Is this for real? I've not received that email from Google.
If so, I guess it's time to setup my own mailserver. I've been meaning to do it for a long while now anyway, as I'm not comfortable with the thought that Google is data-harvesting all my and my family's emails. But with mailservers being notoriously difficult to setup and configure securely, I keep putting it off.
Time to get reading a few tutorials, methinks. Can anyone recommend a good lightweight email server [I have less than a dozen email accounts on my domain] and a useful tutorial on setting it all up securely?
Incidentally, I run email accounts on some of my other domains, using Yandex Mail for Domains [0] which [at least last time I checked] was still free. Im slightly dubious about using it for my main domain though as I've found delivery to be less than 100% reliable. In the past, I've had one or two emails disappear completely. Yandex's own mail logs showed them being received, but they never showed up in my inbox or any of my other folders.
I suspect Yandex have a slightly over-eager server level spam filter, which ate them before they ever reached my inbox. But Yandex's support are generally useless and were unable to tell me what had become of the emails in question, even when I presented them with their own mail log.
Email is increasingly difficult to do yourself with the proliferation of anti-spam and anti-malware protection, combined with consolidated usage of SaaS apps for email across the board. Most of the IP address space in AWS and Azure is blacklisted by spam filters (as is customer IP space from most ISPs if they don’t already filter SMTP traffic), so unless you want to roll the dice on config settings for everyone you send email to, you’re generally going to need an authenticated relay for outgoing mail — and your best option will be one of the big cloud providers.
If you want a secure mail service that won’t read your email, try ProtonMail.
You can set up an email server to receive mail typically (assuming your ISP doesn't block it). For outbound mail, you can create a dedicated regular gmail address, and instruct it to accept sending emails out with an alternate email/domain in the From address and set up all outbound mail to route through that. (I haven't tried this yet, but it looks like all the pieces are there under the "send mail as" setting on gmail).
Everyone is so attached to big tech on all levels that no matter how hard you try to escape, it all comes right back. You can set up your own mail server and still get screwed over. So sick of it.
I'd honestly rather roll the dice on emails than contribute to the monopolization.
Does this even work for non-Russian businesses? I tried to register a business in "Yandex 360" and it asks for a Russian phone number and some identity numbers?
UPDATE: Well, I've still not received that email from Google and, when I log into my Gsuite admin account, it's still showing "You are on the G Suite legacy free-of-charge edition. Consider upgrading to Google Workspace Business Starter." at the top of the Admin Console page. And, underneath:
Plan details
Payment plan -- Free plan
Licences -- 88 available, 12 assigned
Estimated monthly bill --Free edition (no charges)
So, either that article was a spoof, or Google are rolling this out gradually.
Agreed.. do you know where you will end up migrating to? I looked into FastMail a long time ago, at that time it was the best replacement for just the Gmail component with custom domain, not sure if it still is.
I looked into FastMail as well about 1-2 years ago. I’d like IMAP PUSH support for iOS, to replace the polling needed for gmail. Good support for iOS search is also needed, I haven’t investigated how FastMail works in that regard yet.
Same here. What side-effects such migration would have? Would I lose all the files in my Google Drive? Sure my email@customdomain.com email will still exist as a Google, YouTube account, right? It just won't use Gmail as my email provider?
Yes, it's true. I think Google rebranded it as part of Google Workspace. I received their email detailing their policy change back in Dec 2020; been an extremely frugal user of it back when it was simply called Google Apps Engine for basic domain email hosting.
> As of February 28, 2021, the specific "Outlook.com Premium" and "Ad-Free Outlook.com" subscriptions no longer include the ability to use a custom domain with Outlook.com.
> To continue using a personalized email address and custom domains with Outlook.com, you will need to subscribe to Microsoft 365. Learn more about Premium features in Outlook.com for Microsoft 365 subscribers.
Yeah thinking the same. Microsoft 365 most likely the best switch for me. With 2 users and my custom domain, for cheaper might as well get 1TB cloud storage and Office as well.
I don't understand why they do this. Microsoft used to have a service called Windows Live Domains that used your normal TXT-record validation and killed it off in 2014; the shift to requiring GoDaddy be your registrar for outlook.com premium just baffles me.
For those not trying to host their own, you might want to look at Migadu[1]. I have quite a lot of domains still running on the legacy GSuite, and a few others on the paid workspace, and the remaining on Migadu (not relations but a happy customer).
A lot of us have one-off use cases to email 80 people. There's that one time you need to email everyone on your kid's sports team even though you're not the coach, etc.
Migadu is great overall. I've been using it for probably 3-4 years.
I will say, they broke imap/pop without an announcement. They just silently changed the pop endpoint. I had to reach out to support to get the new endpoint. That's totally unacceptable without advanced notice.
They also doubled the price and added worse storage limits in 2020 citing the pandemic and increased expenses. So it's something to be weary of.
However, the price quality of the product are good, so I'm happy I migrated away from Google.
I created a free account many years ago for my family. We've all been using it ever since for everything. So I have a lot of purchases and history in there. All of my YouTube stuff, all of my Android purchases. Everything to do with Google.
And now they're going to start charging me $70 per family member or delete all of their purchases for the last decade or so.
A more reasonable approach would’ve been to offer custom domains as part of Google One, whose pricing is far more family-friendly.
Eg, Google One provides 100GB of storage (shareable with your family Google accounts) for £16/year. Just let those who want that to link it to custom domains — Apple (iCloud+) and MS (MS 365) already offer this.
Exactly! Or provide a migration path - I went back to a standard gmail account, but the vast majority of my purchases, photos etc are in my old GAFYD account.
Google are going to lose even more goodwill without a migration path.
That would be a great solution. I would imagine many "legacy free" users are old GMail for Domains users who just want the same Google One functionality of @gmail.com addresses but with a custom domain.
I don't even use my domain name for anything but email anymore, but I certainly don't want to give up the address I've been known by for a dozen years.
As you can imagine, my username @gmail.com gets too much spam to be usable.
(full disclosure, I work for Google but have no special insights here other than reading the article)
My interpretation is that you'll still be able to use your account on Youtube, Play Store, etc. You'll just lose the workspace specific features like Drive, so use the tools that let you dump that data.
Exactly, since Android and Youtube aren't "workspace core services" (the next sentence after the one you quoted explicitly mentions YT and Photos), your purchases are probably safe past the deadline.
However, now what do you sign into your Android device with? Google's products work... poorly... across multiple accounts. I needed to change my email address a number of years ago, which is impossible with Google's apparent use of email addresses as a primary key or something, and my Google account has had to live in a very messy state ever since... the old address has to be the core of the account for all services, even if I'm handing out and sending as a new address... and that account is an extra security vector into it... (Meanwhile, Microsoft just lets you add and remove email addresses from your Microsoft account, including changing and removing the primary.)
I wonder if Google will support a workflow for users "leaving", whereby the can keep their "Google Account" under the same email address, but with Gmail disabled.
This could be a reasonably low friction way to keep the system working without breaking the "email address is unchangeable per-account" assumption - the underlying Google account can continue to exist, even if the associated MX record disappears, or Google Workspace ceases to provide service.
This is how Google accounts work today if you ignore the "default" sign-up path, and take the route where you create a Google account under an existing external email address.
I think that depends on how much storage this person is using.
Google includes Photos against the billed quota, so if you have more than 15GB of photos then Google will surely do something, either restrict access or eventually delete the data.
Dealing with the cloud will always be like dealing with Darth Vader. ("I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further.") The idea that anyone actually chooses to depend on this when alternatives are out there is incredible: It's simply a horrible arrangement for both consumers and businesses.
True, but it's a compromise most of us are forced to make. The vast majority of people know that a custom domain name makes their email more professional, but wouldn't have the faintest idea of how to even begin to manage one if it weren't for services like this one. (Or, at the very least, wouldn't have known how to do it in 2007-2010 which this service was marketed as "free forever.") These cloud services are basically just "linux admin done for you" since most of us don’t have the expertise.
Fortunately I already went through the hassle of extracting my photos a while back. It was something like 45 downloads of 2GB zip files, with really chaotic organization of photos.
But I tried to do Google Takeout of just a few things, including Email (which is under 2GB usage) but not including photos. Somehow it still created 63 files, each 2GB in size. I just threw up my hands and gave up. I got my email using IMAP + Thunderbird, and I exported my contacts. The rest is going in the bin.
Depending on what your family members do with it, you may be able to get by with one paid account and some aliases, routing, etc, to forward emails somewhere else.
I’ve found Zoho to be fantastic. They offer good value, some extra shit if you want it, and you can bring your own domain. I think it’s about $35 USD a year.
"Free Forever" somehow isn't legally binding, every year many companies renege on their promises or surreptitiously find ways to de-grandfather their customers plans via BS semantics or outright deceit.
But, after auditing a number of their enterprise products, dealing with their security team and seeing the quality of the code they produce I have to say they are a very significant security risk.
To be fair, they stopped giving it away for free 10 years ago (I asked Urs at the time, and he said “it’s too hard to support and test another edition”, whatever). But I’m pissed as well, probably just gonna pay.
Putting everything into the hands of an enormous corporation and being surprised when they do things to benefit themselves. insert picture of shocked but not that shocked fry meme
I've posted this comment a few times in these threads. I'm in a same boat and did some digging with support and through the docs.
When you cancel workspace, the accounts remain active but lose access to just the workspace features (gmail, drive, docs, calendar etc). The accounts will remain the same for things like google play, youtube etc and you won't lose access to any purchases.
The biggest impact I can see, other than the headache of migration, is that former GFYD email address can NEVER be used for docs, drive etc, even on the same terms as a free personal account.
For a highly techy audience, you'd think people could have figured that out, but I guess outrage is better.
You don't have to lose access to anything except the core products - gmail, drive, docs, calendar. You still get to log on with your Google Account to access your purchases.
For a new domain I had to signup to Cloud Identity Premium then cancel. For an existing domain on Google Apps, just remove Workspace and add Cloud Identity Free.
I've been meaning to migrate but am more than a little leery of the potential for gotchas and disruption. Any advice from those who have gone through this already?
I understand you just lose all your Google Play purchases and need to re-purchase any apps or subscriptions you want to keep. I'm assuming this will basically require an Android phone factory reset and to be setup fresh with a "new" Google account for the old email address? Is this the case?
I also understand the need to do a Google Takeout and download everything. Already got bit by this once though when I recently did a Takeout to backup all my Google Photos content: a week or so later, after I had already permanently deleted the originals, I received an email from Google saying "sorry there was a bug in Takeout and some of your large videos were omitted from your exported data". I guess you need to comb through and verify everything actually made it to the Takeout to be safe.
When you migrate an email address off of Google Apps for Your Domain to another email host or self-host, what happens to the Google Account for that email address? Is it possible to shut down the Google Apps for Your Domain service for the domain in question and then establish a new fresh Google account for the same email address (not a gmail address) that was formerly part of the Google Apps for Your Domain service?
Oof, this sucks. I'd forgotten about losing all Android purchases. That totally sucks. You still need to get out though, as it will only get worse.
I personally migrated by downloading and uploading over imap.
I went through this last year. It was relatively smooth, but I did do a factory reset and spent a couple hours on the project just to be sure.
I have been plagued by account problems for years, though, having signed up for services like YouTube with a personal email prior to creating the same email address in Google Workspace. I recommend avoiding it, and just using a free Gmail account for basic usage of Google docs and YouTube and your phone.
Did you successfully go from having yourname@yourdomain.com as the primary Google account on your phone, with the account setup under Google Workspace, to an end state where you had a "new" Google account for the exact same email address with no connection to Google Workspace.
I understand it's a given to lose the purchases. I'm semi-dreading the prospect of being presented with an error message preventing the creation of a new Google Account for an email address previously under Google Workspace. This may be irrational...but it seems like a case where Murphy's Law would rear its ugly head, and typical of the "gotchas" that these legacy accounts have had to deal with when interacting with certain Google products.
And I guess the worst-case downside is that I might need to create a new Google Account with a different email address from my primary email address just for the phone and Google apps, which is awkward but isn't the end of the world.
Provided Google doesn't disable "too much" of these accounts, they ought to act like normal "Google accounts", which don't have Google-provided email service associated (i.e. a free Google account that was created with an external email address).
You might miss out on some things like Calendar/Gmail, but a free Google account using an external email should preserve things like purchases. Failing to do that would seem likely to push them down the path of lawsuits and PR fiascos, and also embolden what's likely a disproportionately tech-savvy (and influential in making purchasing decisions) audience fitting the demographic that set up a domain for email 10+ years ago.
> I understand you just lose all your Google Play purchases and need to re-purchase any apps or subscriptions you want to keep. I'm assuming this will basically require an Android phone factory reset and to be setup fresh with a "new" Google account for the old email address? Is this the case?
You understand wrong.
You do not lose access to your purchases. You will still have a Google Account (with your own custom domain), it's just that after the conversion from G-Suite Legacy to Workspace, if you stop paying it it will not allow you to access the "core" products (Gmail, Drive, Calendar, whatever).
Nothing stops you from moving your e-mail somewhere else but still keeping the Google Account with that domain.
Bummer the only value I get out of the service as an individual user over Gmail is a custom domain.
