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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

#661

Well, shit. My home town has a tiny hobbyist theatre group. Their shows have like 30 people in them max, and half of those are family and friends. I set up a G Suite for them to handle email, because it was - you know - within their budget of 0€. There's no fucking way they can start paying 12€/user/month. That's more than they make from a show :D Any alternatives with reasonable pricing for ~5 people?

iCloud+ ($0.99/month in US) allows custom domains with 5 emails. I set iCloud to forward by creating a on addressed to rule. Configured the "Accounts/Import" in my gmail account with smtp (I always used this with my vanity emails). Not exactly the same as before for your usecase perhaps (everyone will need a free gmail), but about as cheap as I could find per recommendation elsewhere in this thread.

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

#663
I have a bunch of users from our university's computer club going years back where the club provided emails. For 15 years it was hosted on a qmail installation on a personal box of mine.

A few years ago, as my time got more expensive and I didn't want to manage it as closely, I moved it to the free gsuite account that I had (with some headaches, as free gsuite didn't support email routing, so qmail aliases couldn't transition over, as "-" is not a traditional alias character).

So, this is screwing with me a bit. What will probably end up happening, as I have a personal 1 user gsuite account already, which does support routing rules, I will just make the old domain an alias on my personal domain and use multiple routing rules to forward mail the matches regex ^username(-.*)?@ to whatever is their personal email account.

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

#664
post #647
post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I'd gladly pay something but 60 dollars per month, every month? I'd be happy to pay 120 dollars a year for the service I'm getting now. Like one of the parallel commenters, I have given out accounts on my domain. I dont really need any more service than I have now, I don't need the full google workspace, I just want gmail on my custom domain, thats all really. The most annoying parts of this, google, the compan…

> I don't need the full google workspace It's honestly just a chore, many things don't work using G-Suite accounts, like taking part of a Google Home family with Gmail users, or signing in to Android Automotive (yes, I had to make a new account to be able to sign in to my Polestar 2 because my account is a G-Suite account), I would be HAPPY if they "downgraded" me to Gmail with custom domains and charged me a few buc…

Agreed.

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

#665
post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would you be comfortable adding your email credentials for two accounts in a tool you didn't write?

If I was to do this, I would:

1. Change password of each account

2. Enter credentials into tool

3. Wait for process to complete

4. Check process completed successfully

5. Change passwords of each account back to what they were (or new passwords)

This at least minimises the window of malfeasance. There's no guarantee, however, that said untrusted tool doesn't also syphon all mail off into its own data-mining database.

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

#666
As many here I use own domain with free Gmail. This Google move changes everything and maybe it's time to move to Microsoft 365 subscription which provides possibility to use own domain even with personal and family plans [1]. For the same subscription Google asks, with MS 365 at least one gets 1TB of cloud and the latest Office suite. 6TB with family plan. No brainer I'd say. Just needed a motivation to finally ditch Google.

1. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-a-personalize...

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

#668

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 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…

I have a number of users at user1/user2/etc@mydomain.com on G Suite. If I started to use Fastmail, could they all continue to use their existing email addresses at Fastmail to send/receive mail, access their historical emails (if I copy those across) etc using whatever client? And second question: if after this G Suite shutdown in May (or whenever) Gmail is stopped for these users they can presumably still link Fastmail to Gmail? Or would they have to use some other email client? Would they each get their own credentials for logging in or would I have to trust them with my "main" Fastmail credentials? I've never used another email provider before.

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

#669

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 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…

Just to add, one of my golden rules for online stuff is to never use one of the ecosystem providers for my email or anything critical.

I have accounts with MS, Google, and Apple, but my domains are elsewhere and my emails are with Fastmail.

The reason is simple. There are too many tales of the ecosystem providers cutting off accounts with no reason and no recourse. If that happens I may well lose some purchases (which ought to be illegal, and I don't buy from the ecosystem providers anyway personally) but I will not be locked out of anything other than devices that need their account (iOS, Android, Azure, etc).

Give one of these providers control over either your domains or your emails and you have a single point of failure for your whole online life (emails, banking, password resets, etc) and whose main concern is policing their obscure Ts & Cs for their other cloud properties. The risk is huge.

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

#670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very troublesome... It is possible to create a general, personal Google account using any email address (iirc) so I wonder if it is possible to just migrate to your own email solution (since you own the domain) and keep the google account, or at least migrate it to a regular account.

It appears this is not possible. I don’t need any of the G Suite features, and I don’t even need email. I just need my single user inside G Suite to be converted to a normal unmanaged Google account but there doesn’t seem to be a way to do that.

Some people are saying if you convert your account to Google workspace then cancel that then you end up with what you want. You'd keep Photos and YouTube but no Gmail, contacts, calendar etc. I'm trying to discover if this is true.
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