoulders. As much as I hate to be beholden to Google, both my parents (in their 70s) use our gsuit account with custom domain and migrating them to a different service was … well, you know how it goes. The cost was a bit much.

So thanks Google.

Yeah, similar situation here. And yes, trying to explain to others how to use a new email system would probably have been more expensive than just paying but FFS, Google, way to freak out a bunch of kids who have had to be the family IT admin.

This situation sort-of landed in my lap. My older brother set up custom domain email with the family surname for himself, parents, and another sibling many years ago, but he died a couple of years ago, and as the only other techy person in the family, I've kind of taken on responsibility for these things, even though I don't use it myself. I was putting off migrating to another service, so I'm glad I don't have to worry about it anymore. (I was going to go with Apple iCloud+ because they're all pretty invested in Apple stuff anyway, but the process of manually transfering each person's email archive with Google Takeout was a bit of an unknown for me.)

Huh.

Well, I already moved my custom domain email over to fastmail.

Been meaning to for a while anyway... I'd rather pay them a few bucks than keep having Google do whatever it was they were doing with my email (maybe nothing all that bad, but who the hell knows?)

The transition was smooth.

I did the same but was already a Fastmail customer. Didn't even realize you could add additional domains to an existing account without any additional charge. Great service!

I'd like to know what exactly was the decisioning around this as it seems like a case study in how not to do product management.

Perhaps Google just wanted to scare businesses on the legacy plan into migrating to the paid service, expecting that those who could afford to pay wouldn't leave it to the last minute.

Probably trying to get rid of people using their service like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ufa4v4/google_...

I think they're pretty justified to block additional uploads for any over their stated (but poorly enforced) quota, and give a window for users to get back under quota then just delete it for the obvious bad actors.

G Suite legacy accounts have always been limited to 15GB, and my newsletter inbox has been barred once from receiving further email because I'm always close to the limit.

Given how long it took and their original apathy to the negative reaction, I’m guessing a large percentage of users were migrating away rather than paying to upgrade.

And now I’m curious what that number is.

36 hours too late for me - I deleted my 14+ year old GSuite account yesterday morning. Oh well, Fastmail seems great so far.

That's definitely within a reasonable deletion windowpz but also maybe up against the edge of it - try yelling really loudly (tweet @AskWorkspace, ask contacts/friends, etc, basically move now) and you very well might be able to get it back.

(I see there's an email address at the bottom of the link in your bio FWIW, just in case someone might consider reaching out that way)

Google accounts can be restored for at least 30 days after deletion. Should be quite easy. No yelling necessary.

A, the contiguous unit is 1 month, not 1 day. That makes things a lot less stressful. Good to know.

(Wow I tripped over my phone keyboard writing these two comments. lol)

I had been holding off out of laziness but all this does is give me more time before I transition to fastmail as well. Google is not offering any assurances they won't do something similar in the future. And renegging on the free tier I simply use for email has left a bad taste.

Why did I have to find this out from Twitter rather than Google?

I find it somewhat odd (or disturbing?) that they spent months telling us this wouldn't be an option; then a couple months telling us it would be an option but without custom domain email; then now, just weeks before the former June 1 deadline, custom domain email is an option too?

So the option is available to those who were waiting until the last minute to do anything about it -- which is probably quite a lot of people actually. (It is me, but I still will probably use the push to get off google finally).

I wonder what's going on within Google.

If you did not wait until the last minute you can still undo it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31409611

This is great, but really should've been done in the first place. Must've been a major PR oversight/disconnect, no clue how that happened.

Stop letting them push you around like this. Leave, never look back.

No I like it and I never had a problem with it.

I am with you on this.I have disabled all features (including Gmail) and migrated my family to self hosting, but you need a Google account/identity when invited to some online webinars, for Android phone (unless you want to jump through huge hoops and use Aurora store, but some apps might still not work (banking...)). Unfortunately.

