There is a hidden cost to this though. Running your own email server, or even having a lesser-known company manage your email server, can cause your emails to be sent to spam without any action on your part. You aren't notified when your email goes to a spam folder, so you always have to worry that the recipient of your emails didn't receive the email, even if you only ever send legitimate emails. If you stay on top of all the best-practices for running your own mail server, your hidden cost is the mind-share that that takes.
In theory this shouldn't be a problem if you aren't using a known-trash IP and have SPF and DKIM set up, since the only thing the major inbox providers want is a way to verify and associate spam reputation with a domain instead of an IP. If this really hurts you can just set up Amazon SES use that via SMTP, you'll get 62k free emails a month (always free, not just first 12 months).
This even works if you want a mostly-free setup: you have MX forwarding via some provider (Cloudflare, your registrar, etc) going to a personal address, and SES operates as your outbound SPF that works with Outlook/Gmail in terms of allowing you to set your domain email(s) as aliases within their interface.
Thats not entirely true. Microsoft is crazy on what it flags, and their AI straight just does "things". Their support has admitted as much when i had tickets open for months trying to white list basic GNU/Hurd list serves (that I didnt run).
Im sure just running Mail in a Box on linode would 100% flag it.
I KNOW google would because half the time i socks through one of my linodes (that i have used and owned the IP for years on) i get thrown through all sorts of captchas on services. INCLUDING signing into my own gsuite from it (despite an established history of just doing it).
Unfortunately the big players own mail, they do what they want. In fact having a domain registered with one will do better for your mail reputation than most would care to admit.
Just look at how MS uses SMTPS on port 25, sure they COULD use 587 or 465, but they dont:
I run postfix on Debian on a longstanding Linode, haven't gotten around to setting up DKIM, and emails to businesses served by outlook.com go through just fine.
I'm not rejecting the concern or the ambiguous worry about arbitrary judgement, but the surveillance web's captchas are much more draconian than spam filters.
If i'm running an email inbox, responding to support regarding email deliverability is my lowest priority primarily because, if I respond once, it becomes an attack vector for dedicated spammers to try to extract information about the spam detection systems.
Thats more or less an argument FOR using one of the large providers.
Frankly you are more likely to make exceptions and monitor internally for deliverability from a google, or outlook.com or comcast.net than for some random xyz.email domain.
And blocking swaths of those has a bigger impact. Frankly though, imho, you should respond to users that report deliverability issues on your domain and tweak your spam filters accordingly. Just ignoring a users saying "i am not getting expected emails from this listserve" is a great way to encourage your users to employ shadow IT and just use personal accounts.
Obscurity isnt security, even with spam mitigations. Things like SPF, DKIM, DMARC along with some user impersonation filtering (including spoofing from fields) is basic spam 101 and will catch 99% of your actual security related phishing.And the largest ones (dmarc) can be probed publicly anyhow since almost all of it relies on DNS txt records.
The hidden cost of me keep using google is that all my mail is stored who knows where, can be take away at anytime, is read by who knows what and pricing may change at anytime as it has with this "will always be free" version...
I am surprised that people here still have this all-or-nothing approach when it comes to managed vs self-hosted e-mail despite it being covered countless times.
If what you mention does turn out to be an issue, or you decide it's a worthwhile tradeoff to not have to care about IP reputation, you can choose to route all or a subset (depending on destination domain) of your outgoing mail through a provider like mailroute/mailgun/sendgrid/fastmail/posteo. Or even gmail/AWS. You can still self-host the rest even if you don't want to hother with outgoing SMTP, which you can always add later should uou choose to.
> If you stay on top of all the best-practices for running your own mail server, your hidden cost is the mind-share that that takes.
Are you actually speaking from experience here? Over the past 20-30 years it's been like, what, 4-5 new things to learn?
OpenBSD with opensmtpd is the most sane approach to SMTP. You probably will need dovecot for IMAP which is not that easy to configure but default configuration mostly fine.
I set this all up last month with docker-mailserver, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, the rDNS ptr, sharing LE cert with dokku, with alps for webmail, and it all seemed to be working fine (round-trip delivery to Gmail addresses, etc) until one day I tried to email an outlook.com address and immediately got told my IP was blocked.
The mail server's IP is a pretty normal cloud VPS IP from a major hosting company. It's not on any public blocklists. I submitted unblock requests to MS, and signed up for their SNDS service, but all requests were denied without explanation and I simply made no progress.
My conclusion is that this route is impossible - do not waste time trying it.
> Worked great until one provider, Outlook.com, blocked me. Do not try cause you may run into an issue like me and get upset and quit. Now I use Outlook.com instead.
Microsoft are the worst (and the only ones that ever posed a hassle for us).
I recommend raising the issue with support of your cloud VPS. They most likely handle cases like this routinely and have channels to MS that can get this resolved much smoother, IME. It's their IPs, after all.
I don't even mind paying for it but the nature of the transition and the cost for the features is obscene. For example, I have a secondary address for business reasons and in the new g suite that has to be an "account" which costs money every month
I maybe mistaken but I believe you can create additional aliases under the same account -- I seem to remember doing that a few months back when I got auto-updated to Google Workspace.
No it doesn't? You can set up unlimited aliases, afaik. If you want to have separate access however, it does. I'm currently planning to migrate my script-sending email address to mailgun or SES instead of using a separate gmail user.
