16 ms·

I'm definitely getting screwed over by this. I've hosted close friend's and family's email for a decade now on an old G Apps instance. We only ever used it for

I'm definitely getting screwed over by this. I've hosted close friend's and family's email for a decade now on an old G Apps instance. We only ever used it for email on a custom domain. It was most useful because I could reset passwords for them if they forgot it. Now I'm going to have to figure out what to do. Microsoft's Family offering is way better (not saying much considering Google doesn't have one). Right now I'm really considering moving over to them. But I have no idea what the migration of a decade of email across 5 inboxes will look like; not to mention Calendar and contacts. I used this as my primary email on at least 7 android phones (the original Pixel up through the Pixel 6 I preordered). The loss of Youtube purchases; android play purchases, etc. is going to hurt. I'm sad it isn't illegal to turn a free account into a paid one when it means losing purchased content like this. I'm not 100% sure what to do, I don't have dozens of hours to walk everyone through a migration; and Google provides absolutely no migration tools to help with this. This is the last time I'll be burned by Google though. I used to be a huge fan; but at this point I'm done. I'm really looking forward to cutting them out completely. As an added bonus; I no longer have to worry about them deciding to ban my account one day and lose everything.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
> But I have no idea what the migration of a decade of email across 5 inboxes will look like; not to mention Calendar and contacts. Contacts and Email seems to be the easy part: you can download the emails via IMAP to a client like Thunderbird, and the re-upload them on a new account. Years ago I did this transferring from one G Suite account to another for a friend, worked very well. Contacts can be exported in CSV and then imported bia CSV, no big deal too. I have routinely transferred loads of contacts between different systems this way, including Gmail. With calendar, I never had a necessity to transfer data, but I imagine that there are ways, given that it uses a standard iCalendar format.
- digital_voodoo 5y ago
  Are you sure about the re-uploading part? I've had an issue like that last week, and am currently stuck with my mails locally, not able to 'put them back' to the IMAP server. Not Gmail though.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    I most definitely did re-upload it without any issues to another G suite account. It was in 2014 though, maybe something did change since then. Here [1] people write that there are probably some differences between Gsuite and regular gmail accounts. [1]: https://superuser.com/questions/446135/import-e-mail-via-imap-into-gmail https://superuser.com/questions/446135/import-e-mail-via-ima...
  - vetinari 5y ago
    Make sure you are not uploading into the Inbox folder. Any other folder should be fine.
- bshep 5y ago
  you can use a tool called imap-sync ( at least thats what i remember it was called)
dheera 5y ago
I never got this e-mail. Does that mean I'm not subject to this?
- freedomben 5y ago
  Your email is probably sitting in a job queue. I would start looking at other options now.
- Turing_Machine 5y ago
  I didn't get the email either, or at least not yet, but when I logged on to the admin console the notice was there. Unless you verify that it's not in the admin console (and continue to verify that it's not there), I'd assume you're subject to it.
- aembleton 5y ago
  I've not got this either and its not in the admin console. I'm guessing I'll see it in the next couple of days. Think I'll be moving to Zoho mail. Fortunately, all my Google stuff like Youtube and Google Play purchases are tied to a gmail account. I intentionally didn't use my custom domain for that, as I thought this would happen one day. I didn't expect the free email to last so long though.
- Robadob 5y ago
  I received this email about an hour ago, so it must be being sent out progressively.
wffurr 5y ago
Why would you lose purchases? Can't you continue to log in with the same email@domain just with a different provider for mail / calendar / etc.?
- someguydave 5y ago
  If you migrate to a google workspace subscription wouldn't you keep the purchases?
  - wffurr 5y ago
    I don't even think you have to do that. Your Play account is tied to the email address itself, which you can migrate to another provider with DNS, not the workspace / gsuite stuff.
    - theossuary 5y ago
      According to what I've read I'll lose access to my google play purchases made under my legacy g suite account unless I decide to pay $6/month indefinitely. I'm not 100% sure, can't be until I do it; but I'm pretty certain, after reading through posts like https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/3195114/transfer-g-suite-paid-apps-to-gmail-account https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/3195114/transfe...
      - junar 5y ago