I am on GSuite's Legacy plan because of this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17689404 and I was very disappointed with them transitioning to paid. I believe their turnaround has something to do with EU/USA government going after big tech?

I transitioned to fastmail for e-mail and am happy I did. I really like google docs and google sheets, but I'm moving off of google drive for everything else and just using syncthing.

Same. I recently moved to iOS and I found the Gmail app to be pretty buggy. Staring emails worked about 50% of the time, scrolling in HTML emails was very janky, clicking on a notification and reading an email didn't mark the email as read. This plus the Gsuite transition pushed me to Fastmail. I now use that plus the native iOS mail app and I have no complaints.

I switched yesterday to the paid Workspace account. It was weird needing to come up with a company name to do it. I'm glad Google offers this option now for people who've used the legacy GSUite in order to be able to have a custom domain name for email.

It looks like I may be able to undo this switch:

> If you transitioned to Google Workspace after January 19, 2022 and used G Suite legacy free edition for personal use, you can [contact Support](https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213)

1. Go to admin.google.com logged in as your domain admin

2. Click the question mark in a circle, at the top right

3. Click buttons named as seen in this screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/VxluEzc

4. Confirm that you got the email that explicitly says no cost, and no further action required on your part

Thanks for this. Worked like a charm! (Though I am another user that switched to Fastmail and so far enjoy it)

This should be the top Comment!

I noticed it says "You may be eligible". My live chat convo with CS says the same blurb. I'm guessing this may be a manual process where they need to evaluate if you're eligible or not.

Possibly, I don't know. I read the "possibly" as "if you answer this long-ass question about our definition of 'not a business'".

Good things come to those who procrastinate, I guess.

Hmm, I already opted in to Google Workspace, even though I only use the account for personal use. I wonder if there will be an option to switch?

Same boat, of course not. Google can take a hike.

I would love to know this too. Should have waited it out...

Reddit to the rescue:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/comments/ur5x...

I migrated everything to Zoho already. $1 a month is a fair price.

Anyone know if wildcards still work with this? I mostly make up domain addresses on the fly e.g. hn@example.com

Do not use a Google Workplace (GSuite) account for personal accounts. Last time I did, many things didn't work (e.g. Google Play, YouTube Premium, etc). They might work now but it was a bad experience (non-paying customers seemed to have better service).

I just have mine forwarding all email to my regular @gmail.com account. That account is set up to send and receive email for several different addresses, and it's the one I log into to use google services.

The last big issue I had along those lines was with Pay. Support for Workspace accounts pretty much always lagged behind though.

The things you list do work now, but there are still a lot of things that don't. I really want an option to convert my GSuite account to one of their regular personal Google Accounts without Gmail, as I've already moved my mail over to Fastmail. But I don't want to have to change my Google "identity" away from my custom-domain email address.

I currently have a legacy account with one user, with a bunch of emails and a handful of other Google data. What happens if I use to transfer to a personal account under my domain (which seems to be how this works?), but then transfer the domain to Fastmail for email? Am I able to create a normal "free" gmail account with the rest, or does transferring email to Fastmail inevitable delete all of the other data on the account?

Part of me doesn't want to deal with the risk and hassle tied to all this, but another part of me wants to get as far away from Google as possible as a result of this experience.

There is no official migration path to a normal consumer Google/Gmail account. That's what they were indicating for quite a while that they would start offering around now, but with today's news it seems like they've had a change of mind.

Exporting your email data and importing it into a different provider (and perhaps more importantly, changing the MX DNS record on your domain) should work fine though. Your inbox on the Google side will just cease receiving new email.

Still quite shitty of Google to insist on sunsetting this one. God damn, it's infuriating. Never again will I be so naive and trust them. Damn Big-G cold blooded.

The message is clear - you are the product and Google is finding you too expensive. Pay up or move out.

We are all aware of how Google treats products they sunset. We are aware how they want to raise their subscription rates and services.