As others have said, you can set up aliases / groups and those do not require additional accounts.
Also if you’re the only account then you can just configure a catch-all in the routing section so that anything@your domain goes to you. That’s no additional cost even on these basic accounts I believe.
I use this so I can also track by using a new address for each service (e.g. twitter@mydomain.com, ebay@mydomain.com, etc)
I do the catch-all too, it works with the free version but will it still work with the paid version, even the cheapest tier ? At this point I have given around a crazy number of stuff@my.domain addresses, some of them for pretty important stuff, and while I don't mind paying for the service (I really like the GMail UI, matter of taste I suppose, and that justifies the price for me), I really need the feature as loosing it would be nearly as bad as loosing the "primary" email address.
Indeed. I can hardly blame any company for shutting down a free tier of service. I think many people would've been happy if Google Reader would've stuck around for a monthly fee.
Workspace ads work differently - for example, before 2017, Google didn't scan Workspace email for ad targeting (they no longer do it for personal email inboxes either[0]). That's the general rule, any official Workspace products[1] won't display ads or contribute to an advertising profile[2].
Google has a monopoly and are part of many dupolies in many areas. Offering free services to create lockin and switching the terms is the basis of the complaints here.
Many small companies had a business around maps. Google's free products kill most of them. Now that they are gone google starts charging to embed maps.
What free services has the parent offered killing a market only to require payment short after? None..
Yes, and I've wanted to migrate my GSuite account to a regular personal/free Google Account for years, but Google has offered me no way to do so. Google even has what I need as a product: "Google Account without GMail". It would let me use my email address at my personal domain as my Google identity, and work exactly like an @gmail.com account, except no GMail. This would be perfect, but Google hasn't bothered to give me a way to migrate.
And no, Google Takeout doesn't work here, because a lot of the data on the account can't be imported into the new account. Think stuff like Chat history, YouTube subscriptions and watch history, sharing settings on Docs, albums and sharing settings on Photos, purchases on Play, payment methods and transaction history on Pay, and a whole host of other things.
So yes, the writing has been on the wall, but there's been no migration path out of the dead-end product. I see in another thread here that Google is working on a migration tool, but I expect that will just migrate me to a fresh @gmail.com account, which is not what I want.
If I understand your situation correctly, you don't really need to do a migration. The status quo (if you don't pay for GSuite after the deadline) is that you won't be able to receive send new emails, set up videoconferences in Meet, upload new stuff to Drive, etc. However you'll still be able to sign into the account, track your subscriptions in Youtube, install apps you've bought on the Play Store, sign in via OAuth on non-Google websites, etc.
edit: however I'm not sure how storage quotas work and if you'll be able to upload new things on Photos
I tried this in 2018, and had problems with notifications under iOS, and there wasn't support for syncing contacts and calendars. Also, Zoho its offering is pretty huge, so for example grokking the settings screens takes some effort. Perhaps someone can give a more recent update?
I used zoho for a few years in our org. We started on the free zoho plan then transitioned to paid. As we hired more, we got a lot of requests for people to switch to gsuite, and we finally did a few months ago. Now we have both side by side.
Main reasons people wanted gsuite
- gmail UI preference (Zoho webmail ui is feature-complete but clunky and slow)
- perceived email deliverability (people thought gsuite would be better for deliverability. We haven't seen much difference in reality though)
- preference for google drive + docs over zoho workdrive + docs. This is not just due to familiarity -- the features for google are smoother and more reliable. It seems fine to use zoho but when you are losing saved drafts or having to doubele-check the technology or don't know where thee buttons are for something, productivity losses add up over time
- frustratino with some of the other zoho services. Their Zoho One offers a ton of things to solve most product categories, but they're rarely best in class. More of a problem is that often simple things you would expect to work don't work. We struggled a lot with zoho desk for example because there is a years-old bug where they didn't implement the RFC for nonce's correctly, so we couldn't actually use it embedded in our website because of the CSP
It takes some getting used to. There are some rough edges, mainly with the UI and figuring out where things are hidden behind deep menus. Calendar sharing is not as straightforward. Otherwise it's been a good experience so far. I have 8 custom domains for about 8 users. Transition was easy too, you can do it from within zoho for the most part. The only thing that takes a bit of time is domain propagation.
I'm actually in the middle of fully migrating to zoho from my grandfathered GSuite accounts. So far, going quite well. I actually had already planned to move away from Google about 1 year ago...so had spun up a paid Zoho account and associated it to an old domain name that i was not using...Just to see how zoho performs...And, you know what, they're pretty damn good; especially for the price! I should caveat that my needs (and those of my family) are very meager. My family and I do not share calendars, so don't know if the issue that @bbertelsen noted is hitting others. (I guess I'll be testing that!) I do agree with @bbertelsen that the UIs for many settings can be quite deep. It is clear that zoho wanted to keep adding lots of bells and whistles...but i guess because my family's needs are pretty simple, once i figured out where to do whatever was needed...sort of set it and forget it...at least so far...and again, at this point working great! (We'll see how things go once i complete the mkigration.)
Yes I'm using custom domains and yes I migrated from free Gsuite. I just use the email only on Zoho, which is totally fine for me. It does also include other services which I haven't investigated. Migration was fairly painless. The domain setup on Zoho is quite good. I was able to export my contacts from google and import them into Zoho. The main feature I wanted was catch-all support, which Zoho does support and works fine. Spam detection seems fine. No issues with email deliverability. I have set-up SPF and DomainKeys. Seems OK generally.