Migration is going to suck only because of stupidly relying on login with Google which won't work after I putge everything google from my life with fire.
I'm presuming this includes paid apps that Google will be stealing when I decline to pay them by the month to keep them.
I switched to Migadu a few years ago, as I realized that having a personal account with Google Workspace was a bad idea.
All Google features kept getting delayed for Workspace users. Google removed the free tier (huge red flag on its future). Fortunately I just had to migrate email and calendar. You're in a bigger mess.
Yep. Get out. Stop relying on Google for anything important.
Migadu starts at $20/year. Like everything else, almost all services with free tiers went crippled or paid-only with the pandemic, and last I checked all the SEO listed the same outdated options.
I don't think there is a good option here because I don't think you can use the same domain. You would need to switch to a service that can have multiple mailboxes on a domain.
I can handle setting up new email that still uses the domain. The issue is all the data/purchases/etc with the Google Apps account that can't be transferred to a regular Gmail account.
Ah yes. That is also the problem I have and I don't think there is any option here. There was an internal experiment but I guess that didn't go anywhere before they decided to just close all of the accounts.
The wording sounds like non-"Workspace" services will still be available so i guess you can theoretically still access purchases. Not great, because now I have half of my stuff in different accounts but not too bad.
Add "Cloud Identity Free" to your subscription, seems to have let me keep all my purchases. (I canceled my legacy subscription today to avoid future charges)
It seems it's not possible to add "Cloud Identity Free Edition" to your account while the legacy subscription is still active, and I don't want to risk cancelling it before the deadline in case it has other unintended consequences :(
hmm. cost per user approaches alternate mail providers with domains. Self-hosting would be cheaper, but the problem is blacklisting of a VPS IP range for email sending. Probably, it requires some use of a specific SMTP service for mail and do all the rest in the self-host, but then that means finding SMTP-as-a-service for $ distinct from VPS, unless you can VPS host for the same cost inside one of the FAANG and avoid the SMTP blacklisting that way?
Hmmm, SendGrid offers 100 sends per day for free and their "API" has an SMTP feature. I'm sure there are others. SMTP relay for outbound? I'm thinking of giving it a go.
well.. to report back there are minor nits in the docs about "how to do it" but I succeeded in getting DKIM/SPF done, and google and pobox both honoured it for delivery which is something. (I used the google postmaster doorway to prove control of the domain)
I have one simple rule. Never rely on Google for anything. Not email, not cloud storage, not infrastructure, *anything*. If you're going to use one of their products, cost-in the expense of moving everything out at a moments notice and keep constant backups of your data. My advice to anyone is to just avoid using Google for anything you expect to use long term.
I'm sure they are banking on people just ponying up the cash because they've been with them for so long. It's basically mafia protection payments. Pay us or we'll break your legs (delete all your data).
Not at all, they actually would be happy to get rid of all these low value accounts. They don’t want to maintain separate SKU, and given that this option is not available for 10 years, any potential revenue is so tiny, they just don’t want to bother.
Do you know anybody else who will give me free hosting for the next 12 years before demanding payment? I think I'm okay with moving once every ten or twelve years.
I wish most places would even let me pay for 10 years at a time like you can do with domain names, when it comes to peace of mind in the event of unexpected circumstances (which is incredibly relevant now given COVID-19, losing your job, ending up in hospital for a few months etc.)
How fragile is your infrastructure if one or two missed payments will wipe everything or even let somebody else take over your intangible identifiers because they're now 'inactive'.
I feel like it depends a lot on what you're using it for. I have a personal domain attached to mine with one or two email aliases that I use for a few things - I get maybe 5-10 emails a week there, so super low volume.
I feel like I would comfortably fit into any sane "free tier" they wanted to offer with some restrictions and low volume limits.
I have been planning to move more and more of my personal email over to my personal domain (currently mostly all running on my @gmail.com address), and eventually would have been happy to pay for the privilege once I started consuming more and more resources.
I'll see how I feel in 6 months if I've bothered to migrate over, but I might as well now look at alternative options.
$6/user/month is $6 * 12 * 100 = $7,200 a year if you have taken up their grandfathered offer of up to 100 accounts.
This is for a service which is basically identically (except in some ways where it is less functional) to their free offering but linked to a custom domain, and a service they told us they were planning for to be free forever.
I wouldn't mind paying something, but this charging per accounts is ridiculous for something that was free.
I would have used the service differently if I thought it was going to transition to a paid-for service.
For example, I have an elderly friend who I hooked up to the Google ecosystem using my domain because I thought it would be slightly easier to troubleshoot any issues he had if he had problems. He wasn't costing Google any more than if he had an @gmail account. (Presumably he brought in the same amount of money, rather: if he was profitable under a free account, then I imagine he was just as valuable on an Apps account).
He doesn't even use email, so the custom domain doesn't really help him. He will be just as happy to use a free @gmail account, but I will have to spend an afternoon some time in the next few months driving out to see him and updating his accounts and devices. And then doing the same the next weekend when I've missed something. And then doing the same for some other users.
I'm a Google employee who just found out about this.
I'm not annoyed that I have to pay, it's been ~13 years of free service and I don't think Google is obligated to continue providing this to me.
The annoying part is that Google doesn't provide any migration tool, but there are migration tools for Google Edu accounts so that graduating students can migrate their data to personal Google accounts. The software is evidently mostly written and tested, but for whatever reason it hasn't been brought over the finish line for other workspace users.
Obviously our use case isn't that common (it's been "legacy" for years) but still annoying to know that there's probably some script I could run to do this, but nobody has built the web UI for it.
The problem is, I'm not a freeloader despite having my free account for almost 13 years.
I was a proud owner of Nexus phones, Google Fi subscriber, Google Music (YouTube Premium) subscriber, I've purchased apps and tv content on Google Play, and I also started paying for Google Drive storage after they removed the free unlimited photo backups. I had YouTube TV for a time. Having a powerful Gsuite service was a driving factor into the Google ecosystem for me.
I've been slowly pulling out of Google's services as they've been shutdown, renamed, etc. This will be the ultimate drive off of their services for me. By wanting an extra $6/month/user, they are now losing out on a lot more. I'm sure that my situation isn't unique.
Dyn.com (nee DynDNS, in the dialup days) was bought out by Oracle, my nearly 20 year old lifetime VIP account will be terminated in May despite using a few thousand requests per month and in the past highly recommending their extortionately priced but rather excellent global load balancer and enterprise anycast services (to the tune of thousands of dollars per month).
Likewise with Google, I had an original G1 phone and several iterations of the Pixel, have migrated several companies over to their excellent their cloud offerings, again to the tune of tens of thousands per month.
It just feels like I'm getting the shitty end of the stick here. In both cases I could've done it cheaper myself with other providers, and had to strongly argue that the alternative (Dyn, Google Cloud, AWS etc.) is a pragmatic and possibly the best albeit expensive choice in the long-run.
Ah yes, we used Dyn global load balancer 10 years ago. It was a great solution at the time. But they kept their high prices while AWS started offering more flexible solutions at 1/100th of the Dyn price.
Identical situations, VIP dyndns, all Nexus phones, 3 Pixels and google apps. On the plus side, I can't think of any other free service I use. (Damn, just remembered I use the hobbyist license for fusion360, they are slowly crippling that but not a big bang).
What are you going to do for DNS? I just got static DNS for home so I guess I could host my own DNS but the custom gapps domain mail will be a hassle. Maybe just forward it to my other @gmail account?
Luckily I never trusted this to stay free (for all 10 years I think), so I never used the calendar or drive, just the email.
So I own the domains, I can register them for 10 years at a time with ICANN, with that I can switch providers at will. Most of the reputable domain registrars have been around for the past 20 years and offer free basic DNS hosting... All I need is a MX record.
Next step is buying IP space, that's a lot more expensive with the yearly AS fees, I'm not sure I can afford that, and ARIN/RIPE seem just as bad as the [PS]aaS cartel where if you don't pay up your IP space gets re-sold.
Hi "cx". If you skim this page you'll notice the predominant personas and their own-domain email use-cases. Something like: 1 domain, 10 aliases, ability to send/receive messages. So, why don't you create a "Google Workspace Rescue" plan at $1/$2 per month? I'm a potential customer myself, and it seems to me that the free plan lacks functionality and the Premium is too resourceful (at a $9 tag). Just adding my 2 cents.
Thank you for the suggestion. We had had this requests since the beginning, but the issue is that at $1/$2 per month, one chargeback cost us 7 to 15 customers at these plans to support just the implicated costs. That's why we never got lower than 9$.
Granted, we don't have chargebacks everyday, but we get some occasionals one that, at these price, would hurt way more.
Now, we still offer an alternative plan that is available only upon request (or on certain occasions). We call it the "Lite plan" at 30$ per year, where you have all the advantages of the premium plan, but without the SMTP sending part. If that interests you, just send a request to the support and we'll enable it for your account :=)
I switched from Dyn to Namecheap (who is the registrar for my family domain) for their free DNS service. No issues but we really only use it for e-mail.
Just to answer one of my own questions. I am tossing up between ProtonMail and Runbox. Both have custom domains for the first paid level tier and I'll get better security to boot. Both take BTC so it comes from my trading account and not the family funds. :)
DNS I'll probably look at when Larry from Oracle kicks the last of the VIPS off dyndns. Looking at hosting on a container in my DMZ. Something I have not done for 20 years. djdns anyone?
I used Runbox for very many years and loved it. I cannot even remember why I migrated off; I was probably naively seduced by the launch of GMail (it was a long while ago) and getting similar stuff for free (I was an idiot).
Every couple of years I get a new trial account with them as I liked it so much, and each time I think 'nothing has really changed'. I read their dev blog and it's interesting, and their staff were great each time, but it just seems to take forever for anything to get done.
It may have been finished now, but the last time I tried them (only maybe a year or two ago) I was put off by wanting to move my calendar entries over and finding out that the new(ish) CalDav support they'd added had no web interface to it.
I get that the basics don't really change (and they are good at it); I just get irritated at the lack of pace. Otherwise I'd definitely consider returning to them.
By default it sets up a wild card local-part so any and all email sent to your domain will be forwarded. So you don't have to predefine aliases for every online account/service that use.
What the 25 aliases allotted in the free tier allows you to do is have 25 different domains.
Hi! I'm ImprovMX's founder. You are correct that you'd reach the limit of 5 free alias in your case. Upgrading to the monthly plan at 9$ would allow you to have up to 100 aliases.
Happy to answer any questions that you might need!
That got me thinking. I tested again on CheckTLS.com and if you use the port 465 and direct TLS, everything is fine. If you use port 587 and use STARTTLS, it's all good too.
Our decision was to not use STARTTLS for port 25, but that's maybe not a good idea and we should allow it back: this would make both services happier ;)
In a nutshell: TLS via 465 works correctly, and STARTTLS via 587 too.
Don't hesitate if you want to weight on this, happy to discuss this further!
I've been using AWS Route53 DNS for my domain for many years, very cheap and easy to automate a DDNS setup if desired (e.g. https://crazymax.dev/ddns-route53/)
I was an early "GMail for domains" user, and have felt abandoned as there are services in Google Home I can't use as a "Workspace" account.
I would gladly transition to a @gmail.com account and just do an email forward, which is why I had originally signed up, IF ONLY GOOGLE WOULD HAVE A MIGRATION TOOL. They pushed my family into Workspace as they abandoned us, and give us NO OPTION to transfer 13+ years of history.
Is there an equivalent of Microsoft’s Home Use Program (HUP) for Google Workspace?
HUP gets you Microsoft 365 (Office apps, OneDrive, ad-free email with a 50GB quota and one custom domain) for your family, with 30% off list price for people using Microsoft solutions at work — which is most office workers, assuming their employers have opted in.
It’d be nice to see something similar from Google.
I honestly would not mind a one-off fee to convert my accounts so that I can carry on using my accounts just like any other free @gmail.com user. I never used any of the extra functionality. I only wanted to use my own domain with Google.
Yeah, unfortunately going to @gmail may mean the account name isn't available because it's already in use. Almost all of my family members fall into that category.
> I'm a Google employee who just found out about this. I'm not annoyed that I have to pay, it's been ~13 years of free service and I don't think Google is obligated to continue providing this to me.
Well I'm very annoyed. It's not that I might have to pay for a service, it's the unfairness of it. I've several friends and family members up with accounts on my domain to be nice to them to make life easier for them or because they were too poor/techy to set up something for themselves.
I also have a few hacky things set up using free email accounts on my domain, because why not.
Now Google want to charge me cash for their accounts after I've done some free marketing for them in getting people using the Google ecosystem. They don't seem to be providing me with any help to get them transferred to a free account. It will cost me either a lot of money or time and/or social capital to solve this.
This is an enormous price jump from free. The free Google Apps or whatever it is had up to 100 users. If I had 100 users, that looks like £50 per user per year on their cheapest tier, so £500 [edit: £5,000!! - thanks, @alias_neo] a year.
I don't know what their freeloader costs are on the grandfathered Google domain accounts, but I'm having a hard time believing it's going to be worth the amount of goodwill they're going to burn by shitting on their most loyal users of all. These folks have been using Google services (and presumably suggesting as much to others) for at least 10 years.