        For what it's worth, I came across this passage: > After 60 days in suspension, you will no longer have access to Google Workspace core services, such as Gmail, Calendar, and Meet. You may still retain access to additional Google services, such as YouTube and Google Photos. https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217 https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217
        deadgiveaway 5y ago
        "You may"? May's a stupid word. Do they mean "You are permitted" or "hey, you may have access, you may not - depends how we feel". Is there a definitive list of which are "Google Workspace core services, such as Gmail, Calendar, and Meet" and which are "additional Google services, such as YouTube and Google Photos."? Do the 50 (in my case) G Suite legacy accounts on my domain because just 50 regular first-order Google accounts but without the core services? Can I still use gmail and point it at an external email provider? And it's probably nothing to worry about but it's a bit odd there's no "i'm never going to upgrade and pay 50 users * $6 per month for this so please just cancel the G Suite workspace thing now and let me use my account on Android, with access to the apps and movies I bought, and using some other email provider" option and instead they're probably going to keep nagging me to "provide payment information". What if I use google pay - are they going to assume I'm interested in paying through that?
isodude 5y ago
Shameless plug but https://epostflytt.se https://epostflytt.se is a online mail transfer tool. Coming to think about it we should add calendar and contacts as well.
- criddell 5y ago
  What is it? I can't read the page but am interested in something that could ease migration.
  - isodude 5y ago
    You add your credentials for the old and the new account and the tool moves the mail between the two. Very easy if you don't want the hassle. It should indeed exist an english version, I think there's a newer version soon to be released. You can add several mail accounts and get a mail when the transfer is complete.
    - rzzzt 5y ago
      Would you be comfortable adding your email credentials for two accounts in a tool you didn't write?
      - ryan29 5y ago
        That's how most of those tools work from what I've seen. Some let you use an MS365 admin account with impersonation rights, but that's even worse than giving up the credentials for all the normal user accounts. The biggest problem with every migration tool I've ever tried is they all do a very poor job of reconciliation. I've even used a few that incorrectly report success for partial (aka broken) migrations. The MS365 IMAP migrations are a good example of poor reconciliation, but at least they give you total message counts if you're paying attention. What I'd really like is a tree view of the old mailbox vs the new mailbox with read/unread message counts for every folder.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
apohn 5y ago
Something I just discovered is that Office 365 Family only lets you use custom domains if they are hosted by GoDaddy. If you want to use another domain registrar you have to get Microsoft 365 Business, which has a similar price as Google Workspace :( There's no way I'm moving my domain to GoDaddy.
- wdtrsd 5y ago
  There are reddit posts showing how to bypass the Godaddy requirement. I used them to setup Office 365 for my family. I have since moved the family emails to icloud mail since we already pay for icloud+ and I get multiple domain support, and aliases.
  - rcarmo 5y ago
    Those Reddit posts are two years old.
  - minton 5y ago
    I have considered moving to iCloud as well. How do you find the UX? It has been a decade+ since I used the Mail app but I don’t have fond memories.
    - gzer0 5y ago
      I find it cumbersome. I have a custom domain on iCloud and it's terrible for checking the mail from web browser (which I need to do whilst at work). Not only that. the 2FA requirement is particularly bad. You cannot use 2FA apps (such as authenticator.cc / bitwarden / 1password); the requirement is having an apple device that you have physically signed in on before to be able to allow you to log in. Every single time. Even if you save the cookies.
      - skinnymuch 5y ago
        I absolutely hate Google and Apple’s 2FA of verifying with a diff device. So annoying. I don’t need to check mail by web browser though. So maybe I’ll do it.
ec109685 5y ago
Both Microsoft and Yahoo offer the ability to do “imap in”. Could that be used to sync down the email from Google and then you reconfigure your DNS provider to forward email to your Yahoo/Microsoft personal email account and configure that account to send email using your custom domain name. What is lost in that case?