Everyone on my team under this domain had these zoho emails and was wondering the point of this masochistic exercise of not using gmail.
and yet, I mean it works, and its not a Zoho issue, its a Google network effects issue. Having to make a google account for your non-google email just to join a meet or load a spreadsheet is just bleeeeehhhhhh! I think its the mental association with that email then having a gmail inbox, but it doesnt end there as I'm pretty sure the ux was worse than just that.
For people only using it as an email backend: there are plenty of cheap, privacy-respecting alternatives such as mailbox.org (the one I've used for 7-8 years now).
Yeah, this is a pain and I hope there will be some good news soon. My family runs on this - the only advantage over free Gmail is that we can use our own domain name, and we're going to suddenly have to pay $42 per month (okay, $36 if I trim one of the accounts I hardly use). We've got loads of Photos, movie purchases etc which I don't want to lose, plus all the kids Android phones, 2 x Home, 2 x Chromecast.
Friends who use regular Gmail accounts get to use things like Family Link etc for parental approval/monitoring as well... which I'm still not going to be able to use.
Come on Google, please come up with a family service which allows you to use your own domain name. Pretty please! I'd still pay a few $ per month for it, especially if it's good on parental controls and monitoring.
> Google is holding all your old free G Suite accounts hostage
They are not holding these accounts hostage. You can export mail from Google. You can change your MX records to different servers.
I've been bit as much as anyone by Google killing products, but honestly, it's amazing they've kept this product free for so long. And in this case, the product isn't being killed; they've simply decided to start charging for it.
So now our choices are: pay $6 per user per month for essentially what everyone gets for free, or our accounts, which are used for all kinds of free Google services, stop working.
> If you don’t upgrade to a Google Workspace subscription, you will not lose access to other Google services, including YouTube, Google Photos, and Google Play, nor paid content, including YouTube and Play Store purchases.
"After 60 days in suspension, you will no longer have access to Google Workspace core services, such as Gmail, Calendar, and Meet."
I'd really like to know the full list of the "core services" that become unavailable. I've moved my email to Fastmail, but I still use Google Calendar and occasionally Google Meet. What else is included here? Chat? I use that too.
It sounds like Google will simply be converting your account to the kind that anyone can create at the first result that comes up when you google "create google account without gmail." This is fine. It's a full Google account like any other.
Calendars are very easy to migrate from one account to another (or even to other services). You can download one ics file that describes your whole calendar and import that file to a consumer Google Calendar account. That would probably be the least disruptive path for you.
You could import that same file at least to Apple's free iCloud, though I imagine it would be more disruptive because that service is different in many ways.
Now as for those who want gmail but can't afford the $6, I think it's as simple as you'd need to add Gmail to that "non-gmail" account, which would restore your access to the consumer version of Gmail. Hosting your domain's email does usually need to be done for money now, but with the money one has saved for the last 17 years or so, you should be able to do this for $30 a year or something - and simply configure consumer Gmail to pull messages in via POP from your "personal domain" email account, so that you get the Gmail UI and the pretty generous storage space. I know it's possible to configure gmail to send "From" the other address too, but it does so in a pretty conservative way that some clients show as "Bob Smith on behalf of Bob Smith" and both addresses are visible in the headers.
What i have been doing for years now is to setup Thunderbird leveraging maildir...Now, the majority of the time i do read my mail via google's webmail...but on occasion i do use Thunderbird for reading mail. But the benefit of having my mail locally accessible - as indivudual files under maildir - is that things are snappier for going through all of my messages...But the secondary benefit is that i can (and have been for years) backing up my email as files...In essence all the files under thunderbird's maildir can be copied/pasted to some other storage place/folder/network share/whatever...so i get speed and protection! Plus this (having all my email messages locally-accessible) makes it trivially easy to "re-import" (if you want to call it that) my email from GSuite over to any other IMAP-capable mail provider...it is as easy as dragging files from my GSuite-account in thunderbird over to the other, non-GSuite account within said same Thunderbird view. (Granted it takes time to push up email to the new provider this way if you have tons of messages...but its easy.) I'm sure there are more efficient methods to get your messages from Goolgle and shifted over to another mail provider...but this is what i've done, and it works. YMMV depending on the number of messages you're dealing with, and any constraints your new/other mail provider might have in receiving loads of "new" messages.
Actually, I can login to account settings and can initiate a take out, but there's no way to include Gmail data in it (and trying to get to Gmail results in "account suspended" message).
> They are not holding these accounts hostage. You can export mail from Google. You can change your MX records to different servers.
There is sinking cost fallacy of setting up all of this through them. Like I have 100 domains that I've setup to be able to receive emails through Google. So much work + damage to fix everything. Will probably let it die.