I would say besides Fastmail and other email providers, take a look at Microsoft w/ O365. Yes it's pricy, but it offers a full office suite and can be as low as $60/yr for a business premium plan.

Folks seem to be favoring fastmail above most of the other options. Does anyone like ProtonMail? Any particularly compelling pros or cons for either?

Both Fastmail and ProtonMail are quite expensive if you need more than one mailbox (user account). ProtonMail offers IMAP only through its own bridge application, and that’s only for paid accounts. Fastmail offers IMAP without any additional software requirements.

I would suggest looking at options like Mailbox.org, Runbox, Mailfence, and a few others that I don’t recall right now.

For a pricing scheme that’s not based on number of mailboxes but on other parameters like storage and mails sent, there are options like mxroute and Migadu. I don’t prefer either of these for different reasons (the former is in the U.S. and the latter left me with a bad taste when it moved from a free plan to paid).

ProtonMail (Switzerland) and especially Ctemplar (Iceland) are my favorites.

I always recommend Ctemplar (even if i am swiss)....however i have my own mail-server..so there's that ;)

EDIT:

OHDAMN READ THIS!!!:

https://ctemplar.com/ctemplar-is-shutting-down/

Now i have to make some calls

>Remember to change your email information to your new service.

Yeah exactly what I'm afraid of. I don't want to do more than one migration.

Took them awhile and it's a mystery why they had no foresight to know this option was needed or at least a way to move laterally, but good that they did something. Anyone that managed to get over the initial freaking out and decide to wait to see should be able to sort something out with this, and I read that they are providing good support helping people with questions.

I'm seeing that option in my account admin page now too. I'm going to confirm mine is for personal use and see how it goes.

Quick and painless. I don't notice any immediate difference, but I only use the core features really. Clicked the button and it came back with the following text and that was it:

>You have chosen to continue using the Free Legacy Edition of G Suite for personal use.

>If you change your mind and want access to premium features, you can take advantage of a special discount by upgrading your subscription in the Google Admin Console.

What a self inflicted mess though since this is what should have been announced in the first place.

Any idea which features are the premium features?

Access to support was the one they specifically called out

So first they’re telling people they must upgrade, then they change their mind and add this option. However, people who have already upgraded because they thought it was the only option are getting screwed now, because they no longer are given this option. I feel like this warrants a complaint with a bunch of consumer protection agencies.

Does anyone know if after switching to "personal use" if you can swap the domain? That's not allowed with the legacy edition so I'm guessing the answer is no but wondered if anyone tested that theory. So I want to switch to "personal" and then change the "primary domain".

Probably still can't do it. You COULD try upgrading to the Google Workspace offering, then seeing if it would let you chat, to get the plan set to free, but no guarantees still.

I transitioned my family domain name to a small nonprofit that I created to do donations. If you have such an entity, it's an easy way to opt out of this whole problem. I realize this doesn't apply to most people, but I'm just putting it here as an alternative.

created to do donations for what causes, if you don't mind my asking?

> I transitioned my family domain name to a small nonprofit that I created to do donations. If you have such an entity, it's an easy way to opt out of this whole problem.

Unless your family has a foundation that's planning to give grants, this sounds like an abuse of Google's goodwill towards nonprofits.

Also quite possibly not a legal purpose for a nonprofit. There are different sorts of US non-profits, state (various) and federal, and I'm not sure which ones Google means to accept, but "providing email services to one family" is not a valid purpose for many of them.

If it's a 501-c-3, "sending donations to whatever my family wants to" may also not be valid, and may be considered a tax dodge.

(I am not a lawyer).

I'm happy to be able to keep one of my personal domains at Google...it's the one the whole family uses, except for me, and none of them wanted to move. My other domain is hosted at POBox.com, which is for all intents and purposes Fastmail.

If you had any illusions about how Google feels about users this seems to clear it up. Would have transitioned, but I moved away when they announced it as many others did.