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  IMAP doesn't sync stuff like calendar, contacts, tasks, settings, email filters (not usually, anyway), and many online clients will only download the email headers in bulk, not the contents; those are often lazy-loaded in when you open a message, especially from more than two weeks ago. A more reliable way to transfer email would be to download all email through POP3 and then copy them over to an IMAP account on the new server. You can definitely export your account information (in fact, European data portability laws pretty much require Google to provide such a functionality) but importing it may require some custom tooling. Unless either Google or the receiving party provides an official migration tool, migration is probably a pretty sucky experience. I know it can be done (companies and educational institutions switch between Google and Microsoft all the time) but I'm not sure if there's any good migration path unless you can get in contact with someone from sales.
designium 5y ago
You can use mailinabox.
l33tman 5y ago
You're complaining that a service you use all the time for a decade for free now might cost the equivalent of a cup of coffee per month? I'm all about Google being evil and all that, but spending valuable aggression on this seems a bit excessive.. The Google Takeout system gives you all of your email in a format you might be able to import into another system?
- rodolphoarruda 5y ago
  You see how things change in perspective depending where you are in the world. Google cost would be nowhere near a coffee per month. If I consider my family, the 4 of us, the cost would be equivalent to going 1 extra week per month to the supermarket. Per year terms? It would be like saving the money to spend a weekend at the beach at a nice hotel once a year. I want that money for me! Edit: I'm in Brazil BTW.
- bmarquez 5y ago
  > The loss of Youtube purchases; android play purchases, etc. is going to hurt It's basically blackmail: pay the new monthly fee which you didn't agree to when you signed up, or lose access to everything you've already paid for.
  - enobrev 5y ago
    "paid for"?
    - bmarquez 5y ago
      The paid Android apps, YouTube purchases, etc which the parent commenter bought using his account. If it was just email hosting (the GSuite service itself), it wouldn't be such a big deal.
      - enobrev 5y ago
        I misunderstood. Thank you for the clarification.
Hnrobert42 5y ago
I switched to Fastmail about 6 months ago after a decade on Google Apps. Yes, it’s paid, but I like it.
- artdigital 5y ago
  The problem isn't just mail. Mail is easy to migrate, but this means you either pay, or you lose access to everything you bought on that account, like Android apps, music, YouTube premium (and playlists), and so on
  - Hnrobert42 5y ago
    I can’t help you there. I don’t rely on those other things much. I still buy all my mp3s and I don’t have many apps on my iPhone. It was partly principled opposition, partly indifference.
coolspot 5y ago
Check out https://360.yandex.com/business/tariff https://360.yandex.com/business/tariff . They have a free “limited” plan that should be good just for a custom domain email.
abawany 5y ago
I've had good experiences with Mailbox.org - the basic plan supports multiple domains with wildcards. Also, a neat free option is Seznam.cz though I don't have considerable personal experience with the domain feature on it.
unmole 5y ago
> The loss of Youtube purchases; android play purchases, etc. is going to hurt. If you migrate to a different email provider, you won't lose access to any of your purchases.
- breakingcups 5y ago
  Do you have a definitive source form Google on that? There seem to be conflicting messages from Google. (Not helped by the "may" wording on this page: https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?article_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsupport.google.com%2Fa%2Fanswer%2F60217&assistant_event=welcome&assistant_id=!EeLdngiT4qrN8SULewzJ1s8nfrtSpqO4&product_context=60217&product_name=UnuFlow&trigger_context=a https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?article_ur... )
  - autumnbuzz 5y ago
    Yes, the official FAQ has been updated with the following: "What happens to my additional Google services and paid content if I don’t want to pay for Google Workspace premium features? 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." Source: https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217?hl=en#zippy=%2Cwhat-happens-to-my-additional-google-services-and-paid-content-if-i-dont-want-to-pay-for-google-workspace-premium-features https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217?hl=en#zippy=%2Cwha...
joshspankit 5y ago
Having been through maybe a dozen of these over the last decades, my experience says that when all costs/hours/conversations are added up it’s going to be cheaper and maintain those relationships better if you simply bill your friends and family so everyone can stay with Gmail. And my advice: If you go that way, charge them automatically by CC every month and add a 30% markup to cover inevitable extra costs like footing the bill when someone cancels unexpectedly.
webmobdev 5y ago
Zoho is the only one I know that still offers free email with custom domains, but with limited number of users - https://www.zoho.com/mail/custom-domain-email.html https://www.zoho.com/mail/custom-domain-email.html