But I'm not paying $100/mo so my extended family can continue to have a vanity Google account.
Google ought to think long and hard about this one. The email I draft to everyone to tell them that they're losing access to all their email, docs, pictures, apps, music, etc. is going to be harsh as hell on Google. And I'm sure that I'm not the only one that's going to have to author one of those...
It's basically the drug dealer business model: get people hooked for free, then start charging them a huge amount when it's too difficult for them to stop.
At least your local heroin vendor doesn't pretend it's /always/ going to be free, though...
I've been reading people on HN talk about how Google is burning their goodwill and there will be Very Serious Consequences for a literal decade. Over that time Google stock price has gone up 10x.
Google's stock price is so driven by its advertising business that it is absolutely disconnected from Google burning its goodwill in "prosumer" services like this and some of the others cycled through on HN. Given how large Google's advertising division's reach is outside of Google products, its probable that even a large boycott of Google's first party consumer services wouldn't easily affect the advertising business bottom line. At least for now. At some point they could burn enough goodwill that even advertisers and sites that need advertising won't work with them. (Given what we know from DoubleClick's legacy even before they merged into Google though, the internet in general doesn't seem to mind evil companies running their ads so long as they get paid their share of ad revenue.)
>Over that time Google stock price has gone up 10x.
Based mostly on taking display ads from "only in the sidebar" to "everywhere, including every pixel above the fold if the search term is lucrative". There's not a lot of juice left there to continue revenue increases that exceed general internet eyeball growth. They will still make an insane amount of money, but I don't see how they can sustain past growth YoY percentages.
No, GCP and Google Workspace are great compared to most options out there. Microsoft Family is a good price and I use it as a backup, but the 1TB of storage is per account and I honestly hate Microsoft at this point way more than Google, have fun with Outlook and everything else.
The thing that was the most annoying was the shift from G Suite to Workplace. Before, I was getting unlimited Google Drive storage for $12 a month, and now it is like $20 or something... still, for $20 a month you get basically unlimited cloud storage. No other provider can compete.
20$/month is quite expensive compared to many cloud offerings. It’s only a bargain if you actually store a lot of data which is so rare they can offer it at 20$/ month with the expectation that most of their customers are getting screwed.
$20/mo. is for their enterprise std version. They have plans starting at $6/mo. and $12/mo. provides 2TB of storage per user which is plenty for most users and a much better deal than O365 IMO.
> GCP and Google Workspace are great compared to most options out there.
GCP is number 3 and struggling, with few wins big enough to compensate for the gaps. Workspaces isn’t bad but it’s not compellingly better than O365. Both are held back by management and sales teams who appear to think it’s 2008 and everyone will do the job of selling for them.
As I see it, GCP has successfully become a peer competitor to AWS and Azure (which I was, to be honest, uncertain they could pull off), while, conversely, Workspace is a truly painful experience compared to almost every alternative -- and I'm including Sharepoint in that. It's horribly disjointed, and they've changed chat and conferencing solutions so many times that it's virtually impossible to figure out how to make their own hardware work with their own services. O365 has its issues, but it hangs together as a single product far more successfully than the farrago Google is pushing.
Until you need to manage it, and then Workspace is far ahead of Microsoft. Hence, why at least Workspace has proper DevOps integrations for things like Terraform. Google's MDM is pretty good too, while maybe not as diverse as Microsoft, far cheaper and Microsoft MDM is a nightmare.
This has been a legacy feature for quite some time. Honestly, if it was just about email I think there would be nothing wrong with it. The main problem is that it's THE Google account for some people, which includes all their purchases and data and there's no way to move it.
Using G-Suite as your personal email has always been hell anyway.
> it's THE Google account for some people, which includes all their purchases and data and there's no way to move it.
In these comments (on HN), I've seen claims that we'll still be able to login to Google with our old accounts, like how it's possible to have a Google account with an @yahoo login.
I've also seen people disputing that, though.
> Using G-Suite as your personal email has always been hell anyway.
I've not had "hell"-level problems. It's all been working pretty well for me.
Any idea if they'll make a "gmail.com" account migration utility down the line? This is extremely concerning for Play store purchases, and anything non-email attached to the "google apps for your domain" account, like YouTube.
Afaict your account will still exist, just not be linked to mail (which I get), but also not linked to calendar (which I don't get). See the email: "You may still retain access to additional Google services, such as YouTube and Google Photos."
I will wait for an official answer from a Google rep. There is too much at stake to guesstimate on vague phrasing.
And still, losing google docs document sharing, and calendar, on the e-mail address identifier which will stay my valid and primary one is a hostile move, plain and simple.
When you cancel workspace, the accounts remain active but lose access to just the workspace features (gmail, drive, docs, calendar etc). The accounts will remain the same for things like google play, youtube etc and you won't lose access to any purchases.
The biggest impact I can see, other than the headache of migration, is that former GFYD email address can NEVER be used for docs, drive etc, even on the same terms as a free personal account.
I will wait for an official answer from a Google rep. There is too much at stake to guesstimate on vague phrasing.
And still, losing google docs document sharing, and calendar, on the e-mail address identifier which will stay my valid and primary one is a hostile move, plain and simple.
"
Impact to services after you cancel Google Workspace
You lose access to core Google Workspace services, such as Gmail, Calendar, Meet, and more.
You still have access to Additional Google services, such as YouTube, Google Photos, and Google Ads.
"
That's info related to cancelling from "Google Workspace". I'm on "G Suite legacy" so i'm not sure that applies to me. Maybe I have to upgrade, but not pay, then cancel. It's a bit of a gamble. What if I do that - or do nothing except wait - and find my account is eventually suspended? I have a bunch of accounts I use for photo backups, plus maybe 5 humans using accounts for Android login, and email. Suppose I own mydomain.com. Can everyone continue to log into android using user1@mydomain.com, user2@mydomain.com? Gmail stops working - what does that mean? Assuming the users can continue to use their accounts for Android (youtube, photos, apps etc) can't they configure gmail to send/receive email via some other service?
Thanks. This is Google, where nothing's ever finished, so when I logged in and tried to find out the answer to questions like this I saw:
"Support availability is rolling out to our G Suite legacy free edition customers over the coming days. If you do not currently have access to Support, please check back in a few days. We apologize for any inconvenience, but look forward to connecting with you shortly."
I look forward to some support for the service I've used for 15 years and what to tell the 5 family members who use "G Suite" (aka Google Apps) to handle email from my domain.
Do you know if there's a list of which services will/won't be avaiable after this process? Seems a bit random. Google ads but not gmail..but you can use gmail to point at another email service presumably? Can I still use the google apps I paid for? Does my user1@mydomain.com sort of work like it would if I'd use a hotmain account as my android account? But...if I did that, wouldn't I have access to gmail still? I sort of assumed you would but perhaps not.
One thing about G Suite accounts is Google never got around to making them act just like normal accounts; I cannot review android apps with my account, nor can I share paid-for apps with family members. Will this functionality magically appear after I cancel?
But then what happens when that new account wants to use Google Docs? From what I've been reading it sounds like they would be blocked from doing that forever.
Yes, I had this confirmed by support.
This is the most frustrating (and ridiculous) aspect. People will no longer be able to share things with your main email address.
You can sign up for a google account with any email address, so if you'd never used GFYD you'd be able to do this no problem.
Over the last week I've gone through all of the steps of registering a new domain, setting it up with Google Workspace, sharing some docs back and forth, deleting the entire organization, and then signing up for a new google account using the same email address (so no gmail). After each step I waited 24 hours.
I was able to access Docs and share back and forth using this reused address on the new account. You'll obviously lose all of the existing share connections, but it's not like the address itself is burned.
They're telling some people the exact opposite - that they'll lose all their photos. Google need to forget all this "core", "additional" crap and just list what people will and won't lose access to once they cancel Workspace.
> (Optional) Step 3: Delete your organization’s Google Account
> If you no longer want a Google Account for your organization, delete the entire account. Deleting your organization’s account frees your domain within 24 hours for use with a new Google Account.
Not totally sure the implications of that, it kind of sounds like you can create a clean slate where you can re-use that email address as normal? But not sure, it's confusing and I wouldn't count on it.
Which I'm not surprised about not being sure what will happen -- honestly for the last ten years, the implications and consequences of this legacy free "g suite"/"g aps"/whatever it is account have been continually super confusing and un-documented, and often seemed accidental on google's end.
> The biggest impact I can see, other than the headache of migration, is that former GFYD email address can NEVER be used for docs, drive etc, even on the same terms as a free personal account.
If the legacy product is the same as the paid product, you may want to rename your accounts/switch domains before you close the workspace. Then there wouldn't be a naming conflict.
> The biggest impact I can see, other than the headache of migration, is that former GFYD email address can NEVER be used for docs, drive etc, even on the same terms as a free personal account.
Uh oh. So, let's say I take my custom domain email address and set it up on a non-Google provider. (The whole reason I have a custom domain is to avoid locking me to a vendor).
I can't then set up an ordinary personal google account using this email, it'll be reserved forever?
> Obviously our use case isn't that common (it's been "legacy" for years) but still annoying to know that there's probably some script I could run to do this, but nobody has built the web UI for it.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity for a 20% time project. Surely you aren't the only Googler in this situation?
You're forgetting the circle of ageing techies that used to use AltaVista and now (in)directly control large budgets, have long memories and significant clout when it comes to guiding our replacements into making the right decisions and educating them about corporate (mis)trust.
Uh, why do they matter in the context of a potential side project to let people migrate their Mails from the discontinued free legacy project to a free private account?
I'm in that circle. I've cost Google millions of dollars in business due to a history of similar dick moves on their part. This adds just one more to the list. The organization I work at will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever consider using Google for anything business-critical, and neither will businesses I advise in various roles.
I have at least a dozen relatives on my Google family domain. We're looking at a lifetime cost of tens of thousands of dollars if I were to switch to Workspace, which is a non-starter.
One possibility is to finally incorporate my family foundation as a 501(c)3, if we can do that in time. It's been on my to do list.
I'm not even sure where to go from here, but I have things like Android apps I've bought on this account, as does my family. Or I guess the word is "rented." I have a bunch of logins with Google OAuth. Or I guess past tense.
I feel like there's a class action in here somewhere.
It was free for 10 accounts. The number one massively applicable use case vs plain google accounts was vanity domain names and signing up was no harder than creating a regular gmail account. There are probably more vanity domain users than small businesses with 10 people. In fact I would venture to guess with the 10 address limit they are nearly 100% of the remaining users on the legacy program.
The cost of the domain name is $10 per domain per year or $1 per person per year little enough for one person to pay without thinking.
Most people keep an email address for a very very long time rarely switching unless a service ceases to exist.
Almost no domain owners are going to pony up $720 per year themselves and collection from other users will be an untenable hassle.
Basically every bullet point you listed is wrong. The remaining pool of users is likely 99% vanity users who would have used Gmail+custom domain forever at no real cost to Google over free Gmail none of which will migrate to Google workspace.
For Google the gain from this change will be identical to picking n random Gmail accounts and canceling them and keeping those users digital purchases as a giant fu.
Not ruinous but hardly profitable either.
Someone with an ounce of sense would have included the option to migrate all email accounts to regular Gmail accounts.
It was free for unlimited accounts (I still have a G Suite Legacy account that was grandfathered into that) at first.
Eventually unlimited free accounts was dropped to 50, in 2009 (my grandfathered account was soft-capped at that, with the option to reach out to support to increase it), but I had several other domains that were hard-capped at 50 since I opened them after that limit was instituted. [1]
Then that limit was dropped from 50 to 10 (hard capped, grand-fathered accounts kept their old limits) in 2011. [2]
Then last but not least there was the 1 user free if you had a Google AppEngine project (that came with the requirement that it was tied to a G-Suite at the time).
My G Suite legacy accounts were all created in 2007-2010 timeframe.
No email here. Mine is from the very early days, pretty much as soon as it became available as Google Apps for Domains. I have a 200 user cap because I requested more than whatever the default was. I have a total of 3 active accounts, everything else is just a forwarder.
I use it as a forwarder to my gmail, but now I have to migrate my parents off their accounts. It will either end up as Gmail or Outlook.com for them. Migrating their email will be annoying.
I maintain a full GSuite Business account for other purposes, so I can use that as my mail relay service.
Thanks to routing rules, they'll continue to receive emails transparently, it will redirect a copy to their new email, as if they were a BCC.
I'll handle the groups the same, only a few and the routing rule can add 100 recipients.
Eventually, once cloudflare email forwarding supports groups, I'll just move to that. It's on their internal roadmap, so maybe it will happen before 2024.
"A standard edition of Google Apps for Your Domain is available today as a beta product without cost to domain administrators or end users. Key features include 2 gigabytes of email storage for each user, easy to use customization tools, and help for administrators via email or an online help center. Furthermore, organizations that sign up during the beta period will not ever have to pay for users accepted during that period (provided Google continues to offer the service)."
The original version of the TOS from August 2006 read as follows:
"16. Modification. Except as provided in Section 17, Google reserves the right to change or modify any of the terms and conditions contained in this Agreement or any policy governing Google Apps, at any time, by posting the new agreement at http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/terms.html or such URL as Google may provide. Customer is responsible for regularly reviewing any updates to this Agreement. Any changes or modifications to this Agreement will become binding (i) when made in a writing executed by both parties, (ii) by Customer's online acceptance of updated terms, or (iii) after Customer's continued use of Google Apps after such terms have been updated by Google."