You can't export purchased licenses for software / media to another Google account, nor can you migrate Google Play Developer accounts. The mail isn't the problem, the problem is everything else tied to people's personal Google accounts
G Suite accounts are by definition not supposed to be personal accounts: they are for when an organization wants to own someone else's account, with the ability to do stuff like managing it and revoking its access; and so, just like when you are using an account given to you by your employer, you should not consider them "yours". If you want to complain about this, it should be that businesses that were using this system for free are being locked out, not personal accounts: if you were buying stuff for your personal use from Google Play using a G Suite account that was never a good idea. I realize people started using them like that, because they wanted a "personal" Google account with support, and I also realize that Google kind of caved on this a while ago when people were whining constantly about why they couldn't use Google+--a social network--with their G Suite accounts (with some resulting changes that completely messed up the model of how these accounts work, muddying up the namespace by mixing the various kinds of accounts together, which broke the ability to have a true personal account with the same email address as a domain owned by G Suite... something which awkwardly made it more difficult for the people who did understand this difference and who were making damned sure not to do something like attach a Google Developer account to a Google Apps account, lest I later decide to switch to a different workspace and email provider), but the mental model of using a G Suite account as a personal account never made sense.
It's my domain and I'm the admin on G Suite so it's just as much my personal account as any gmail account, and to follow your logic then you basically shouldn't use any kind of 3rd party service or cloud account.
>I realize people started using them like that
Perhaps that's because google advertised this as way to get a gmail address with a personal domain, offered a free basic tier to everyone that wanted, and rolled out support for all their products to use these accounts with them, without, it seems ever considering the eventuality of charging for the free tier and thereby holding accounts and data hostage in away they'd never consider for normal accounts.
But I guess that makes it harder for you to feel superior
I've been making a list of all the Google services I use that are tied to my account, and what migrating to a free/personal account would look like. Yes, I can get pretty much all the data out, but it's incredibly lossy, and much of it just cannot be imported into the new account at all, and some of it that can be, will require me to write a bunch of tools that use Google's various product APIs.
I've already moved my email and contacts from my GSuite account to Fastmail, but that's a tiny part of the story.
Say you make a choice between equivalent services, A or B. Over time you are locked into your choice because you make decisions that fit your choice. The benefits and costs/risks of choosing A or B are often indistinguishable over time. Yet later, changing between the two can be unfeasibly expensive: e.g. changing banks (mortgage lock-in), changing health insurance (existing condition lock-in), changing careers, etcetera.
But if both choices provided a free service of great value for years, is it fair to complain when A at some point wants money for the highly valuable service? I don’t see a lot of Fastmail customers having this issue.
One of my colleagues used to be a reasonably hard "Google fanboy", while I mostly drove the company away from Google as much as I could.
The years go by and the fanboyism in him dies a little bit more every day. Then this came along. He is completely screwed, and pissed at Google about it.
The issue isn't moving mail, it's the rest of the ecossystem and accounts. He can move mail somewhere else, but his account is also his Youtube account with all his business videos and playlists, several domains, and several other services which he has used under the PROMISE that they would all be free forever. He actually used the word hostage when talking about this with me. He is a hostage.
Google has all the right to price their products, but it is "typical shit google" to go back on their word, destroy expectations and basically scam their users. If the service hadn't been offered as "free forever", many people would not have used it.
I don't like Google. I used to. But I can't, now. There are a couple of amazing Google-owned products (Maps, Youtube come to mind), but the company, to me, is just the Microsoft of the 2000s. Seriously, it seems like they intentionally make themselves look bad (it's 2022 and some of my youtube videos still appear translated to the language of the country I'm in and there's no place for me to change this without screwing something else).
So the last I heard about this, Google had relented to some extent and was going to offer some offramp for people who had data, purchases, etc. in an old free Apps for Domain/G Suite/Workspace account. They had a form you could submit to saying you wanted more information about those options. Has anyone heard any more on this front?
I don't mind paying someone else just to run email for my domain (or potentially even paying Google) but I'd like to offload my Android app purchases and all that kind of stuff I have on there.
I signed up for the form. Have not heard but they DID say it would be after April 1.
My guess is they have a Family Tier. Same limits as free, but with a cost.
Personally I'm willing to foot the bill if i have to, but that will probably only be a stopgap to get to something that is cheaper.
Unfortunately a lot of the heralded services (ie: ProtonMail) dont have the same services (ie: no contacts sync or notes sync etc). That is VERY handy outside the app. While i could work around it, not sure family would be a willing.
I'd be willing to pay for it if it's actually good value, because the current G Suite sure is not.
You need to pay $6/month, or $72/year to get 30 GB of storage + custom domain. If you're on Gmail and pay nothing, you get 15 GB of storage. If you're on Gmail and pay $20/year (or $1.99/month) towards Google One, you get 100 GB of storage.
Basically, the custom domain part of G Suite costs quite a lot considering how little of anything else you get in comparison to cheaper Google One plans. No idea how expensive that can be, since Apple will sell me a 50 GB iCloud+ account that has custom domain emails, iCloud Private Relay and other features for 0.99 €/month.
I submitted the form but haven't heard back. I have recreated all important email accounts on a self hosted Mailcow instance with a sync job that syncs all email every hour. When push comes to shove I only have to flip the MX record for the domains.
Purchases won't go anywhere. You will be forced to the new plan, and then when you fail to pay you will lose access to the mail and the workspace apps (so will lose Docs Sheets, etc access), but the account remains a valid google account indefinitely.
From the FAQ:
> If my G Suite legacy free edition account is suspended, what happens to my additional Google services and paid content after July 1, 2022?
> In account suspension, you won't lose access to other Google services, including YouTube, Google Photos, and Google Play, nor paid content, including YouTube and Play Store purchases.