NoPicklez 5y ago
Having used Microsoft Outlook for personal use and Gmail for work, the UI for Google is so much better. Much less clutter IMO.
nirui 5y ago
> Microsoft's Family offering is way better Well, it's called Google _Workspace_ now and their cheapest offering is _Business_ Starter at $6/user/month, and their "Individual" offering is $9.99/month (currently on sale for $7.99/month). I guess Google is making the service business-oriented. For you, that means you need to consider whether or not the service will add value to your _business_ before buying them. It's not a family service. Little rant here: to be completely honest, I don't really understand what Google has been doing in the past decade. As a search engine company, the clerk of the Internet if you will, you'd imagine that they would do anything in their power to create and maintain a vibrant Internet. Things like encouraging custom domain usage, lowering hosting costs etc should be naturally on bucket list. But instead of doing that, they became one of the company who focused on sipping on their user, all the while the Internet is more and more concentrated and hard to search. Well played ...
Gareth321 5y ago
>But I have no idea what the migration of a decade of email across 5 inboxes will look like; not to mention Calendar and contacts. Painful. I know first hand. It is no surprise that these companies make migrating out of their services as painful as possible. This is why I treat personal services like I treat business services now: if there isn't a realistic exit option, I don't use it. There are just too many examples of services being cancelled, accounts banned, and prices jacked up unreasonably.
kcartlidge 5y ago
I totally get that this is largely about losing a decade of "purchased" stuff that is tied to the email address, meaning you're being heavily steered into starting paying for emails etc just to keep your purchased movies, apps, and so on. If you do decide to move away it may not be as bad as you expect for the everyday email, contacts, and calendar. In particular when it comes to your email you probably don't need to manually use IMAP. I've migrated thousands of emails between different providers a few times, the last one being GMail to O365 then on to Fastmail when I decided I preferred them. Each occasion only took quarter of an hour or so and didn't involve manual work or IMAP downloads. The not-so-secret secret is that many providers include the ability to import directly from other providers. In the case of Fastmail (which I've now used for years and totally recommend) their import options include IMAP but also include direct connections into GSuite to do it for you - in the background that option also uses IMAP as it happens, but other than providing the connection details they do the transfer server-to-server without your involvement. Then you can copy over contacts as Outlook CSV files (which are recognised by most services), and calendars by exporting then importing ical files (connecting calendars only works until the connection breaks, in this case by your G account being switched off).
- hatch_q 5y ago
  Users won't lose anything purchased - your google login will stay the same (Same as you can use your Yahoo e-mail as google login), you will just lose g suite domain hosting.
  - kcartlidge 5y ago
    Doesn't affect me, but that's useful info for those caught up in this - thanks.
  - neogodless 5y ago
    I'm not following your line of thought. G Suite domain hosting includes the email address and the user licenses (albeit free ones.) If you stop paying for G Suite (Google Workspace) the user licenses will be revoked. They will not be able to login to Google services, access Play Store / Music / Movies purchases, etc.
viztor 5y ago
Your use-case could be well solved by Cloudflare's email forwarding[1]. I'm contemplating switching since I'm already on Google One. [1][https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/email-forwarding https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/email-forwarding]
- MikusR 5y ago
  That is a third party paid app. The Cloudflare one is in preview https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/
  - celso 5y ago
    We're mass enabling the zones that have asked for Beta access and will be going GA soon. Email me at celso@cf if you can't wait; we'll try to prioritize.
    - e38383 5y ago
      Are you going to add smtp relaying / sending mails too? Otherwise this is a one way street, you can receive mail on your domain, but not send from it.
      - prima-facie 5y ago
        You can use the SMTP relay from other providers. The free tier should be enough for a personal account or two. For example AWS SES, Mailgun, Sendgrid, etc.
hatch_q 5y ago
I'm guessing tutanota is cheapest - $1/month. But there's no easy, automatic way to migrate from gmail. Protonmail is more expensive at $5/month and provides migration from Gmail. There are also other options - like Zoho.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