"17. No Fees. Provided that Google continues to offer Google Apps for Your Domain to Customer, Google will continue to provide a version of Google Apps for Your Domain (with substantially the same services as those provided as of the Effective Date) free of charge to Customer; provided that such commitment (i) applies only to End User Accounts created during the period when the Google Hosted Services are considered a beta service (the "Beta Period") by Google (such Beta Period determination at Google's sole discretion) and (ii) may not apply to new opt-in services added by Google to the Google Apps for Your Domain in the future. For sake of clarity, Google reserves the right to offer a premium version of Google Apps for Your Domain for a fee."
In mid 2007 the language was changed to read the following:
"17. Modification. Except as provided in Section 18, Google reserves the right to change or modify any of the terms and conditions contained in this Agreement or any policy governing the Service, at any time, by posting the new agreement at http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/terms.html or such URL as Google may provide. Customer is responsible for regularly reviewing any updates to this Agreement. Any changes or modifications to this Agreement will become binding (i) when made in a writing executed by both parties, (ii) by Customer's online acceptance of updated terms, or (iii) after Customer's continued use ...
I have received The Email for domains set up with Google Apps on 2007-09-08 and 2007-10-08 (got the emails on Jan. 20 and 27 respectively), but not for domains set up on 2007-07-03 or 2012-01-24. I think they're still getting around to it.
I have not received an email, but logging in to the account there's a notice now that tells me about the impending changes.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's finally time to migrate away, I've been putting it off, but so far the accounts I created seem to have mostly become dormant, so only one user has to change, and I'll just re-create them an IMAP account for their mail, they don't use any other services.
> Basically every bullet point you listed is wrong. The remaining pool of users is likely 99% vanity users who would have used Gmail+custom domain forever at no real cost to Google over free Gmail none of which will migrate to Google workspace.
Why do any of your issues in any way contribute to the decision wherever someone should invest their time to create a migration tool so users can switch from the old legacy product to a free account which doesn't have any of the domain features to begin with?
I get that you're unhappy that Google discontinues their free service for you, but that wasn't what the discussion was about.
My point was that you listed 3 factors and asserted that the overlap in a venn diagram would have little overlap. In fact the venn diagram ought to look more like a circle.
All users who signed up for google apps at your domain are in A people who initially signed up. People in B are those who haven't switched away. C are those who are unwilling to pay $72 per user per year.
A->B Very few users change email addresses very frequently because we accumulate 100 or even hundreds of pages with signups under a single address, phones set up under our google account, oauth sign ins, apps and games purchased under our google account. Google accounts are much more sticky than regular email accounts and people rarely abandon those. I would venture to guess the list of active accounts in B is most of A.
B->C Very few people who signed up for $10 a year for 10-50 addresses are going to be onboard with paying between $720 and $3600 a year. C includes 99.9% of B.
I do, and I'd encourage you to try to ship a user-facing feature that transfers control of user data between different authentication users at a big tech company if you're skeptical.
Someone else in the thread mentioned that Education users can migrate their accounts out of the organization to free gmail amounts. Surely some or all of that workflow applies to these legacy free accounts too.
That was me, I'm sure some of it would apply but you still have to build a web app, test it, test the transfer stuff, implement anything that wasn't already implemented for EDU, etc...
Pardon I meant that question literally not sarcastically. As in is this an actual estimate based on understanding the nature of the problem or an estimate from the outside.
Right. I think what's lost in translation is because it was free, a lot of early adopters used it in ways that are impractical to transition to paid—extended families, hobby projects, etc, and have been using them for a very long time.
I could almost be sympathetic to them not wanting to build a migration tool.
But the least they could have done is set up a way to permanently forward to another gmail account so at least old email addresses do not break. They did not do that.
Ooh, and one more super fun fact: there is no way to transfer ownership of a Google Drive folder to an account outside of your domain. Which is awesome when you're the owner of a large shared folder that needs to persist.
They are creating a LOT of issues for people if they don't provide a tool to migrate the account to a non G-suite account. I'll be moving email elsewhere, but losing that account and all the services it's connected to will result in a lot of annoyances for me over the years as I discover to what services I've authenticated in this manner.
Not to mention Android devices and software purchases tied to the account, what happens to those unless Google provides a migration tool?
Oh man, I didn't even think about Single Sign On. Changing your email on every service you've ever interacted with is a huge project, but if you used SSO, a lot of those can't be changed to conventional emails, and even if you can pick up your domain and hop to Fastmail or something those are going to break.
I was already livid about this change but this is the piece de resistance. Holy hell. Even after migrating to a regular Google account I've still been using my custom domain as my identity.
Look, I'd gladly pay something but 60 dollars per month, every month? I'd be happy to pay 120 dollars a year for the service I'm getting now. Like one of the parallel commenters, I have given out accounts on my domain.
I dont really need any more service than I have now, I don't need the full google workspace, I just want gmail on my custom domain, thats all really.
The most annoying parts of this, google, the company that hosts my email, couldn't even be bothered to send me an email about this, I instead found out about it on the front page of HN.
So now I need to figure out how to migrate out, because if I move my email, I have to move my entire google account, my email, domain hosting/registration, youtube account, everything, I have no way to port the data over even to a regular account.
Exactly the same boat here. No email notifying me of the change either.
Plus, what about all the third party web sites that offer nice buttons that say "Sign in with Google"?
If you used your legacy Gapps domain to authenticate, do you think they all provide easy implementations to migrate your Google-one-click-authentication account to a same-email-new-local-password account? Hell no.
I haven't looked at it but I would hope that "Sign in with Google" provides the service using it with a stable ID other than the email address. But I can also see services ignoring that and just using the email address anyway...
If such a service only saved the email address when the user account was created it might be very difficult for them to fix this unless the do it really quickly and I happen to sign in to their service before all of this goes down.
It's honestly just a chore, many things don't work using G-Suite accounts, like taking part of a Google Home family with Gmail users, or signing in to Android Automotive (yes, I had to make a new account to be able to sign in to my Polestar 2 because my account is a G-Suite account), I would be HAPPY if they "downgraded" me to Gmail with custom domains and charged me a few bucks a month for it.
This is exactly how I feel. I'm not against paying for hosted email, but that's not what they're trying to charge us for. They're trying to charge for hosted email + a million other 'Workspace' features we don't want or need.
If Google introduced a "Legacy GSuite Mail' plan at say $20/yr to retain all existing mail functionality and accounts, and disabled every other Workspace feature, I'd gladly pay for that.
I'm a G Suite legacy user that is affected by this change, primarily using it for personal email.
Extremely, extremely annoyed that Android app purchases will be lost.
Since I also have Apple devices I'm considering moving over to iCloud+ since they now support 3 email boxes and 5 domain names per account: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212514
Other options I'm researching include Outlook Premium and Zohomail. Will be watching the comment section for other alternatives.
Those of us who were awake for that time noticed that they didn't; Google just moved over to where Microsoft was and still is. The only difference is that Google got worse and Microsoft much better at PR, so many people are now under the misapprehension that Microsoft moved in the opposite direction.
Not since they redid the gmail UI, it's _intolerably_ slow. Granted, the only thing iCloud has going for it is the speed of the interface compared to gmail, the overall interface is rather poor.
fwiw I use Fastmail, it's relatively inexpensive (~$100/3 years). My only real gripe is the app passwords tend to break, but the fastmail client is pretty good.
Fastmail's UI is so nimble compared to the beast that is now Gmail. Normally I get IMAP or whatever set up on my laptop but I get email so infrequently that it's really not a problem to open the web version.
I can't blame Google for this, but this is a pain. I'm likely a low-value customer and being intentionally churned out with this change (that's fine).
Google really needs to figure out their customer support. I've always been hesitant to commit because I've feared I'd not be able to get support if I ran into an issue.
I can. Free forever means exactly that. They shouldn't have made the promise in the first place if they didn't have a plan on how to sustain it. Along with their other behavior these days they are just another lying corporation.
At least give folks a chance to migrate their purchases without forcing them to pay rent to keep what they ostensibly already own.
I've heard that it's possible to strike a balance by self-hosting incoming email and outsourcing outgoing email to Amazon SES. SES provides SMTP credentials which should be fairly straightforward to use. Anyone has experience with this kind of setup?
SES for outgoing works pretty nicely, I don't think I ran into any gotchas.
You can use SES for inbound email receipt as well, but unfortunately there's no POP3/IMAP service (emails just get stored in an S3 bucket). However you can use a Lambda to forward inbound email to a personal email account: https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder
SES -> S3 -> aws-ses-pop3-server -> desktop client with POP3 and SMTP
Using this option, email is only really usable from a single device, but it avoids sharing private emails with yet another cloud, especially a free cloud that would share email with advertisers.
You can probably make that work, just have to be careful deleting from S3, make sure to only delete those emails you imported and not accidentally delete an email that arrived during the import process.
My personal setup makes heavy use of rclone so I used that instead of awscli:
Have been a G Suite legacy free user for over 10 years now, given my usage it costs them basically nothing, especially with the revenue they've made from my usage, purchasing via adverts etc.
Fairly recently Google suddenly remembered ~$15 in adwords spend from just over 7 years ago, for a now defunct business I worked at where I had (presumably by accident) used my personal adwords account as a quick test.
The problem is this was the first I'd heard about it, and in the UK it exceeds the statutory limitation period for debt recovery. I stated very clearly that what they were attempting to do is illegal in my jurisdiction and I'm more than happy to take them to the small claims court to recover costs and damages related to dealing with alleged non-payment and any subsequent account closure etc.
While the fee eventually got waived, it was impossible to talk to anybody on the phone (as I had been advised) and I kept going in loops until finally being able to 'chat' to somebody who was more useful than a chocolate teapot. It seemed they wanted me to input some billing details so they could auto-upgrade me when the time comes.
I won't be paying $6/mo, due to a spotty history I've had to rely on paying for domains for years in advance and relying on free services because the absolute last thing I want is one of my most important daily tools (e.g. account recovery, 2FA) being turned off because something unexpected happened - the amount of hassle that would cause is immense and could have some very serious knock-on effects that effectively lock me out of many other things.
I know, Google can decide to block and terminate your account across the board, so far they haven't, but it has been on my mind for a while now.
It's time to step-up my de-googling to the next level, and work on better continuity plans.
Now, the service is the product. Only since it's Googs, the user will still be a product too. Googs needs to re-watch the Seinfeld episode on double dipping.
Yes, and Hacker News calling it "killing for existing customers" is ridiculous. No service or access is being "killed" here - they are simply asking to start paying for it like everyone else.
I think the parent company misunderstood the process as being required to move to a new Google account. That's not the case as far as I can tell from the support document. The account remains the same, just have to pay for the service.
"How does the upgrade affect my current G Suite legacy free edition subscription?
Your current G Suite legacy free subscriptions and related services will continue to function as they do today, until you self-upgrade or we upgrade you automatically to one of the new editions."
That "until" is really ambiguous - does that mean services terminate when you self-upgrade?
If you cancel it, your account is converted to an ordinary external domain Google account AFAICT. You need to migrate your email out of Google/Gmail to get service messages over email, but you can continue using your Google account as an ordinary Gmail-like account - only difference being that you handle your email yourself (because you didn't want to pay Google to do it for you.)
Well not to a Gmail account (since you can't change your Google account email address), but your Google account and associated purchases is not deleted: https://support.google.com/a/answer/1257646
Just set up your MX with some other service if you are not happy with Gmail, or start running your own SMTP server.
Yes but for my family of 4 it would cost me 4612= 288$ per year! That's about 50% of my yearly unlimited fiber internet access (that also come with a free email).
For me that's the last nail in the coffin, will make sure in the future to keep away from all Google product (private or professional).
What is strange is how in a few year Google went from the cool company where everybody wanted to work to something that can almost be compared to a tobacco company.
In my case it won't, because, of course, it's all backed up locally. This Google outfit can be pretty sketchy at times - needed to make sure they didn't close down and take my stuff.
Maybe it's just a relic of me holding out for the Google Plus migration so long but my youtube account is a "brand account" which is definitely a thing I can transfer to another google account (indeed there were a few youtubers who got famously scammed last summer into doing this). Maybe yours is set up similarly?
Android apps will be a pain. I have apps that are no longer sold, or am grandfathered on a premium 1 time purchase for stuff that is now subscription based, etc.
> Maybe it's just a relic of me holding out for the Google Plus migration so long but my youtube account is a "brand account" which is definitely a thing I can transfer to another google account (indeed there were a few youtubers who got famously scammed last summer into doing this). Maybe yours is set up similarly?
Could be. I'd have to figure this out, thanks for the heads up.
Looks like that may not be possible for people in my situation. From the youtube docs:
> You can move your channel and its videos over from one account to another. Note that if your account is a supervised account or a work or school account, you cannot move your channel.
So it depends if g suite is considered a "work or school" account or not.
It will definitely hurt us financially as we have around 10 domains with 20 email ids. We can't delete them due to older emails but can't complain as Google did allowed free account for 10 years.