> You'll also be able to sign in to your Google apps (such as YouTube) and third-party sites with your G Suite legacy edition email address. You won’t be able to receive or send email, including authenticating password resets via email. Without access to Gmail in the suspendedstate, we recommend you use a different email provider to send and receive email messages, including changing logins and authenticating new passwords.
What seems to be weirdly missing is the option to convert to normal non-gmail google account, which is what most individuals or families willing to migrate to a different email host would want. If they offered that, it would allow keeping access to gdocs et al, and you would really only be losing mail hosting and the ability to administer other accounts.
My understanding was that it was something approaching your last paragraph that they were looking at offering, either converting your Workspace account to a regular Google account, or offering some sort of thing to pull over your content: I have a regular Google account already, and would rather not keep around a neutered one in perpetuity for access to apps.
I would think that having such an account would also just be trouble down the line: being on a Workspace account already affects time of access to features routinely (and the new Pay never came to those accounts... though I feel like that's somewhat dead in the water already anyway?) and being in an even more limited non-paying weirdo customer subset can't possibly help any of that out.
>In the coming months, we'll provide an option for you to move your non-Google Workspace paid content and most of your data to a no-cost option. This new option won't include premium features like custom email or multi-account management. You'll be able to evaluate this option prior to July 1, 2022 and prior to account suspension. We'll update this article with details in the coming months.
Oh, this is quite interesting. The one thing I am worried about is that it's not clear if it will let us migrate to a "Google Account without GMail" (which lets you use a custom domain to create a free Google Account, see https://accounts.google.com/SignUpWithoutGmail?hl=en), but will instead require that we migrate to an @gmail.com account.
I really don't want that; I want to keep my Google Account identity the same (with my custom domain). I've already moved my email from GMail to Fastmail, so I don't need Google to host my email. Unfortunately this support page doesn't give much in the way of details, and I expect there won't be much time between when they release this tool (and I inevitably am able to confirm it won't do what I want) and when I'll have to start moving my data, which will require writing some specialized tools if I want to migrate as losslessly as possible to a new Google Account.
This is exactly what I'm waiting for, too - I don't really care about migrating my email somewhere else, I'd wanted to do that for a while even before they discontinued the program. But I do want to preserve my existing Google account and the various Google data associated to it, even if that means migrating it out of GSuite.
Why would you ever expect a service like this to be free in perpetuity? It's hardly a bait and switch: you never paid for anything, and still got 15+ years of service!
> 18. Fees. Provided that Google continues to offer the Service to Customer, Google will continue to provide a version of the Service (with substantially the same services as those provided as of the Effective Date) free of charge to Customer; provided that such commitment: (i) does not apply to the Domain Service described in Section 4 above; and (ii) may not apply to new opt-in services added by Google to the Service in the future. For sake of clarity, Google reserves the right to offer a premium version of the Service for a fee. [1]
Which is weird given that the term that allows them to modify the terms explicitly referenced number 18 as an exception.
The only valid argument for it being legal to discontinue this on you is that G-Suite is not GApps, and both are discontinued services anyway, with Google Workspace being the current offering. Which is presumably what they would argue if sued over this.
Looks suspiciously at Google docs, which is free, rapidly approaching monopoly status if it's not there already, and has no revenue stream for personal users to speak of.
This is the kind of company that Google has always been - eager to make money off you in dark alleyways and always eager to throw users to the piranhas when it's not worth their time anymore.
The end result is for want of a few engineers to maintain Google Reader or a few dollars of revenue left on the table for free G Suite users, Google's users don't trust the company farther they can throw it, which has led to hundreds of billions of dollars of lost enterprise value as products like Google Cloud just don't have the trust to compete with AWS and Azure.
Paying for subscriptions is the way to go. We can't expect companies to give expensive services away for free, and we don't seem to like being merchandized with ads.
The service itself is not expensive. For example, my ISP offers it for free, so does my registrar. They're effectively selling an overpriced software subscription (to gmail) and threat of lock-in is at least some part of the marketing tactic.
Google has a habit of offering free services that other companies can't compete with, and then after they've killed off the competition they start charging for the services. Classic example is Google Photos - they killed off a bunch of competiors in the early days who couldn't compete with Google's unlimited free storage.
> "Hey Google, if you expect users to pay for the privilege of using services that were marketed for free to small organizations or families, you can at least migrate to a regular free plan. options can be provided. While you’re at it, here’s how to go about fixing the shortcomings of Google Workspace to make it worth the attached monthly fee."
Hey Nation World News Desk... Google doesn't care.
From Do No Evil to Do Evil, going forward will avoid any Google product in the name of FREE (you're the product), mine the data for years (and know everything about the user) and later start charging for it!
I feel like at some point we have to accept that unless we want to have stuff like this happen and/or sell our personal data all the time…. we as users also need to pay for stuff.
We want everything free, and I don’t blame anyone for that desire but when nobody pays the bills it comes due in some way. The result sucks when the math works out…
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadI am aware of what it entails regarding IP "cleaning", setting a reverse record, SPF and DKIM. Just looking for tips on the software stack side.
> Is it caddy for email?
> No. It was intended to be one but developers quickly acknowledged the fact email cannot be easily abstracted behind some magic.
The only other instances of Caddy are that they copied a "caddyfile lexer" [1] and seemingly a typo in a test[2].
0: https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy/blob/d08c7f0e3927df64f10db91...