> But I have no idea what the migration of a decade of email across 5 inboxes will look like; not to mention Calendar and contacts. Contacts and Email seems to be the easy part: you can download the emails via IMAP to a client like Thunderbird, and the re-upload them on a new account. Years ago I did this transferring from one G Suite account to another for a friend, worked very well. Contacts can be exported in CSV and then imported bia CSV, no big deal too. I have routinely transferred loads of contacts between different systems this way, including Gmail. With calendar, I never had a necessity to transfer data, but I imagine that there are ways, given that it uses a standard iCalendar format.

digital_voodoo 5y ago
Are you sure about the re-uploading part? I've had an issue like that last week, and am currently stuck with my mails locally, not able to 'put them back' to the IMAP server. Not Gmail though.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  I most definitely did re-upload it without any issues to another G suite account. It was in 2014 though, maybe something did change since then. Here [1] people write that there are probably some differences between Gsuite and regular gmail accounts. [1]: https://superuser.com/questions/446135/import-e-mail-via-imap-into-gmail https://superuser.com/questions/446135/import-e-mail-via-ima...
- vetinari 5y ago
  Make sure you are not uploading into the Inbox folder. Any other folder should be fine.
bshep 5y ago
you can use a tool called imap-sync ( at least thats what i remember it was called)

dheera 5y ago

I never got this e-mail. Does that mean I'm not subject to this?

freedomben 5y ago
Your email is probably sitting in a job queue. I would start looking at other options now.
Turing_Machine 5y ago
I didn't get the email either, or at least not yet, but when I logged on to the admin console the notice was there. Unless you verify that it's not in the admin console (and continue to verify that it's not there), I'd assume you're subject to it.
aembleton 5y ago
I've not got this either and its not in the admin console. I'm guessing I'll see it in the next couple of days. Think I'll be moving to Zoho mail. Fortunately, all my Google stuff like Youtube and Google Play purchases are tied to a gmail account. I intentionally didn't use my custom domain for that, as I thought this would happen one day. I didn't expect the free email to last so long though.
Robadob 5y ago
I received this email about an hour ago, so it must be being sent out progressively.

wffurr 5y ago

Why would you lose purchases? Can't you continue to log in with the same email@domain just with a different provider for mail / calendar / etc.?

someguydave 5y ago
If you migrate to a google workspace subscription wouldn't you keep the purchases?
- wffurr 5y ago
  I don't even think you have to do that. Your Play account is tied to the email address itself, which you can migrate to another provider with DNS, not the workspace / gsuite stuff.
  - theossuary 5y ago
    According to what I've read I'll lose access to my google play purchases made under my legacy g suite account unless I decide to pay $6/month indefinitely. I'm not 100% sure, can't be until I do it; but I'm pretty certain, after reading through posts like https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/3195114/transfer-g-suite-paid-apps-to-gmail-account https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/3195114/transfe...
    - junar 5y ago
      For what it's worth, I came across this passage: > After 60 days in suspension, you will no longer have access to Google Workspace core services, such as Gmail, Calendar, and Meet. You may still retain access to additional Google services, such as YouTube and Google Photos. https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217 https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217
      - deadgiveaway 5y ago
        "You may"? May's a stupid word. Do they mean "You are permitted" or "hey, you may have access, you may not - depends how we feel". Is there a definitive list of which are "Google Workspace core services, such as Gmail, Calendar, and Meet" and which are "additional Google services, such as YouTube and Google Photos."? Do the 50 (in my case) G Suite legacy accounts on my domain because just 50 regular first-order Google accounts but without the core services? Can I still use gmail and point it at an external email provider? And it's probably nothing to worry about but it's a bit odd there's no "i'm never going to upgrade and pay 50 users * $6 per month for this so please just cancel the G Suite workspace thing now and let me use my account on Android, with access to the apps and movies I bought, and using some other email provider" option and instead they're probably going to keep nagging me to "provide payment information". What if I use google pay - are they going to assume I'm interested in paying through that?