I hope there is a service Migration of emails from Gmail to other platforms.
Google is really on a killing spree lately. Can any insiders give us insight into whether the people at the top of Google are aware that they have a strong reputation in the community for killing things off?
also not an insider, but it's obvious that Google is running out of runway and needs to start making money on its products lest it should shutter its doors. /s
Do you really think they care about that reputation? It's simply binary: Product makes money, product does not make money. Did you think Google was giving away free stuff for "the community"?
I'm not necessarily just talking about this particular instance, just in general that's definitely been the overall theme of the discussion when things like this happen. We're a paying G-suite customer so we're not affected, but we HAVE been affected by features that users adopt as part of their workflow and productivity that Google decides to axe on a whim.
It makes us as an IT organization look stupid when our users come asking us where the feature they rely on went. I just want to know if leadership at Google has any inkling that this is their reputation or not.
Loss leaders are a thing. I've had a free GSuite account on my personal domain which effectively acted as free job training and contributed to choosing them as an email provider for two companies I've worked for and clearly contributed to vastly more revenue than it would cost to host my personal GSuite account for my next 10 lifetimes. Over the last decade I've slowly but surely stopped recommending Google for anything they offer. It's been a slow attrition but I've wound up at zero.
They've very effectively taken a good chunk of their best evangelists and turned them into detractors. I have no idea if they've done the math and decided that was worth it, but I sure hope they have and it's not just total incompetence from one of the biggest players in the industry.
Exactly. As an early adopter, I brought who knows how many souls to gmail. I set up a couple small companies on Google Apps, or whatever they want to call it this year. (Mine is called GAFYD...)
When Google gave me a free HTC Magic handset in San Francisco, I showed it to everyone. I performed tricks with it. I made people want one.
To this day, three members of my immediate family use newer models of my old Pixel phone.
I told a man with a lot of CPU heavy jobs that GCE exists.
I'm talking about "influence" a lot.. but let's be clear, that's not all.
Google knows me--or at least it had the opportunity to. Somewhere between all those referrals and the emails in my mbox files at gmail and GAFYD which pre-date the launch of those services by a decade or my bug reports, or working in one of their datacenters for a while, they should know that I helped them be what they are today.
Maybe they do. Maybe this kind of treatment is what I deserve.
(to reiterate what others have posted, it isn't about the money. It's about the major unplanned migration. Which they still have not notified me about.)
Haha! Just yesterday, that is exactly what Google was promoting as their first defense against antitrust regulation. That “these free services provide thousands of dollars a year in value to the average American”.
So if they’re going to kill the free stuff, then they have no ground to stand on.
I'm happy I've been able to use this (for free) for such a long time - genuinely great. But I do hope the 'seamless' transition will sort the things that just fell by the wayside, like the ability to review Play store apps etc.
Seconding Fastmail. I pay about £45/yr for it and I am very satisfied with all the features it provides. What I most value however is the no-bullshit attitude from the Fastmail team. No random killing of features, no ads, no sudden UI changes.
It might feel simple and old, but I like it simple and old.
I use Fastmail for personal e-mail for myself and two family members and where I work uses Microsoft's Office 365. I've never had issues with mails I send from Fastmail landing in spam, even to Google users, and I prefer their webmail UI over Outlook for the web or whatever it's called these days.
I just moved my domain mail to Fastmail, and everything arrives perfectly. I'm annoyed that I was bullied into this by the fact that 'unknown' mail servers are third-class citizens, but at least the problem is solved.
Some paranoid thread in me fears that Google will find a problem with Fastmail's IP range and credentials this spring (among others), in order to consolidate the Gmail upgrade cash avalanche, but I'm hoping that's just me with my tinfoil hat on too tight.
Also looking for recommended paid/simple alternatives. Email only. Been using it for family email on a custom domain and am not looking forward to funding a dozen accounts every month for eternity.
If you’re not using the productivity suite (docs, drive, sheets and whatnot) why not go with the little guy and use Fastmail? $5/user with 30gb or 100gb per user for $9/month
I think they have always replied to me (as a paying customer). Now, whether their reply has any relevance to the question I asked, let alone solves my problem, is another issue entirely. I have at times wondered if they just have a random reply generator that doesn't look at anything except the subject line of the request.
Yeah I'm happy with fastmail and it just makes it less confusing when I'm doing stuff online. Instead of having 2 google accounts, one legacy and one custom domain. My custom domain is a completely different site unattached to the entire google ecosystem.
I already deal with this enough at work. I don't like having to switch between g accounts all the time.
1) You can stop feeding personal data into the Google (advertisement) ecosystem
2) Google is notorious for killing off services or changing their agreements at a moments notice like here so there is a chance they'll drop their offering or increase prices.
3) Google support is either terrible or nonexistent (unless you're lucky enough to get your complaint to the HN frontpage).
I'm an affected user and I plan to put in the effort to migrate -- I only use it for email on a custom domain and have been doing regular backups (using gmvault) in case Google changed their mind so moving to a new service should be a breeze.
1) valid point, but how can I be sure another email provider won't do just the same, or even worse? At least Google is sitting on it's data using it to profit for itself. Smaller actors are just wholesaling everything they can reach.
2) I don't agree with "moments notice" sentiment. 3 months are quite enough for most users (and they can buy more time for a relatively small price). The free lunch was off the menu for more than nine years, I am actually surprised they gave us so much time.
3) There are replies around this post that for paying users Google support is significantly better. Good opportunity to check if it is really so.
Because the other service only does email as a service, so if they do the same their business folds, and the other service is likely to have far better support (which tends to 0 at google)
It is far more likely Google will decide to change the terms unilaterally on their customers or discontinue a service altogether - their business is advertising, not email.
For 20 years people have complained of 1,2,3 for free accounts, and said that they'd prefer to pay to avoid these issues. Now that there's an option....
Our philosophy
Google Workspace customers own their customer data, not Google. Customer data that Google Workspace organizations put into our systems is theirs, and we do not scan it for advertisements. We offer our customers a detailed Data Processing Amendment that describes our commitment to protecting customer data. Furthermore, if customers delete their data, we commit to deleting it from our systems within 180 days.
No advertising in Google Workspace
There is no advertising in the Google Workspace Core Services, and we have no plans to change this in the future. Google does not collect, scan or use data in Google Workspace Core Services for advertising purposes. Customer administrators can restrict access to Non-Core Services from the Google Workspace Admin console. Google indexes customer data to provide beneficial services, such as spam filtering, virus detection, spellcheck and the ability to search for emails and files within an individual account.
Limited data use
Google does not use any of your data for any purpose except to provide you with the relevant Google Workspace service. For example, when customers use the Cloud Translation API, Google will not make the content of the text that you send available to the public, or share it with anyone else, except as necessary to provide the Cloud Translation API service.
Fastmail discounts for longer terms. I'm on the 30GB plan because of a custom domain and it was $90 for 2 years in Nov 2021, or $3.75/mo. Now I see it's $95 for 2 years so they've had a recent price increase apparently.
Fastmail does give you access to your 30GB via FTP or WebDAV. It also has a web-based file uploading tool. Then you can create links to share files or folders with others, like a picture album. I did this a little just to try it out, and it was very straightforward. Whereas I could never figure out how to do it with iCloud and gave up.
Recently Cloudflare also started enabling email forwarding. I believe it's still in Beta, and with the sites I've got in Cloudflare I got approved 2 weeks-ish after applying.
This looks a lot like a direct clone of https://forwardemail.net/, except that ImprovMX isn't open source. I wonder which came first?
I like simplelogin.io (also open source, so can be selfhosted) because the aliases can be used to send and receive, though you do have to set the domain up on their platform first.
I can answer that easily (I'm the founder of ImprovMX).
Forwardemail was created well after us (ImprovMX goes back to 2013).
We are not Opensource, but that doesn't mean we track user's email (we don't, we wrote about it: https://improvmx.com/are-you-reading-my-emails/). On the contrary, screaming to anyone that one uses Opensource doesn't mean they respect user's privacy (like Forwardemail does): take their way of forwarding for instance: you need to add your email in the DNS settings, publicly available... they have a odd definition of privacy.
And don't get me started on their homepage full of misleading messages ... ;)
Sure, but let’s also be realistic that any service large / secure enough to trust your email to will also be large enough to have drawn the attention of entities that can force them to do things against their will.
Amazon WorkMail, part of the AWS suite of tools, $4/month/user last I looked. If you host your domain on route53 setup is painless. It's an exchange server compatible service and provides some MDM functionality.
Aruba. Biggest hosting provider in italy has a very competitive mail service. Domain + 5 mailbox x 1gb each at 9 euro/year. At 20 Euro year you can create unlimited mailboxes x 1gb each. https://hosting.aruba.it/en/email.aspx
Why not? It's an IMAP service, you could use it with the client you prefer. Obvius GMAIL far way better for mail classification (promotional, transactional, spam). But I doubt any other service can do better than GMAIL with features.
gmail webmail client and spam/classification filters are already something above by far any other competitor. This is the added value I would like to see in a mailbox, not just another IMAP service.
We're switching over to Zoho for our latest startup. If you have more than one Google account the switching between personal and business is a nightmare. Some features are unavailable for one or the other, and it keeps switching between the two accounts seemingly randomly. It constantly asks for a password when you want to switch back. It's more headache than it is worth to be signed in to Google.
The only issue I have with Zoho is that their calendar solution falls well behind Google's. Between the scheduling, the Android widget, and notifications, it just really doesn't feel to have the same clarity as Google's.
Could just be my experience, but I'm considering moving back to Google for my personal email just for that.
G Suite Business Starter is $6/user. Even if you find something viable for, say, $3/user (and I really doubt so), it just not worth the fuss with migration.
I haven't gone through the process yet, but it additionally looks like I will need to borrow a Mac or Windows machine to start up iCloud Email. Once it is enabled I should be able to use IMAP or their web client.
From what I've read, on Android you just go to Settings / Passwords & accounts / Add account / Personal (IMAP) and you can use ICloud email through IMAP.
That said, if you don't have anyone in your family with an Apple product, this iCloud+ thing may not be right for you.
Highly recommended against m365 unless you are a big company with a separate IT department.
I setup a trial with plan to use it long term but I got locked out of my own admin account with no way in (I use a password manager, yes) and the support page that was supposed to work kept crashing my browser.
Their Twitter account redirected me to that support page after explaining the situation to them.
The quality of the service itself is horrible for an individual to manage compared to gsuite or any other service I have touched.
I've had exploring mxroute as a low-priority todo item for a while, I like that pricing is roughly per gigabyte, not per domain or per user. Do you use it? Does it deliver to gmail and others ok, or does it go to spam?
It's pretty basic in terms of webmail/core functionality but it receives and delivers mail well from the various IMAP clients I use, which is all I need.
IIRC migadu.com is $9/month, but that includes essentially unlimited domains and mailboxes (but only mail, nothing else, which seems to fit your use case).
Which means, if you like to set up new domains for specific projects, there's no extra cost (other than registering the domain of course).
Have never had a spam problem, but they stress that they don't consider themselves mission critical.
I went with fastmail for my personal email, after a small-ish provider I had used (and liked very much!) between 2001 and 2018 was unable for a few month, in 2018, to avoid getting my mails sorted by gmail into spam -- no delivery problems since mail. Alas, despite wishing to support the smaller players, silent non-delivery of emails is a huge problem.
>but they stress that they don't consider themselves mission critical
I'm new to shopping for email hosting and using your own domain. I know sending emails and not get flagged as spam is a hard, but is there any risks when it comes to receiving emails?
Historically, they've not been able to migrate purchases from g suite to Gmail - I've been asking on roughly an annual basis for the last 5 years. I really hope they are going to change that, although I don't buy much anymore thanks to a phone with very little app storage space.
YouTube channels can be converted to a "brand account" then you can link it to a different email address.
Play store purchases are probably lost (I'm in the same boat). I have no intention of repurchasing my Android apps so I guess its an easy permanent switch to iOS at this point.
This is really pissing me off because of this. I've dealt with annoying limitations on my Google Account that I created back when it was just "Google Apps for Domains" to have a custom email domain for myself and my family. The service has been plagued with limitations as Google has added new services, but I've dealt with it as a nuisance - now my account is being held hostage?
Google can get bent. They advertised Google Apps as a solution for families way back when it was announced, and they're seemingly content to burn any good will it bought them.
Since you can have a Google account with a non-Gmail address [1] they should at least provide a way to switch to a non-Workspace account. I have a ton of app purchases tied to my account that are going to get stolen if I don't pay the extortion money.
Well I think this is probably the push to move my email to fastmail, though for €5/month if they've got rid of the 5 user minimum I might pay for the archive/drive space/laziness.
I don't remember the details, but fastmail was recently the recipient of some HN ire recently. Might be worth your time to search to see if it changes your opinion of fastmail. Lots of users chimed in with alts in the thread there.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 562 ms ] threadIf so, I guess it's time to setup my own mailserver. I've been meaning to do it for a long while now anyway, as I'm not comfortable with the thought that Google is data-harvesting all my and my family's emails. But with mailservers being notoriously difficult to setup and configure securely, I keep putting it off.