1: https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy/blob/d8cabb932d9e7c3abd056fe...
2: https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy/blob/d8cabb932d9e7c3abd056fe...
This even works if you want a mostly-free setup: you have MX forwarding via some provider (Cloudflare, your registrar, etc) going to a personal address, and SES operates as your outbound SPF that works with Outlook/Gmail in terms of allowing you to set your domain email(s) as aliases within their interface.
Im sure just running Mail in a Box on linode would 100% flag it.
I KNOW google would because half the time i socks through one of my linodes (that i have used and owned the IP for years on) i get thrown through all sorts of captchas on services. INCLUDING signing into my own gsuite from it (despite an established history of just doing it).
Unfortunately the big players own mail, they do what they want. In fact having a domain registered with one will do better for your mail reputation than most would care to admit.
Just look at how MS uses SMTPS on port 25, sure they COULD use 587 or 465, but they dont:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/mail-flow-best-pra...
I'm not rejecting the concern or the ambiguous worry about arbitrary judgement, but the surveillance web's captchas are much more draconian than spam filters.
But having managed email across all three providers. Microsoft does just ignore rfc’s and basic standards pretty regularly and relies heavily on “AI”.
Google less so.
And when it works it works great. But once you get deliverability issues it’s a pain to resolve with them. Especially if you have to engage support.
If i'm running an email inbox, responding to support regarding email deliverability is my lowest priority primarily because, if I respond once, it becomes an attack vector for dedicated spammers to try to extract information about the spam detection systems.
Frankly you are more likely to make exceptions and monitor internally for deliverability from a google, or outlook.com or comcast.net than for some random xyz.email domain.
And blocking swaths of those has a bigger impact. Frankly though, imho, you should respond to users that report deliverability issues on your domain and tweak your spam filters accordingly. Just ignoring a users saying "i am not getting expected emails from this listserve" is a great way to encourage your users to employ shadow IT and just use personal accounts.
Obscurity isnt security, even with spam mitigations. Things like SPF, DKIM, DMARC along with some user impersonation filtering (including spoofing from fields) is basic spam 101 and will catch 99% of your actual security related phishing.And the largest ones (dmarc) can be probed publicly anyhow since almost all of it relies on DNS txt records.
If what you mention does turn out to be an issue, or you decide it's a worthwhile tradeoff to not have to care about IP reputation, you can choose to route all or a subset (depending on destination domain) of your outgoing mail through a provider like mailroute/mailgun/sendgrid/fastmail/posteo. Or even gmail/AWS. You can still self-host the rest even if you don't want to hother with outgoing SMTP, which you can always add later should uou choose to.
> If you stay on top of all the best-practices for running your own mail server, your hidden cost is the mind-share that that takes.
Are you actually speaking from experience here? Over the past 20-30 years it's been like, what, 4-5 new things to learn?
Been sharing this setup with about 20 family/friends for a while now (5 years?)
The mail server's IP is a pretty normal cloud VPS IP from a major hosting company. It's not on any public blocklists. I submitted unblock requests to MS, and signed up for their SNDS service, but all requests were denied without explanation and I simply made no progress.
My conclusion is that this route is impossible - do not waste time trying it.
I recommend raising the issue with support of your cloud VPS. They most likely handle cases like this routinely and have channels to MS that can get this resolved much smoother, IME. It's their IPs, after all.
It doesn't matter what you do.
It doesn't matter that you are replying to an email and the message-id is referenced.
It'll be considered SPAM.
DKIM, DMARC and SPF mitigate it a bit, but not really.
Yesterday I had a form ask me for my email and it only accepted @gmail.com
Every other domain I tried was refused as invalid.
Email is dead.
Also if you’re the only account then you can just configure a catch-all in the routing section so that anything@your domain goes to you. That’s no additional cost even on these basic accounts I believe.
I use this so I can also track by using a new address for each service (e.g. twitter@mydomain.com, ebay@mydomain.com, etc)
A lot of the times it's a bait and switch. They give you a service in exchange for your data, then they pull the service away once they've got it.
0: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/26/534451513...
1: https://workspace.google.com/intl/en/terms/user_features.htm...
2: https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056650#zippy=...
Many small companies had a business around maps. Google's free products kill most of them. Now that they are gone google starts charging to embed maps.
What free services has the parent offered killing a market only to require payment short after? None..
Even though it worked for preexisting users, new user signups were closed a decade ago so I feel like the writing was on the wall
And no, Google Takeout doesn't work here, because a lot of the data on the account can't be imported into the new account. Think stuff like Chat history, YouTube subscriptions and watch history, sharing settings on Docs, albums and sharing settings on Photos, purchases on Play, payment methods and transaction history on Pay, and a whole host of other things.