isodude 5y ago

Shameless plug but https://epostflytt.se https://epostflytt.se is a online mail transfer tool. Coming to think about it we should add calendar and contacts as well.

criddell 5y ago
What is it? I can't read the page but am interested in something that could ease migration.
- isodude 5y ago
  You add your credentials for the old and the new account and the tool moves the mail between the two. Very easy if you don't want the hassle. It should indeed exist an english version, I think there's a newer version soon to be released. You can add several mail accounts and get a mail when the transfer is complete.
  - rzzzt 5y ago
    Would you be comfortable adding your email credentials for two accounts in a tool you didn't write?
    - ryan29 5y ago
      That's how most of those tools work from what I've seen. Some let you use an MS365 admin account with impersonation rights, but that's even worse than giving up the credentials for all the normal user accounts. The biggest problem with every migration tool I've ever tried is they all do a very poor job of reconciliation. I've even used a few that incorrectly report success for partial (aka broken) migrations. The MS365 IMAP migrations are a good example of poor reconciliation, but at least they give you total message counts if you're paying attention. What I'd really like is a tree view of the old mailbox vs the new mailbox with read/unread message counts for every folder.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]

apohn 5y ago

Something I just discovered is that Office 365 Family only lets you use custom domains if they are hosted by GoDaddy. If you want to use another domain registrar you have to get Microsoft 365 Business, which has a similar price as Google Workspace :( There's no way I'm moving my domain to GoDaddy.

wdtrsd 5y ago
There are reddit posts showing how to bypass the Godaddy requirement. I used them to setup Office 365 for my family. I have since moved the family emails to icloud mail since we already pay for icloud+ and I get multiple domain support, and aliases.
- rcarmo 5y ago
  Those Reddit posts are two years old.
- minton 5y ago
  I have considered moving to iCloud as well. How do you find the UX? It has been a decade+ since I used the Mail app but I don’t have fond memories.
  - gzer0 5y ago
    I find it cumbersome. I have a custom domain on iCloud and it's terrible for checking the mail from web browser (which I need to do whilst at work). Not only that. the 2FA requirement is particularly bad. You cannot use 2FA apps (such as authenticator.cc / bitwarden / 1password); the requirement is having an apple device that you have physically signed in on before to be able to allow you to log in. Every single time. Even if you save the cookies.
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      I absolutely hate Google and Apple’s 2FA of verifying with a diff device. So annoying. I don’t need to check mail by web browser though. So maybe I’ll do it.

ec109685 5y ago

Both Microsoft and Yahoo offer the ability to do “imap in”. Could that be used to sync down the email from Google and then you reconfigure your DNS provider to forward email to your Yahoo/Microsoft personal email account and configure that account to send email using your custom domain name. What is lost in that case?

jeroenhd 5y ago
IMAP doesn't sync stuff like calendar, contacts, tasks, settings, email filters (not usually, anyway), and many online clients will only download the email headers in bulk, not the contents; those are often lazy-loaded in when you open a message, especially from more than two weeks ago. A more reliable way to transfer email would be to download all email through POP3 and then copy them over to an IMAP account on the new server. You can definitely export your account information (in fact, European data portability laws pretty much require Google to provide such a functionality) but importing it may require some custom tooling. Unless either Google or the receiving party provides an official migration tool, migration is probably a pretty sucky experience. I know it can be done (companies and educational institutions switch between Google and Microsoft all the time) but I'm not sure if there's any good migration path unless you can get in contact with someone from sales.

