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Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

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Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#221
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the problems is that people who paid for Google Play purchases and other services have no way of migrating them to a free Gmail account.

Or from free into the Paid ones - either move you pay twice.

Wait, we'll lose our purchases even going from gsuite to workspace? Is that confirmed somewhere?

Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#222
Glad I migrated my email off of it to Fastmail (although still going through my own email server)

Any tips for downloading google docs and sheets? any online alternative for those? (libreoffice or Mac numbers aren’t that exciting…)

Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#223
post #107

Does anyone know of another service that accepts the email+whatever@domain.com wildcard? I've used that feature a lot over the years and its the only thing keeping me on Google Mail

Fastmail does generally support that. https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591053-Plu...

Fastmail also supports subdomain addressing for your own domains so that if your email is user123@yourdomain.tld you can use whatever@user123.yourdomain.tld rather than user123+whatever@yourdomain.tld and it will be delivered to your mailbox. This is great because:

1. You can create a new alias spam@yourdomain.tld and sign up for services with whatever@spam.yourdomain.tld and it’s all centralized in the same inbox.

2. I’ve found some websites that don’t allow ‘+’ in their email checker/parser. Also since plus addressing is such a common pattern, when sites sell your email to marketers, they probably strip the ‘+whatever’ part anyway so you’ll never know who’s selling your info.

3. They make it really easy in the web UI to reply to emails sent to whatever@user123.yourdomain.tld from the same email address (whatever@user123.yourdomain.tld) vs. for example if you use wildcard addressing. I’ve found this helpful for the few times when an automated email system or customer support person requires you to reply from the correct email for “authentication”.

Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have this exact thing cheaper if you set up a server and forward your mail to Gmail. And you'll also have a server to host a website or whatever else.

Isn't it a pain to avoid getting your outgoing emails marked as spam, if you aren't using one of the established providers (google, microsoft, fastmail etc)?

So, what I did for a similar use case:

-Buy domain from name cheap

-Setup email forwarding to my gmail account with namecheap

-Setup gmail to optionally send as dtparr@domain.name (I forget the steps, but I think it's under settings -> accounts)

So although the email comes to/from my custom domain, gmail is the real sender so I've not had any trouble with delivery (that I've noticed, at least)

Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#225

Huh. I thought that was what I had, but I haven't heard this directly from them. It's the first I've heard of it. I used a microscopic subset of the features. Aside from them hosting my email, I don't think I'm any different from other users. It's just me; I'm not really a business. I notice some differences, mostly in limitations: less storage, features of my Pixel phone that sometimes don't work with that account.…

This is the first I've heard of this as well. I went to admin.google.com and verified that this does impact me. Glad I check HN I guess??

Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#226
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.

Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#227

I'm a Google employee who just found out about this. I'm not annoyed that I have to pay, it's been ~13 years of free service and I don't think Google is obligated to continue providing this to me. The annoying part is that Google doesn't provide any migration tool, but there are migration tools for Google Edu accounts so that graduating students can migrate their data to personal Google accounts. The software is evid…

> I'm a Google employee who just found out about this. I'm not annoyed that I have to pay, it's been ~13 years of free service and I don't think Google is obligated to continue providing this to me. Well I'm very annoyed. It's not that I might have to pay for a service, it's the unfairness of it. I've several friends and family members up with accounts on my domain to be nice to them to make life easier for them or b…

Agreed. I'm fucking livid.

I don't know what their freeloader costs are on the grandfathered Google domain accounts, but I'm having a hard time believing it's going to be worth the amount of goodwill they're going to burn by shitting on their most loyal users of all. These folks have been using Google services (and presumably suggesting as much to others) for at least 10 years.

But I'm not paying $100/mo so my extended family can continue to have a vanity Google account.

Google ought to think long and hard about this one. The email I draft to everyone to tell them that they're losing access to all their email, docs, pictures, apps, music, etc. is going to be harsh as hell on Google. And I'm sure that I'm not the only one that's going to have to author one of those...

Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#228

What are some (paid) alternatives to using G-Suite for emails? Context: We're a small but relatively old SaaS company. Been happily using G Suite's free tier since day 1 - only for email. This announcement is a tad disappointing, but as other commenters have said, 10 years of a free product is pretty great. We'll likely upgrade to Google's paid tier, but out of curiosity, since we're switching to a paid service, we m…

Amazon WorkMail, part of the AWS suite of tools, $4/month/user last I looked. If you host your domain on route53 setup is painless. It's an exchange server compatible service and provides some MDM functionality.

Thanks, will check it out!

For those that are reading this too and are curious:

https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/

Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#229

What are some (paid) alternatives to using G-Suite for emails? Context: We're a small but relatively old SaaS company. Been happily using G Suite's free tier since day 1 - only for email. This announcement is a tad disappointing, but as other commenters have said, 10 years of a free product is pretty great. We'll likely upgrade to Google's paid tier, but out of curiosity, since we're switching to a paid service, we m…

Aruba. Biggest hosting provider in italy has a very competitive mail service. Domain + 5 mailbox x 1gb each at 9 euro/year. At 20 Euro year you can create unlimited mailboxes x 1gb each. https://hosting.aruba.it/en/email.aspx

Re: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying

#230
I have a few legacy Google Apps for Your Domain accounts, but lost the domains per-se several years ago during a perfect storm of clinical depression and financial hardship (which hasn't really ended, just tapered off a bit) where I let the registrations expire. The domains are now being squatted on. The legacy accounts still work for things other than email like Drive, but I've mostly switched to using my Gmail account on Android and elsewhere.

I'll have to think hard about whether I want to start paying for the custom domain accounts, to preserve the option of eventually registering new domains to associate with them (I'm unlikely to pay what the squatters are asking for the original domains I lost), or just do my best to migrate all the old data off, finally.

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