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Google Is Holding All Your Old Free G Suite Accounts Hostage

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Re: Google Is Holding All Your Old Free G Suite Accounts Hostage

#101

Post by kelnos »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #71
kadoban wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?article_ur...

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.

Re: Google Is Holding All Your Old Free G Suite Accounts Hostage

#102

Post by jorl17 »

insaneirish wrote: post #24

> 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…

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).

Re: Google Is Holding All Your Old Free G Suite Accounts Hostage

#103

Post by ROARosen »

saurik wrote: post #87
anaisbetts wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sy…

> 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.

Re: Google Is Holding All Your Old Free G Suite Accounts Hostage

#104

Post by reaperducer »

brento wrote: post #93

Here is the related change.org petition I signed. https://www.change.org/p/google-account-migration-from-works...

Has a change.org petition ever changed anything?

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.

Re: Google Is Holding All Your Old Free G Suite Accounts Hostage

#105

Post by [deleted] »

IgorPartola wrote: post #79
kelnos wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Google Is Holding All Your Old Free G Suite Accounts Hostage

#106

Post by 77pt77 »

sschueller wrote: post #2

Any suggestions on a stack if one wants to run their own mail server? Debian with postfix and some sort of round cube still the way to go? I 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.

You'll be considered SPAM almost everywhere.

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.

Re: Google Is Holding All Your Old Free G Suite Accounts Hostage

#107

Post by tonymet »

xanaxagoras wrote: post #76
tonymet wrote: post #66

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.

i know people who manage free GSuite accounts with 3000+ members. that’s $60k / mo in lost sales and at least $500 / mo cost to operate

Re: Google Is Holding All Your Old Free G Suite Accounts Hostage

#108

Post by bragr »

saurik wrote: post #87
anaisbetts wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sy…

> you should not consider them "yours"

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

Re: Google Is Holding All Your Old Free G Suite Accounts Hostage

#109

Post by mindslight »

croutonwagon wrote: post #52
judge2020 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mostl…

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 fo…

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.

Re: Google Is Holding All Your Old Free G Suite Accounts Hostage

#110

Post by kelnos »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #32
scumola wrote: post #3

Yet another good, working service that Google shuts down for the almighty dollar

(disclaimer, work for Google but not on this) 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

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.

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