So yes, the writing has been on the wall, but there's been no migration path out of the dead-end product. I see in another thread here that Google is working on a migration tool, but I expect that will just migrate me to a fresh @gmail.com account, which is not what I want.
edit: however I'm not sure how storage quotas work and if you'll be able to upload new things on Photos
Main reasons people wanted gsuite
- gmail UI preference (Zoho webmail ui is feature-complete but clunky and slow)
- perceived email deliverability (people thought gsuite would be better for deliverability. We haven't seen much difference in reality though)
- preference for google drive + docs over zoho workdrive + docs. This is not just due to familiarity -- the features for google are smoother and more reliable. It seems fine to use zoho but when you are losing saved drafts or having to doubele-check the technology or don't know where thee buttons are for something, productivity losses add up over time
- frustratino with some of the other zoho services. Their Zoho One offers a ton of things to solve most product categories, but they're rarely best in class. More of a problem is that often simple things you would expect to work don't work. We struggled a lot with zoho desk for example because there is a years-old bug where they didn't implement the RFC for nonce's correctly, so we couldn't actually use it embedded in our website because of the CSP
At the time, Calendar invitations? broken
Google Meet? broken
Everyone on my team under this domain had these zoho emails and was wondering the point of this masochistic exercise of not using gmail.
and yet, I mean it works, and its not a Zoho issue, its a Google network effects issue. Having to make a google account for your non-google email just to join a meet or load a spreadsheet is just bleeeeehhhhhh! I think its the mental association with that email then having a gmail inbox, but it doesnt end there as I'm pretty sure the ux was worse than just that.
Friends who use regular Gmail accounts get to use things like Family Link etc for parental approval/monitoring as well... which I'm still not going to be able to use.
Come on Google, please come up with a family service which allows you to use your own domain name. Pretty please! I'd still pay a few $ per month for it, especially if it's good on parental controls and monitoring.
What do they entail?
They are not holding these accounts hostage. You can export mail from Google. You can change your MX records to different servers.
I've been bit as much as anyone by Google killing products, but honestly, it's amazing they've kept this product free for so long. And in this case, the product isn't being killed; they've simply decided to start charging for it.
https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?article_ur...
"After 60 days in suspension, you will no longer have access to Google Workspace core services, such as Gmail, Calendar, and Meet."
I'd really like to know the full list of the "core services" that become unavailable. I've moved my email to Fastmail, but I still use Google Calendar and occasionally Google Meet. What else is included here? Chat? I use that too.
Calendars are very easy to migrate from one account to another (or even to other services). You can download one ics file that describes your whole calendar and import that file to a consumer Google Calendar account. That would probably be the least disruptive path for you.
You could import that same file at least to Apple's free iCloud, though I imagine it would be more disruptive because that service is different in many ways.
Now as for those who want gmail but can't afford the $6, I think it's as simple as you'd need to add Gmail to that "non-gmail" account, which would restore your access to the consumer version of Gmail. Hosting your domain's email does usually need to be done for money now, but with the money one has saved for the last 17 years or so, you should be able to do this for $30 a year or something - and simply configure consumer Gmail to pull messages in via POP from your "personal domain" email account, so that you get the Gmail UI and the pretty generous storage space. I know it's possible to configure gmail to send "From" the other address too, but it does so in a pretty conservative way that some clients show as "Bob Smith on behalf of Bob Smith" and both addresses are visible in the headers.
I've tried to do it on some old G Suite accounts that got suspended and no, you can't.
What i have been doing for years now is to setup Thunderbird leveraging maildir...Now, the majority of the time i do read my mail via google's webmail...but on occasion i do use Thunderbird for reading mail. But the benefit of having my mail locally accessible - as indivudual files under maildir - is that things are snappier for going through all of my messages...But the secondary benefit is that i can (and have been for years) backing up my email as files...In essence all the files under thunderbird's maildir can be copied/pasted to some other storage place/folder/network share/whatever...so i get speed and protection! Plus this (having all my email messages locally-accessible) makes it trivially easy to "re-import" (if you want to call it that) my email from GSuite over to any other IMAP-capable mail provider...it is as easy as dragging files from my GSuite-account in thunderbird over to the other, non-GSuite account within said same Thunderbird view. (Granted it takes time to push up email to the new provider this way if you have tons of messages...but its easy.) I'm sure there are more efficient methods to get your messages from Goolgle and shifted over to another mail provider...but this is what i've done, and it works. YMMV depending on the number of messages you're dealing with, and any constraints your new/other mail provider might have in receiving loads of "new" messages.
Can't log in? Can't take out.
There is sinking cost fallacy of setting up all of this through them. Like I have 100 domains that I've setup to be able to receive emails through Google. So much work + damage to fix everything. Will probably let it die.
That's totally true but only if you are an employee, the business owner should have total access.
I don't see how a free GSuite account - where you are the business owner - is any less yours than a free gmail account.
It's my domain and I'm the admin on G Suite so it's just as much my personal account as any gmail account, and to follow your logic then you basically shouldn't use any kind of 3rd party service or cloud account.
>I realize people started using them like that
Perhaps that's because google advertised this as way to get a gmail address with a personal domain, offered a free basic tier to everyone that wanted, and rolled out support for all their products to use these accounts with them, without, it seems ever considering the eventuality of charging for the free tier and thereby holding accounts and data hostage in away they'd never consider for normal accounts.
But I guess that makes it harder for you to feel superior
"Google Apps
For individuals and small teams
Free"
https://web.archive.org/web/20120602004504/http://www.google...
Just move the accounts to the free version of "google cloud identity.
I've already moved my email and contacts from my GSuite account to Fastmail, but that's a tiny part of the story.
Say you make a choice between equivalent services, A or B. Over time you are locked into your choice because you make decisions that fit your choice. The benefits and costs/risks of choosing A or B are often indistinguishable over time. Yet later, changing between the two can be unfeasibly expensive: e.g. changing banks (mortgage lock-in), changing health insurance (existing condition lock-in), changing careers, etcetera.