designium 5y ago

You can use mailinabox.

l33tman 5y ago

You're complaining that a service you use all the time for a decade for free now might cost the equivalent of a cup of coffee per month? I'm all about Google being evil and all that, but spending valuable aggression on this seems a bit excessive.. The Google Takeout system gives you all of your email in a format you might be able to import into another system?

rodolphoarruda 5y ago
You see how things change in perspective depending where you are in the world. Google cost would be nowhere near a coffee per month. If I consider my family, the 4 of us, the cost would be equivalent to going 1 extra week per month to the supermarket. Per year terms? It would be like saving the money to spend a weekend at the beach at a nice hotel once a year. I want that money for me! Edit: I'm in Brazil BTW.
bmarquez 5y ago
> The loss of Youtube purchases; android play purchases, etc. is going to hurt It's basically blackmail: pay the new monthly fee which you didn't agree to when you signed up, or lose access to everything you've already paid for.
- enobrev 5y ago
  "paid for"?
  - bmarquez 5y ago
    The paid Android apps, YouTube purchases, etc which the parent commenter bought using his account. If it was just email hosting (the GSuite service itself), it wouldn't be such a big deal.
    - enobrev 5y ago
      I misunderstood. Thank you for the clarification.

Hnrobert42 5y ago

I switched to Fastmail about 6 months ago after a decade on Google Apps. Yes, it’s paid, but I like it.

artdigital 5y ago
The problem isn't just mail. Mail is easy to migrate, but this means you either pay, or you lose access to everything you bought on that account, like Android apps, music, YouTube premium (and playlists), and so on
- Hnrobert42 5y ago
  I can’t help you there. I don’t rely on those other things much. I still buy all my mp3s and I don’t have many apps on my iPhone. It was partly principled opposition, partly indifference.

coolspot 5y ago

Check out https://360.yandex.com/business/tariff https://360.yandex.com/business/tariff . They have a free “limited” plan that should be good just for a custom domain email.

abawany 5y ago

I've had good experiences with Mailbox.org - the basic plan supports multiple domains with wildcards. Also, a neat free option is Seznam.cz though I don't have considerable personal experience with the domain feature on it.

unmole 5y ago

> The loss of Youtube purchases; android play purchases, etc. is going to hurt. If you migrate to a different email provider, you won't lose access to any of your purchases.

breakingcups 5y ago
Do you have a definitive source form Google on that? There seem to be conflicting messages from Google. (Not helped by the "may" wording on this page: https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?article_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsupport.google.com%2Fa%2Fanswer%2F60217&assistant_event=welcome&assistant_id=!EeLdngiT4qrN8SULewzJ1s8nfrtSpqO4&product_context=60217&product_name=UnuFlow&trigger_context=a https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?article_ur... )
- autumnbuzz 5y ago
  Yes, the official FAQ has been updated with the following: "What happens to my additional Google services and paid content if I don’t want to pay for Google Workspace premium features? 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." Source: https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217?hl=en#zippy=%2Cwhat-happens-to-my-additional-google-services-and-paid-content-if-i-dont-want-to-pay-for-google-workspace-premium-features https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217?hl=en#zippy=%2Cwha...

joshspankit 5y ago

Having been through maybe a dozen of these over the last decades, my experience says that when all costs/hours/conversations are added up it’s going to be cheaper and maintain those relationships better if you simply bill your friends and family so everyone can stay with Gmail. And my advice: If you go that way, charge them automatically by CC every month and add a 30% markup to cover inevitable extra costs like footing the bill when someone cancels unexpectedly.

webmobdev 5y ago

Zoho is the only one I know that still offers free email with custom domains, but with limited number of users - https://www.zoho.com/mail/custom-domain-email.html https://www.zoho.com/mail/custom-domain-email.html

