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> 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 you

> 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.

kadoban 5y ago
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.
- EduardoBautista 5y ago
  > 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. 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...
  - kadoban 5y ago
    Thanks, that's new to me.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    The paragraph prior reads: "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.
    - xp84 5y ago
      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.
seba_dos1 5y ago
> You can export mail from Google. I've tried to do it on some old G Suite accounts that got suspended and no, you can't.
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  IMAP just works; at least as long as the account is active.
- mxuribe 5y ago
  As @Freak_NL noted, IMAP can help here. 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.
- OutsmartDan 5y ago
  You can use takeout.google.com to export your entire inbox.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    I think you missed the part about the account being suspended. Can't log in? Can't take out.
aaomidi 5y ago
And what about all your purchases?
hartator 5y ago
> 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.
anaisbetts 5y ago
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
- callesgg 5y ago
  You don't need to pay anything to google or to use googles mail functionality to keep licenses connected to an account. Just move the accounts to the free version of "google cloud identity.
- saurik 5y ago
  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.
  - ROARosen 5y ago
    > just like when you are using an account given to you by your employer, you should not consider them "yours" 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.
jbverschoor 5y ago
Actually keep getting errors on my accounts after the expiry is supposedly finished
kelnos 5y ago
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.
- IgorPartola 5y ago
  Sounds like Google was providing you a bunch of valuable services for free for a long time. Not defending Google but your argument is not compelling.
  - robocat 5y ago
    More likely because of path dependency. 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.
    - IgorPartola 5y ago
      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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
smallerfish 5y ago
> honestly, it's amazing they've kept this product free for so long Really? I remember them saying these early adopter grandfathered in plans would be free for life.
- bobmagoo 5y ago
  Source?
- 77pt77 5y ago
  And they were. For the life of the product. That's how they'll see it.
jorl17 5y ago
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).

kadoban 5y ago

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.

EduardoBautista 5y ago
> 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. 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...
- kadoban 5y ago
  Thanks, that's new to me.
- kelnos 5y ago
  The paragraph prior reads: "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.
  - xp84 5y ago
    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.

seba_dos1 5y ago

> You can export mail from Google. I've tried to do it on some old G Suite accounts that got suspended and no, you can't.

Freak_NL 5y ago
IMAP just works; at least as long as the account is active.
mxuribe 5y ago
As @Freak_NL noted, IMAP can help here. 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.
OutsmartDan 5y ago
You can use takeout.google.com to export your entire inbox.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  I think you missed the part about the account being suspended. Can't log in? Can't take out.

aaomidi 5y ago

And what about all your purchases?

hartator 5y ago

> 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.

anaisbetts 5y ago

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

callesgg 5y ago
You don't need to pay anything to google or to use googles mail functionality to keep licenses connected to an account. Just move the accounts to the free version of "google cloud identity.
saurik 5y ago
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.
- ROARosen 5y ago
  > just like when you are using an account given to you by your employer, you should not consider them "yours" 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.

jbverschoor 5y ago

Actually keep getting errors on my accounts after the expiry is supposedly finished

kelnos 5y ago

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.

IgorPartola 5y ago
Sounds like Google was providing you a bunch of valuable services for free for a long time. Not defending Google but your argument is not compelling.
- robocat 5y ago
  More likely because of path dependency. 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.
  - IgorPartola 5y ago
    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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

smallerfish 5y ago

> honestly, it's amazing they've kept this product free for so long Really? I remember them saying these early adopter grandfathered in plans would be free for life.

bobmagoo 5y ago
Source?
77pt77 5y ago
And they were. For the life of the product. That's how they'll see it.

jorl17 5y ago

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).