Good riddance… feelings mutual I guess.

I closed my 1 user my-domain email account due to this, and now I didnt even have to? Great thanks.

I’ll remember this when the GCP sales people call at work

Thank you google, but i already made my own mailserver on vultr. Deliver-ability is perfect, rspam is just great and it's fast.

> Deliver-ability is perfect, rspam is just great and it's fast.

You should write a blog post about it!

>You should write a blog post about it!

Are you a mindreader? That's exactly what i do ATM ;-)

It's essentially:

You need a DKIM, SPF and DMARK and some let's-encrypt-certs, additionally you can make a "site-verification"-key for google and ms, those two want to be threaded special ;)

Hmm i thinks that's it more or less, for reliable delivery.

You can test your mail with those "tool's":

https://www.mail-tester.com/

https://glockapps.com/

and some more...

I post it here if i finished the blog entry.

You need about 2 days to set it up, and a reminder for those who wants to go that path...keep all your spam mails (you need them to train rspamd later)

The parts are FreeBSD13, blacklistd, pf, OpenSMTPD, Rspamd, Redis and Dovecot

Thanks, did you try sending emails to Microsoft as well? I've heard they tend to penalise smaller operations more compared to Gmail.

Yes no problem at all, however Microsoft is more focused on the DMARC policy so something like this a good idea:

_dmarc.contoso.com 3600 IN TXT "v=DMARC1; p=reject"

The p=reject is here the important thing.

For google this is important:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/183895?hl=en#zippy=

>>Google gives you a TXT verification record to add to your domain host’s DNS records. When Google sees the record exists, your domain ownership is confirmed. The verification record does not affect your website or email.

Big thanks to tekni5. I've been struggling with a move over to iCloud. I will still work through it, but it is no stress now.

Anyone know if this can be used by someone who never used G Suite Legacy but uses Workspace for personal purposes only?

At the moment, it seems no. I tried to follow the "down-grade" path in my Workspace, and it just says "an error occurred".

i bought so many apps and games on my legacy account. they should let us migrate these to a gmail account.

Does anyone know if there is a limit on the number of users with this free option?

I believe it's 50 users.

it's variable and depends on when the legacy account was created. I have one domain with 10 users and I have another domain with 200 users.

Was supposed to be for only personal users with under 10, but the plan still allows up to 50.

I literally just yesterday pointed that domain at ProtonMail.

Is there a good alternative to google photo?

What do you use it for? Just backups, sharing with friends, or what?

All of the above. The “this day X years ago” is my favorite feature right now. In a way they have made my old photos useful.

meh. this is exactly what was always available.

The catch is, as soon as you migrate you will lose your gvoice number, since that is not included in the "all free services will be migrated".

And then it will be too late to research alternatives as you lost your number and will start paying (and then realize your old number is long gone :)

Not exactly the same as normal Gmail, this option lets you keep using a custom domain at $0/month, which basic Gmail doesn't offer. To me it's 100% worth it as that was my main concern (with so many accounts bound to my domain email).

What would you recommend to safeguard the number?

You can transfer your GV number to a consumer Google (@gmail.com) account.

https://support.google.com/voice/answer/12083094?hl=en&ref_t... See the section titled: “Transfer to another Google Account (ends in @gmail.com)”

I just went through the opt-out process and my Google Voice number still works.

What? Where does it say you lose GV

Post on Reddit states otherwise [1]

>I do in fact though still have my google voice on my personal no-cost accounts still working. Logging into each account and going directly to http://voice.google.com

>*this seems to work with already established voice accounts, and new ones cant be made for account on suite legacy anymore.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/comments/ur3h...

I finished the personal use thingie and still have access to my GV number

The "fine print" says other business services will be removed in the future.

We need to rise against Google. Google keeps users hostages for more money. It shouldn't be tolerated under any circumstances.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com