NoPicklez 5y ago

Having used Microsoft Outlook for personal use and Gmail for work, the UI for Google is so much better. Much less clutter IMO.

nirui 5y ago

> Microsoft's Family offering is way better Well, it's called Google _Workspace_ now and their cheapest offering is _Business_ Starter at $6/user/month, and their "Individual" offering is $9.99/month (currently on sale for $7.99/month). I guess Google is making the service business-oriented. For you, that means you need to consider whether or not the service will add value to your _business_ before buying them. It's not a family service. Little rant here: to be completely honest, I don't really understand what Google has been doing in the past decade. As a search engine company, the clerk of the Internet if you will, you'd imagine that they would do anything in their power to create and maintain a vibrant Internet. Things like encouraging custom domain usage, lowering hosting costs etc should be naturally on bucket list. But instead of doing that, they became one of the company who focused on sipping on their user, all the while the Internet is more and more concentrated and hard to search. Well played ...

Gareth321 5y ago

>But I have no idea what the migration of a decade of email across 5 inboxes will look like; not to mention Calendar and contacts. Painful. I know first hand. It is no surprise that these companies make migrating out of their services as painful as possible. This is why I treat personal services like I treat business services now: if there isn't a realistic exit option, I don't use it. There are just too many examples of services being cancelled, accounts banned, and prices jacked up unreasonably.

kcartlidge 5y ago

I totally get that this is largely about losing a decade of "purchased" stuff that is tied to the email address, meaning you're being heavily steered into starting paying for emails etc just to keep your purchased movies, apps, and so on. If you do decide to move away it may not be as bad as you expect for the everyday email, contacts, and calendar. In particular when it comes to your email you probably don't need to manually use IMAP. I've migrated thousands of emails between different providers a few times, the last one being GMail to O365 then on to Fastmail when I decided I preferred them. Each occasion only took quarter of an hour or so and didn't involve manual work or IMAP downloads. The not-so-secret secret is that many providers include the ability to import directly from other providers. In the case of Fastmail (which I've now used for years and totally recommend) their import options include IMAP but also include direct connections into GSuite to do it for you - in the background that option also uses IMAP as it happens, but other than providing the connection details they do the transfer server-to-server without your involvement. Then you can copy over contacts as Outlook CSV files (which are recognised by most services), and calendars by exporting then importing ical files (connecting calendars only works until the connection breaks, in this case by your G account being switched off).

hatch_q 5y ago
Users won't lose anything purchased - your google login will stay the same (Same as you can use your Yahoo e-mail as google login), you will just lose g suite domain hosting.
- kcartlidge 5y ago
  Doesn't affect me, but that's useful info for those caught up in this - thanks.
- neogodless 5y ago
  I'm not following your line of thought. G Suite domain hosting includes the email address and the user licenses (albeit free ones.) If you stop paying for G Suite (Google Workspace) the user licenses will be revoked. They will not be able to login to Google services, access Play Store / Music / Movies purchases, etc.

viztor 5y ago

Your use-case could be well solved by Cloudflare's email forwarding[1]. I'm contemplating switching since I'm already on Google One. [1][https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/email-forwarding https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/email-forwarding]

MikusR 5y ago
That is a third party paid app. The Cloudflare one is in preview https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/
- celso 5y ago
  We're mass enabling the zones that have asked for Beta access and will be going GA soon. Email me at celso@cf if you can't wait; we'll try to prioritize.
  - e38383 5y ago
    Are you going to add smtp relaying / sending mails too? Otherwise this is a one way street, you can receive mail on your domain, but not send from it.
    - prima-facie 5y ago
      You can use the SMTP relay from other providers. The free tier should be enough for a personal account or two. For example AWS SES, Mailgun, Sendgrid, etc.

hatch_q 5y ago

I'm guessing tutanota is cheapest - $1/month. But there's no easy, automatic way to migrate from gmail. Protonmail is more expensive at $5/month and provides migration from Gmail. There are also other options - like Zoho.