Time to get reading a few tutorials, methinks. Can anyone recommend a good lightweight email server [I have less than a dozen email accounts on my domain] and a useful tutorial on setting it all up securely?
Incidentally, I run email accounts on some of my other domains, using Yandex Mail for Domains [0] which [at least last time I checked] was still free. Im slightly dubious about using it for my main domain though as I've found delivery to be less than 100% reliable. In the past, I've had one or two emails disappear completely. Yandex's own mail logs showed them being received, but they never showed up in my inbox or any of my other folders.
I suspect Yandex have a slightly over-eager server level spam filter, which ate them before they ever reached my inbox. But Yandex's support are generally useless and were unable to tell me what had become of the emails in question, even when I presented them with their own mail log.
[0] https://yandex.com/support/connect/add-domain.html
If you want a secure mail service that won’t read your email, try ProtonMail.
I'd honestly rather roll the dice on emails than contribute to the monopolization.
It looks like it's not free anymore. I used to see a free plan, now there are only paid ones.
Plan details
Payment plan -- Free plan
Licences -- 88 available, 12 assigned
Estimated monthly bill --Free edition (no charges)
So, either that article was a spoof, or Google are rolling this out gradually.
Finally, actual motivation to get off google. Probably will go to Outlook premium for my own domain’s email.
I'm pretty wary of any "automatic import from $previous_service" tools (having been bitten in the past)
so I ran the fastmail importer against my user's accounts, then later reconciled this against the gmail/fastmail APIs with my own code
... it was completely byte-for-byte perfect (other than "muted" conversations, which weren't imported at all, that I dealt with separately)
I was very impressed indeed
The article links to an official Google support FAQ regarding Legacy G Suite accounts shutting down on July 1, 2022. [1] 1. https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217#faq
Microsoft discontinued that and increased the price under O365.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-a-personalize...
> To continue using a personalized email address and custom domains with Outlook.com, you will need to subscribe to Microsoft 365. Learn more about Premium features in Outlook.com for Microsoft 365 subscribers.
From: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/premium-features-...
Which causes a price increase.
iCloud+ may also be an option.
1. https://www.migadu.com
"No bulk messaging You cannot use Migadu to send mails fast. These attempts are monitored and will be quickly sanctioned.
We do not approve of or accept bulk mailing, even if it is not spam. Please use dedicated services for that."
I wonder if CC'ing or BCC'ing a list of 100 or 1,000 people every 3-6 months is included in this - if so that's probably the biggest turnoff so far.
I will say, they broke imap/pop without an announcement. They just silently changed the pop endpoint. I had to reach out to support to get the new endpoint. That's totally unacceptable without advanced notice.
They also doubled the price and added worse storage limits in 2020 citing the pandemic and increased expenses. So it's something to be weary of.
However, the price quality of the product are good, so I'm happy I migrated away from Google.
And now they're going to start charging me $70 per family member or delete all of their purchases for the last decade or so.
To say I'm aghast is putting it mildly.
$6 * 12 = $72
The only difference over the free Google Workspaces is the domain name.
Eg, Google One provides 100GB of storage (shareable with your family Google accounts) for £16/year. Just let those who want that to link it to custom domains — Apple (iCloud+) and MS (MS 365) already offer this.
This is what I'd imagine most of the people on Legacy Google Workspaces want.
Google are going to lose even more goodwill without a migration path.
As you can imagine, my username @gmail.com gets too much spam to be usable.
My interpretation is that you'll still be able to use your account on Youtube, Play Store, etc. You'll just lose the workspace specific features like Drive, so use the tools that let you dump that data.
From https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217
This could be a reasonably low friction way to keep the system working without breaking the "email address is unchangeable per-account" assumption - the underlying Google account can continue to exist, even if the associated MX record disappears, or Google Workspace ceases to provide service.
This is how Google accounts work today if you ignore the "default" sign-up path, and take the route where you create a Google account under an existing external email address.
That "May" still worries me, but hopefully it will still work fine.
Fortunately I already went through the hassle of extracting my photos a while back. It was something like 45 downloads of 2GB zip files, with really chaotic organization of photos.
But I tried to do Google Takeout of just a few things, including Email (which is under 2GB usage) but not including photos. Somehow it still created 63 files, each 2GB in size. I just threw up my hands and gave up. I got my email using IMAP + Thunderbird, and I exported my contacts. The rest is going in the bin.
I need to find a nice alternative for email with my domain that's going to work for us and not cost me a fortune.
I'm not even massively concerned about Play Store purchases, I barely use any paid apps anymore anyway I can buy them again if I have to.
Since the domain was also bought through GSuite, how do I get that out?
* - while the current Terms of Service last
But, after auditing a number of their enterprise products, dealing with their security team and seeing the quality of the code they produce I have to say they are a very significant security risk.
I'd trust them not to pull the rug any further even less than Google.
When you cancel workspace, the accounts remain active but lose access to just the workspace features (gmail, drive, docs, calendar etc). The accounts will remain the same for things like google play, youtube etc and you won't lose access to any purchases.
The biggest impact I can see, other than the headache of migration, is that former GFYD email address can NEVER be used for docs, drive etc, even on the same terms as a free personal account.
G-Suite Legacy gets converted to Workspace.
Once you stop paying for Workspace, you lose functionality (GMail, Drive etc.).
Nothing stops you from *still* using that account for purchases and moving your e-mail somewhere else.
You don't have to lose access to anything except the core products - gmail, drive, docs, calendar. You still get to log on with your Google Account to access your purchases.
https://support.google.com/cloudidentity/answer/7319251?hl=e...
For a new domain I had to signup to Cloud Identity Premium then cancel. For an existing domain on Google Apps, just remove Workspace and add Cloud Identity Free.
I understand you just lose all your Google Play purchases and need to re-purchase any apps or subscriptions you want to keep. I'm assuming this will basically require an Android phone factory reset and to be setup fresh with a "new" Google account for the old email address? Is this the case?
I also understand the need to do a Google Takeout and download everything. Already got bit by this once though when I recently did a Takeout to backup all my Google Photos content: a week or so later, after I had already permanently deleted the originals, I received an email from Google saying "sorry there was a bug in Takeout and some of your large videos were omitted from your exported data". I guess you need to comb through and verify everything actually made it to the Takeout to be safe.
When you migrate an email address off of Google Apps for Your Domain to another email host or self-host, what happens to the Google Account for that email address? Is it possible to shut down the Google Apps for Your Domain service for the domain in question and then establish a new fresh Google account for the same email address (not a gmail address) that was formerly part of the Google Apps for Your Domain service?
I have been plagued by account problems for years, though, having signed up for services like YouTube with a personal email prior to creating the same email address in Google Workspace. I recommend avoiding it, and just using a free Gmail account for basic usage of Google docs and YouTube and your phone.
I understand it's a given to lose the purchases. I'm semi-dreading the prospect of being presented with an error message preventing the creation of a new Google Account for an email address previously under Google Workspace. This may be irrational...but it seems like a case where Murphy's Law would rear its ugly head, and typical of the "gotchas" that these legacy accounts have had to deal with when interacting with certain Google products.
And I guess the worst-case downside is that I might need to create a new Google Account with a different email address from my primary email address just for the phone and Google apps, which is awkward but isn't the end of the world.
You might miss out on some things like Calendar/Gmail, but a free Google account using an external email should preserve things like purchases. Failing to do that would seem likely to push them down the path of lawsuits and PR fiascos, and also embolden what's likely a disproportionately tech-savvy (and influential in making purchasing decisions) audience fitting the demographic that set up a domain for email 10+ years ago.
though I advise leaving it for a week or so after deleting it as it was pretty glitchy to begin with
You understand wrong.
You do not lose access to your purchases. You will still have a Google Account (with your own custom domain), it's just that after the conversion from G-Suite Legacy to Workspace, if you stop paying it it will not allow you to access the "core" products (Gmail, Drive, Calendar, whatever).
Nothing stops you from moving your e-mail somewhere else but still keeping the Google Account with that domain.
Migration is going to suck only because of stupidly relying on login with Google which won't work after I putge everything google from my life with fire.
I'm presuming this includes paid apps that Google will be stealing when I decline to pay them by the month to keep them.
Lesson learned don't use anything Google.
Yep. Get out. Stop relying on Google for anything important.
The wording sounds like non-"Workspace" services will still be available so i guess you can theoretically still access purchases. Not great, because now I have half of my stuff in different accounts but not too bad.
I think this approach may be viable.
How fragile is your infrastructure if one or two missed payments will wipe everything or even let somebody else take over your intangible identifiers because they're now 'inactive'.
I feel like I would comfortably fit into any sane "free tier" they wanted to offer with some restrictions and low volume limits.
I have been planning to move more and more of my personal email over to my personal domain (currently mostly all running on my @gmail.com address), and eventually would have been happy to pay for the privilege once I started consuming more and more resources.
I'll see how I feel in 6 months if I've bothered to migrate over, but I might as well now look at alternative options.
This is for a service which is basically identically (except in some ways where it is less functional) to their free offering but linked to a custom domain, and a service they told us they were planning for to be free forever.
I wouldn't mind paying something, but this charging per accounts is ridiculous for something that was free.
I would have used the service differently if I thought it was going to transition to a paid-for service.
For example, I have an elderly friend who I hooked up to the Google ecosystem using my domain because I thought it would be slightly easier to troubleshoot any issues he had if he had problems. He wasn't costing Google any more than if he had an @gmail account. (Presumably he brought in the same amount of money, rather: if he was profitable under a free account, then I imagine he was just as valuable on an Apps account).
He doesn't even use email, so the custom domain doesn't really help him. He will be just as happy to use a free @gmail account, but I will have to spend an afternoon some time in the next few months driving out to see him and updating his accounts and devices. And then doing the same the next weekend when I've missed something. And then doing the same for some other users.
The annoying part is that Google doesn't provide any migration tool, but there are migration tools for Google Edu accounts so that graduating students can migrate their data to personal Google accounts. The software is evidently mostly written and tested, but for whatever reason it hasn't been brought over the finish line for other workspace users.
Obviously our use case isn't that common (it's been "legacy" for years) but still annoying to know that there's probably some script I could run to do this, but nobody has built the web UI for it.
I was a proud owner of Nexus phones, Google Fi subscriber, Google Music (YouTube Premium) subscriber, I've purchased apps and tv content on Google Play, and I also started paying for Google Drive storage after they removed the free unlimited photo backups. I had YouTube TV for a time. Having a powerful Gsuite service was a driving factor into the Google ecosystem for me.
I've been slowly pulling out of Google's services as they've been shutdown, renamed, etc. This will be the ultimate drive off of their services for me. By wanting an extra $6/month/user, they are now losing out on a lot more. I'm sure that my situation isn't unique.
Dyn.com (nee DynDNS, in the dialup days) was bought out by Oracle, my nearly 20 year old lifetime VIP account will be terminated in May despite using a few thousand requests per month and in the past highly recommending their extortionately priced but rather excellent global load balancer and enterprise anycast services (to the tune of thousands of dollars per month).
Likewise with Google, I had an original G1 phone and several iterations of the Pixel, have migrated several companies over to their excellent their cloud offerings, again to the tune of tens of thousands per month.
It just feels like I'm getting the shitty end of the stick here. In both cases I could've done it cheaper myself with other providers, and had to strongly argue that the alternative (Dyn, Google Cloud, AWS etc.) is a pragmatic and possibly the best albeit expensive choice in the long-run.
What are you going to do for DNS? I just got static DNS for home so I guess I could host my own DNS but the custom gapps domain mail will be a hassle. Maybe just forward it to my other @gmail account?
Luckily I never trusted this to stay free (for all 10 years I think), so I never used the calendar or drive, just the email.
Next step is buying IP space, that's a lot more expensive with the yearly AS fees, I'm not sure I can afford that, and ARIN/RIPE seem just as bad as the [PS]aaS cartel where if you don't pay up your IP space gets re-sold.
Granted, we don't have chargebacks everyday, but we get some occasionals one that, at these price, would hurt way more.
Now, we still offer an alternative plan that is available only upon request (or on certain occasions). We call it the "Lite plan" at 30$ per year, where you have all the advantages of the premium plan, but without the SMTP sending part. If that interests you, just send a request to the support and we'll enable it for your account :=)
Every couple of years I get a new trial account with them as I liked it so much, and each time I think 'nothing has really changed'. I read their dev blog and it's interesting, and their staff were great each time, but it just seems to take forever for anything to get done.
It may have been finished now, but the last time I tried them (only maybe a year or two ago) I was put off by wanting to move my calendar entries over and finding out that the new(ish) CalDav support they'd added had no web interface to it.
I get that the basics don't really change (and they are good at it); I just get irritated at the lack of pace. Otherwise I'd definitely consider returning to them.
What the 25 aliases allotted in the free tier allows you to do is have 25 different domains.
Happy to answer any questions that you might need!
Our decision was to not use STARTTLS for port 25, but that's maybe not a good idea and we should allow it back: this would make both services happier ;)
In a nutshell: TLS via 465 works correctly, and STARTTLS via 587 too.
Don't hesitate if you want to weight on this, happy to discuss this further!