Really? I remember them saying these early adopter grandfathered in plans would be free for life.
That's how they'll see it.
The years go by and the fanboyism in him dies a little bit more every day. Then this came along. He is completely screwed, and pissed at Google about it.
The issue isn't moving mail, it's the rest of the ecossystem and accounts. He can move mail somewhere else, but his account is also his Youtube account with all his business videos and playlists, several domains, and several other services which he has used under the PROMISE that they would all be free forever. He actually used the word hostage when talking about this with me. He is a hostage.
Google has all the right to price their products, but it is "typical shit google" to go back on their word, destroy expectations and basically scam their users. If the service hadn't been offered as "free forever", many people would not have used it.
I don't like Google. I used to. But I can't, now. There are a couple of amazing Google-owned products (Maps, Youtube come to mind), but the company, to me, is just the Microsoft of the 2000s. Seriously, it seems like they intentionally make themselves look bad (it's 2022 and some of my youtube videos still appear translated to the language of the country I'm in and there's no place for me to change this without screwing something else).
I don't mind paying someone else just to run email for my domain (or potentially even paying Google) but I'd like to offload my Android app purchases and all that kind of stuff I have on there.
My guess is they have a Family Tier. Same limits as free, but with a cost.
Personally I'm willing to foot the bill if i have to, but that will probably only be a stopgap to get to something that is cheaper.
Unfortunately a lot of the heralded services (ie: ProtonMail) dont have the same services (ie: no contacts sync or notes sync etc). That is VERY handy outside the app. While i could work around it, not sure family would be a willing.
You need to pay $6/month, or $72/year to get 30 GB of storage + custom domain. If you're on Gmail and pay nothing, you get 15 GB of storage. If you're on Gmail and pay $20/year (or $1.99/month) towards Google One, you get 100 GB of storage.
Basically, the custom domain part of G Suite costs quite a lot considering how little of anything else you get in comparison to cheaper Google One plans. No idea how expensive that can be, since Apple will sell me a 50 GB iCloud+ account that has custom domain emails, iCloud Private Relay and other features for 0.99 €/month.
From the FAQ:
> If my G Suite legacy free edition account is suspended, what happens to my additional Google services and paid content after July 1, 2022?
> In account suspension, you won't lose access to other Google services, including YouTube, Google Photos, and Google Play, nor paid content, including YouTube and Play Store purchases.
> You'll also be able to sign in to your Google apps (such as YouTube) and third-party sites with your G Suite legacy edition email address. You won’t be able to receive or send email, including authenticating password resets via email. Without access to Gmail in the suspendedstate, we recommend you use a different email provider to send and receive email messages, including changing logins and authenticating new passwords.
What seems to be weirdly missing is the option to convert to normal non-gmail google account, which is what most individuals or families willing to migrate to a different email host would want. If they offered that, it would allow keeping access to gdocs et al, and you would really only be losing mail hosting and the ability to administer other accounts.
I would think that having such an account would also just be trouble down the line: being on a Workspace account already affects time of access to features routinely (and the new Pay never came to those accounts... though I feel like that's somewhat dead in the water already anyway?) and being in an even more limited non-paying weirdo customer subset can't possibly help any of that out.
>In the coming months, we'll provide an option for you to move your non-Google Workspace paid content and most of your data to a no-cost option. This new option won't include premium features like custom email or multi-account management. You'll be able to evaluate this option prior to July 1, 2022 and prior to account suspension. We'll update this article with details in the coming months.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217#data&zippy=%2Cif-i...
I'm kind of counting on that being available before they start charging me.
I really don't want that; I want to keep my Google Account identity the same (with my custom domain). I've already moved my email from GMail to Fastmail, so I don't need Google to host my email. Unfortunately this support page doesn't give much in the way of details, and I expect there won't be much time between when they release this tool (and I inevitably am able to confirm it won't do what I want) and when I'll have to start moving my data, which will require writing some specialized tools if I want to migrate as losslessly as possible to a new Google Account.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110429023658/http://www.google...
Of course, Google later removed this clause from the ToS.
The only valid argument for it being legal to discontinue this on you is that G-Suite is not GApps, and both are discontinued services anyway, with Google Workspace being the current offering. Which is presumably what they would argue if sued over this.
Looks suspiciously at Google docs, which is free, rapidly approaching monopoly status if it's not there already, and has no revenue stream for personal users to speak of.
The end result is for want of a few engineers to maintain Google Reader or a few dollars of revenue left on the table for free G Suite users, Google's users don't trust the company farther they can throw it, which has led to hundreds of billions of dollars of lost enterprise value as products like Google Cloud just don't have the trust to compete with AWS and Azure.
Other commenters have mentioned that 'Legacy G Suite free users will get a free migration option after all'
Hey Nation World News Desk... Google doesn't care.
It is HOSTAGE and Evil!
We want everything free, and I don’t blame anyone for that desire but when nobody pays the bills it comes due in some way. The result sucks when the math works out…
I'm not sure if my account falls into some sort of never-never-land or if I'm gonna just end up getting charged.
https://www.change.org/p/google-account-migration-from-works...
Every time I see someone mention change.org, I think of it as a bunch of Susanne Vegas standing in a windy tunnel shouting through the wall.
I'd love to hear of any change.org success stories, but as far as I can tell, it's all KONY2012 every time.