I would gladly transition to a @gmail.com account and just do an email forward, which is why I had originally signed up, IF ONLY GOOGLE WOULD HAVE A MIGRATION TOOL. They pushed my family into Workspace as they abandoned us, and give us NO OPTION to transfer 13+ years of history.
HUP gets you Microsoft 365 (Office apps, OneDrive, ad-free email with a 50GB quota and one custom domain) for your family, with 30% off list price for people using Microsoft solutions at work — which is most office workers, assuming their employers have opted in.
It’d be nice to see something similar from Google.
Just tested a bit and it looks like only domains with DNS hosted by Godaddy work with this.
The process is a little convoluted: https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ft15pk/use_perso...
Well I'm very annoyed. It's not that I might have to pay for a service, it's the unfairness of it. I've several friends and family members up with accounts on my domain to be nice to them to make life easier for them or because they were too poor/techy to set up something for themselves.
I also have a few hacky things set up using free email accounts on my domain, because why not.
Now Google want to charge me cash for their accounts after I've done some free marketing for them in getting people using the Google ecosystem. They don't seem to be providing me with any help to get them transferred to a free account. It will cost me either a lot of money or time and/or social capital to solve this.
This is an enormous price jump from free. The free Google Apps or whatever it is had up to 100 users. If I had 100 users, that looks like £50 per user per year on their cheapest tier, so £500 [edit: £5,000!! - thanks, @alias_neo] a year.
I have a dozen or so family members on mine, that's ~£600.
I don't know what their freeloader costs are on the grandfathered Google domain accounts, but I'm having a hard time believing it's going to be worth the amount of goodwill they're going to burn by shitting on their most loyal users of all. These folks have been using Google services (and presumably suggesting as much to others) for at least 10 years.
But I'm not paying $100/mo so my extended family can continue to have a vanity Google account.
Google ought to think long and hard about this one. The email I draft to everyone to tell them that they're losing access to all their email, docs, pictures, apps, music, etc. is going to be harsh as hell on Google. And I'm sure that I'm not the only one that's going to have to author one of those...
At least your local heroin vendor doesn't pretend it's /always/ going to be free, though...
Based mostly on taking display ads from "only in the sidebar" to "everywhere, including every pixel above the fold if the search term is lucrative". There's not a lot of juice left there to continue revenue increases that exceed general internet eyeball growth. They will still make an insane amount of money, but I don't see how they can sustain past growth YoY percentages.
The thing that was the most annoying was the shift from G Suite to Workplace. Before, I was getting unlimited Google Drive storage for $12 a month, and now it is like $20 or something... still, for $20 a month you get basically unlimited cloud storage. No other provider can compete.
GCP is number 3 and struggling, with few wins big enough to compensate for the gaps. Workspaces isn’t bad but it’s not compellingly better than O365. Both are held back by management and sales teams who appear to think it’s 2008 and everyone will do the job of selling for them.
Using G-Suite as your personal email has always been hell anyway.
In these comments (on HN), I've seen claims that we'll still be able to login to Google with our old accounts, like how it's possible to have a Google account with an @yahoo login.
I've also seen people disputing that, though.
> Using G-Suite as your personal email has always been hell anyway.
I've not had "hell"-level problems. It's all been working pretty well for me.
And still, losing google docs document sharing, and calendar, on the e-mail address identifier which will stay my valid and primary one is a hostile move, plain and simple.
When you cancel workspace, the accounts remain active but lose access to just the workspace features (gmail, drive, docs, calendar etc). The accounts will remain the same for things like google play, youtube etc and you won't lose access to any purchases.
The biggest impact I can see, other than the headache of migration, is that former GFYD email address can NEVER be used for docs, drive etc, even on the same terms as a free personal account.
And still, losing google docs document sharing, and calendar, on the e-mail address identifier which will stay my valid and primary one is a hostile move, plain and simple.
The situation has been officially confirmed on their support pages [https://support.google.com/a/answer/1257646]:
" Impact to services after you cancel Google Workspace You lose access to core Google Workspace services, such as Gmail, Calendar, Meet, and more. You still have access to Additional Google services, such as YouTube, Google Photos, and Google Ads. "
"Support availability is rolling out to our G Suite legacy free edition customers over the coming days. If you do not currently have access to Support, please check back in a few days. We apologize for any inconvenience, but look forward to connecting with you shortly."
I look forward to some support for the service I've used for 15 years and what to tell the 5 family members who use "G Suite" (aka Google Apps) to handle email from my domain.
Do you know if there's a list of which services will/won't be avaiable after this process? Seems a bit random. Google ads but not gmail..but you can use gmail to point at another email service presumably? Can I still use the google apps I paid for? Does my user1@mydomain.com sort of work like it would if I'd use a hotmain account as my android account? But...if I did that, wouldn't I have access to gmail still? I sort of assumed you would but perhaps not.
One thing about G Suite accounts is Google never got around to making them act just like normal accounts; I cannot review android apps with my account, nor can I share paid-for apps with family members. Will this functionality magically appear after I cancel?
You can sign up for a google account with any email address, so if you'd never used GFYD you'd be able to do this no problem.
Over the last week I've gone through all of the steps of registering a new domain, setting it up with Google Workspace, sharing some docs back and forth, deleting the entire organization, and then signing up for a new google account using the same email address (so no gmail). After each step I waited 24 hours.
I was able to access Docs and share back and forth using this reused address on the new account. You'll obviously lose all of the existing share connections, but it's not like the address itself is burned.
> (Optional) Step 3: Delete your organization’s Google Account
> If you no longer want a Google Account for your organization, delete the entire account. Deleting your organization’s account frees your domain within 24 hours for use with a new Google Account.
Not totally sure the implications of that, it kind of sounds like you can create a clean slate where you can re-use that email address as normal? But not sure, it's confusing and I wouldn't count on it.
Which I'm not surprised about not being sure what will happen -- honestly for the last ten years, the implications and consequences of this legacy free "g suite"/"g aps"/whatever it is account have been continually super confusing and un-documented, and often seemed accidental on google's end.
If the legacy product is the same as the paid product, you may want to rename your accounts/switch domains before you close the workspace. Then there wouldn't be a naming conflict.
Uh oh. So, let's say I take my custom domain email address and set it up on a non-Google provider. (The whole reason I have a custom domain is to avoid locking me to a vendor).
I can't then set up an ordinary personal google account using this email, it'll be reserved forever?
That stinks.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity for a 20% time project. Surely you aren't the only Googler in this situation?
but the venn diagram overlap of people
will be tinyI have at least a dozen relatives on my Google family domain. We're looking at a lifetime cost of tens of thousands of dollars if I were to switch to Workspace, which is a non-starter.
One possibility is to finally incorporate my family foundation as a 501(c)3, if we can do that in time. It's been on my to do list.
I'm not even sure where to go from here, but I have things like Android apps I've bought on this account, as does my family. Or I guess the word is "rented." I have a bunch of logins with Google OAuth. Or I guess past tense.
I feel like there's a class action in here somewhere.
The cost of the domain name is $10 per domain per year or $1 per person per year little enough for one person to pay without thinking.
Most people keep an email address for a very very long time rarely switching unless a service ceases to exist.
Almost no domain owners are going to pony up $720 per year themselves and collection from other users will be an untenable hassle.
Basically every bullet point you listed is wrong. The remaining pool of users is likely 99% vanity users who would have used Gmail+custom domain forever at no real cost to Google over free Gmail none of which will migrate to Google workspace.
For Google the gain from this change will be identical to picking n random Gmail accounts and canceling them and keeping those users digital purchases as a giant fu.
Not ruinous but hardly profitable either.
Someone with an ounce of sense would have included the option to migrate all email accounts to regular Gmail accounts.
Eventually unlimited free accounts was dropped to 50, in 2009 (my grandfathered account was soft-capped at that, with the option to reach out to support to increase it), but I had several other domains that were hard-capped at 50 since I opened them after that limit was instituted. [1]
Then that limit was dropped from 50 to 10 (hard capped, grand-fathered accounts kept their old limits) in 2011. [2]
Then last but not least there was the 1 user free if you had a Google AppEngine project (that came with the requirement that it was tied to a G-Suite at the time).
My G Suite legacy accounts were all created in 2007-2010 timeframe.
[1]: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2009/01/50-user-limi...
[2]: https://cloud.googleblog.com/2011/04/helping-small-businesse...
Mine is from '08 and I have heard no official communications from them.
I use it as a forwarder to my gmail, but now I have to migrate my parents off their accounts. It will either end up as Gmail or Outlook.com for them. Migrating their email will be annoying.
I maintain a full GSuite Business account for other purposes, so I can use that as my mail relay service.
Thanks to routing rules, they'll continue to receive emails transparently, it will redirect a copy to their new email, as if they were a BCC.
I'll handle the groups the same, only a few and the routing rule can add 100 recipients.
Eventually, once cloudflare email forwarding supports groups, I'll just move to that. It's on their internal roadmap, so maybe it will happen before 2024.
I dont think they can/will do it for anyone prior to December of 2011.
http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/08/google-launches-host...
"A standard edition of Google Apps for Your Domain is available today as a beta product without cost to domain administrators or end users. Key features include 2 gigabytes of email storage for each user, easy to use customization tools, and help for administrators via email or an online help center. Furthermore, organizations that sign up during the beta period will not ever have to pay for users accepted during that period (provided Google continues to offer the service)."
The original version of the TOS from August 2006 read as follows:
https://web.archive.org/web/20061029132431/https://www.googl...
"16. Modification. Except as provided in Section 17, Google reserves the right to change or modify any of the terms and conditions contained in this Agreement or any policy governing Google Apps, at any time, by posting the new agreement at http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/terms.html or such URL as Google may provide. Customer is responsible for regularly reviewing any updates to this Agreement. Any changes or modifications to this Agreement will become binding (i) when made in a writing executed by both parties, (ii) by Customer's online acceptance of updated terms, or (iii) after Customer's continued use of Google Apps after such terms have been updated by Google."
"17. No Fees. Provided that Google continues to offer Google Apps for Your Domain to Customer, Google will continue to provide a version of Google Apps for Your Domain (with substantially the same services as those provided as of the Effective Date) free of charge to Customer; provided that such commitment (i) applies only to End User Accounts created during the period when the Google Hosted Services are considered a beta service (the "Beta Period") by Google (such Beta Period determination at Google's sole discretion) and (ii) may not apply to new opt-in services added by Google to the Google Apps for Your Domain in the future. For sake of clarity, Google reserves the right to offer a premium version of Google Apps for Your Domain for a fee."
In mid 2007 the language was changed to read the following:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070407174217/http://www.google...
"17. Modification. Except as provided in Section 18, Google reserves the right to change or modify any of the terms and conditions contained in this Agreement or any policy governing the Service, at any time, by posting the new agreement at http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/terms.html or such URL as Google may provide. Customer is responsible for regularly reviewing any updates to this Agreement. Any changes or modifications to this Agreement will become binding (i) when made in a writing executed by both parties, (ii) by Customer's online acceptance of updated terms, or (iii) after Customer's continued use ...
Worst case, I may end up paying for a month or two while I make the transition.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's finally time to migrate away, I've been putting it off, but so far the accounts I created seem to have mostly become dormant, so only one user has to change, and I'll just re-create them an IMAP account for their mail, they don't use any other services.
Why do any of your issues in any way contribute to the decision wherever someone should invest their time to create a migration tool so users can switch from the old legacy product to a free account which doesn't have any of the domain features to begin with?
I get that you're unhappy that Google discontinues their free service for you, but that wasn't what the discussion was about.
All users who signed up for google apps at your domain are in A people who initially signed up. People in B are those who haven't switched away. C are those who are unwilling to pay $72 per user per year.
A->B Very few users change email addresses very frequently because we accumulate 100 or even hundreds of pages with signups under a single address, phones set up under our google account, oauth sign ins, apps and games purchased under our google account. Google accounts are much more sticky than regular email accounts and people rarely abandon those. I would venture to guess the list of active accounts in B is most of A.
B->C Very few people who signed up for $10 a year for 10-50 addresses are going to be onboard with paying between $720 and $3600 a year. C includes 99.9% of B.
Right, but only (some) Googlers are in a position to solve the problem by applying 20% time to it.
That seems... wrong. Do you actually work at Google?
Anyone who was ever an Xoogler knows this is basically a non starter. The privacy issues alone are radioactive as far as desirability to chase.
I could almost be sympathetic to them not wanting to build a migration tool.
But the least they could have done is set up a way to permanently forward to another gmail account so at least old email addresses do not break. They did not do that.
Ooh, and one more super fun fact: there is no way to transfer ownership of a Google Drive folder to an account outside of your domain. Which is awesome when you're the owner of a large shared folder that needs to persist.
Not to mention Android devices and software purchases tied to the account, what happens to those unless Google provides a migration tool?
I dont really need any more service than I have now, I don't need the full google workspace, I just want gmail on my custom domain, thats all really.
The most annoying parts of this, google, the company that hosts my email, couldn't even be bothered to send me an email about this, I instead found out about it on the front page of HN.
So now I need to figure out how to migrate out, because if I move my email, I have to move my entire google account, my email, domain hosting/registration, youtube account, everything, I have no way to port the data over even to a regular account.
Plus, what about all the third party web sites that offer nice buttons that say "Sign in with Google"?
If you used your legacy Gapps domain to authenticate, do you think they all provide easy implementations to migrate your Google-one-click-authentication account to a same-email-new-local-password account? Hell no.
If such a service only saved the email address when the user account was created it might be very difficult for them to fix this unless the do it really quickly and I happen to sign in to their service before all of this goes down.
It's honestly just a chore, many things don't work using G-Suite accounts, like taking part of a Google Home family with Gmail users, or signing in to Android Automotive (yes, I had to make a new account to be able to sign in to my Polestar 2 because my account is a G-Suite account), I would be HAPPY if they "downgraded" me to Gmail with custom domains and charged me a few bucks a month for it.
If Google introduced a "Legacy GSuite Mail' plan at say $20/yr to retain all existing mail functionality and accounts, and disabled every other Workspace feature, I'd gladly pay for that.
Extremely, extremely annoyed that Android app purchases will be lost.
Since I also have Apple devices I'm considering moving over to iCloud+ since they now support 3 email boxes and 5 domain names per account: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212514
Other options I'm researching include Outlook Premium and Zohomail. Will be watching the comment section for other alternatives.
I swear that we woke up 20 years in the future and that Google and Microsoft traded places.
Say what you will about Google/Gmail, but it has always worked extremely well just in a browser let alone all their app offers.
fwiw I use Fastmail, it's relatively inexpensive (~$100/3 years). My only real gripe is the app passwords tend to break, but the fastmail client is pretty good.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29997504
Google really needs to figure out their customer support. I've always been hesitant to commit because I've feared I'd not be able to get support if I ran into an issue.
I can. Free forever means exactly that. They shouldn't have made the promise in the first place if they didn't have a plan on how to sustain it. Along with their other behavior these days they are just another lying corporation.
At least give folks a chance to migrate their purchases without forcing them to pay rent to keep what they ostensibly already own.
You can use SES for inbound email receipt as well, but unfortunately there's no POP3/IMAP service (emails just get stored in an S3 bucket). However you can use a Lambda to forward inbound email to a personal email account: https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder
SES -> S3 -> aws-ses-pop3-server -> desktop client with POP3 and SMTP
Using this option, email is only really usable from a single device, but it avoids sharing private emails with yet another cloud, especially a free cloud that would share email with advertisers.
1. List email files in S3
2. For each file, download into a local maildir-style directory, then delete original
3. Use `mutt -f ./maildir` to browse
My personal setup makes heavy use of rclone so I used that instead of awscli:
https://gist.github.com/boronine/661fd24ba6671f687ff714969d9...
Fairly recently Google suddenly remembered ~$15 in adwords spend from just over 7 years ago, for a now defunct business I worked at where I had (presumably by accident) used my personal adwords account as a quick test.
The problem is this was the first I'd heard about it, and in the UK it exceeds the statutory limitation period for debt recovery. I stated very clearly that what they were attempting to do is illegal in my jurisdiction and I'm more than happy to take them to the small claims court to recover costs and damages related to dealing with alleged non-payment and any subsequent account closure etc.
While the fee eventually got waived, it was impossible to talk to anybody on the phone (as I had been advised) and I kept going in loops until finally being able to 'chat' to somebody who was more useful than a chocolate teapot. It seemed they wanted me to input some billing details so they could auto-upgrade me when the time comes.
I won't be paying $6/mo, due to a spotty history I've had to rely on paying for domains for years in advance and relying on free services because the absolute last thing I want is one of my most important daily tools (e.g. account recovery, 2FA) being turned off because something unexpected happened - the amount of hassle that would cause is immense and could have some very serious knock-on effects that effectively lock me out of many other things.
I know, Google can decide to block and terminate your account across the board, so far they haven't, but it has been on my mind for a while now.
It's time to step-up my de-googling to the next level, and work on better continuity plans.
10 years of a free product is not bad
Now, the service is the product. Only since it's Googs, the user will still be a product too. Googs needs to re-watch the Seinfeld episode on double dipping.
Your current G Suite legacy free subscriptions and related services will continue to function as they do today, until you self-upgrade or we upgrade you automatically to one of the new editions."
That "until" is really ambiguous - does that mean services terminate when you self-upgrade?
If you cancel it, your account is converted to an ordinary external domain Google account AFAICT. You need to migrate your email out of Google/Gmail to get service messages over email, but you can continue using your Google account as an ordinary Gmail-like account - only difference being that you handle your email yourself (because you didn't want to pay Google to do it for you.)
Just set up your MX with some other service if you are not happy with Gmail, or start running your own SMTP server.
That product is still free at other providers. We'll just be moving.
For me that's the last nail in the coffin, will make sure in the future to keep away from all Google product (private or professional).
What is strange is how in a few year Google went from the cool company where everybody wanted to work to something that can almost be compared to a tobacco company.
All the one's I'm seeing are paid options, some of which get very expensive if you have more than just one or two users.
But now I'll lose access to any purchases on my phone, my Youtube purchases and history, I need to create a new account for my phone, etc....
Android apps will be a pain. I have apps that are no longer sold, or am grandfathered on a premium 1 time purchase for stuff that is now subscription based, etc.
Could be. I'd have to figure this out, thanks for the heads up.
> You can move your channel and its videos over from one account to another. Note that if your account is a supervised account or a work or school account, you cannot move your channel.
So it depends if g suite is considered a "work or school" account or not.
It will definitely hurt us financially as we have around 10 domains with 20 email ids. We can't delete them due to older emails but can't complain as Google did allowed free account for 10 years.
I hope there is a service Migration of emails from Gmail to other platforms.
It makes us as an IT organization look stupid when our users come asking us where the feature they rely on went. I just want to know if leadership at Google has any inkling that this is their reputation or not.
They've very effectively taken a good chunk of their best evangelists and turned them into detractors. I have no idea if they've done the math and decided that was worth it, but I sure hope they have and it's not just total incompetence from one of the biggest players in the industry.
When Google gave me a free HTC Magic handset in San Francisco, I showed it to everyone. I performed tricks with it. I made people want one.
To this day, three members of my immediate family use newer models of my old Pixel phone.
I told a man with a lot of CPU heavy jobs that GCE exists.
I'm talking about "influence" a lot.. but let's be clear, that's not all.
Google knows me--or at least it had the opportunity to. Somewhere between all those referrals and the emails in my mbox files at gmail and GAFYD which pre-date the launch of those services by a decade or my bug reports, or working in one of their datacenters for a while, they should know that I helped them be what they are today.
Maybe they do. Maybe this kind of treatment is what I deserve.
(to reiterate what others have posted, it isn't about the money. It's about the major unplanned migration. Which they still have not notified me about.)
So if they’re going to kill the free stuff, then they have no ground to stand on.
https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/the-h...
Not this is a good or bad thing, but this news make no sense to 99.9% of their customers.
Context:
We're a small but relatively old SaaS company.
Been happily using G Suite's free tier since day 1 - only for email.
This announcement is a tad disappointing, but as other commenters have said, 10 years of a free product is pretty great.
We'll likely upgrade to Google's paid tier, but out of curiosity, since we're switching to a paid service, we may as well explore alternatives too.
Just need cloud email accounts for around 8 users, and with minimal risk of being flagged as spam.
Thanks!
It might feel simple and old, but I like it simple and old.
Have you had any issues with your outgoing mails being flagged as spam?
That's a (perhaps slightly paranoid) concern of ours, given Google's clout.
And to be clear, I'm not talking about spammy / bulk emails. I mean your standard day-to-day personalised emails (customer support etc.).
Some paranoid thread in me fears that Google will find a problem with Fastmail's IP range and credentials this spring (among others), in order to consolidate the Gmail upgrade cash avalanche, but I'm hoping that's just me with my tinfoil hat on too tight.
I'd trust them not to pull the rug any further even less than Google.
Their support replies faster than google :)
And I see they support custom domains too:
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058753394-Cus...
Ticks all our boxes (admittedly our needs are very basic).
I already deal with this enough at work. I don't like having to switch between g accounts all the time.
2) Google is notorious for killing off services or changing their agreements at a moments notice like here so there is a chance they'll drop their offering or increase prices.
3) Google support is either terrible or nonexistent (unless you're lucky enough to get your complaint to the HN frontpage).
I'm an affected user and I plan to put in the effort to migrate -- I only use it for email on a custom domain and have been doing regular backups (using gmvault) in case Google changed their mind so moving to a new service should be a breeze.
2) I don't agree with "moments notice" sentiment. 3 months are quite enough for most users (and they can buy more time for a relatively small price). The free lunch was off the menu for more than nine years, I am actually surprised they gave us so much time.
3) There are replies around this post that for paying users Google support is significantly better. Good opportunity to check if it is really so.
It is far more likely Google will decide to change the terms unilaterally on their customers or discontinue a service altogether - their business is advertising, not email.
2) Not paid business accounts.
3) Not for paid business accounts.
For 20 years people have complained of 1,2,3 for free accounts, and said that they'd prefer to pay to avoid these issues. Now that there's an option....
https://workspace.google.com/learn-more/security/security-wh...
----
Our philosophy Google Workspace customers own their customer data, not Google. Customer data that Google Workspace organizations put into our systems is theirs, and we do not scan it for advertisements. We offer our customers a detailed Data Processing Amendment that describes our commitment to protecting customer data. Furthermore, if customers delete their data, we commit to deleting it from our systems within 180 days.
No advertising in Google Workspace There is no advertising in the Google Workspace Core Services, and we have no plans to change this in the future. Google does not collect, scan or use data in Google Workspace Core Services for advertising purposes. Customer administrators can restrict access to Non-Core Services from the Google Workspace Admin console. Google indexes customer data to provide beneficial services, such as spam filtering, virus detection, spellcheck and the ability to search for emails and files within an individual account.
Limited data use
Google does not use any of your data for any purpose except to provide you with the relevant Google Workspace service. For example, when customers use the Cloud Translation API, Google will not make the content of the text that you send available to the public, or share it with anyone else, except as necessary to provide the Cloud Translation API service.
Fastmail does give you access to your 30GB via FTP or WebDAV. It also has a web-based file uploading tool. Then you can create links to share files or folders with others, like a picture album. I did this a little just to try it out, and it was very straightforward. Whereas I could never figure out how to do it with iCloud and gave up.
https://improvmx.com/
Recently Cloudflare also started enabling email forwarding. I believe it's still in Beta, and with the sites I've got in Cloudflare I got approved 2 weeks-ish after applying.
As for sending emails, I think you can use something like how ImprovMX suggests https://improvmx.com/guides/send-emails-using-gmail/
I like simplelogin.io (also open source, so can be selfhosted) because the aliases can be used to send and receive, though you do have to set the domain up on their platform first.
We are not Opensource, but that doesn't mean we track user's email (we don't, we wrote about it: https://improvmx.com/are-you-reading-my-emails/). On the contrary, screaming to anyone that one uses Opensource doesn't mean they respect user's privacy (like Forwardemail does): take their way of forwarding for instance: you need to add your email in the DNS settings, publicly available... they have a odd definition of privacy.
And don't get me started on their homepage full of misleading messages ... ;)
Slightly more expensive than Fastmail but seems like better security / privacy considerations.
That said, the space per inbox seems far more limited.
Seems we have some interesting options here!
For those that are reading this too and are curious:
https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/
Could just be my experience, but I'm considering moving back to Google for my personal email just for that.
And iCloud+ is $1/month for up to 5 users for 5 domains with up to 3 addresses per domain per user.
I haven't gone through the process yet, but it additionally looks like I will need to borrow a Mac or Windows machine to start up iCloud Email. Once it is enabled I should be able to use IMAP or their web client.
That said, if you don't have anyone in your family with an Apple product, this iCloud+ thing may not be right for you.
I setup a trial with plan to use it long term but I got locked out of my own admin account with no way in (I use a password manager, yes) and the support page that was supposed to work kept crashing my browser.
Their Twitter account redirected me to that support page after explaining the situation to them.
The quality of the service itself is horrible for an individual to manage compared to gsuite or any other service I have touched.
It's pretty basic in terms of webmail/core functionality but it receives and delivers mail well from the various IMAP clients I use, which is all I need.
Which means, if you like to set up new domains for specific projects, there's no extra cost (other than registering the domain of course).
Have never had a spam problem, but they stress that they don't consider themselves mission critical.
I went with fastmail for my personal email, after a small-ish provider I had used (and liked very much!) between 2001 and 2018 was unable for a few month, in 2018, to avoid getting my mails sorted by gmail into spam -- no delivery problems since mail. Alas, despite wishing to support the smaller players, silent non-delivery of emails is a huge problem.
I'm new to shopping for email hosting and using your own domain. I know sending emails and not get flagged as spam is a hard, but is there any risks when it comes to receiving emails?
How hard it is depends on how many nines you want in the uptime guarantee.
Are there any ways to migrate those licenses to a "google account"? Or am I being forced to pay to keep using licenses I already paid for?
Oh, and what about my YouTube channel?
Play store purchases are probably lost (I'm in the same boat). I have no intention of repurchasing my Android apps so I guess its an easy permanent switch to iOS at this point.
Google can get bent. They advertised Google Apps as a solution for families way back when it was announced, and they're seemingly content to burn any good will it bought them.
1. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/27441?hl=en