91–100 of 189 posts
I closed my GSuite account and migrated to Fastmail when the free tier shutdown was first announced. I’m glad I did. Fastmail does several things better than GSuite/GMail. It has a very nice UI. I was expecting a UI downgrade, but was pleasantly surprised. Also, migrating (including setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) was fast and easy. The $50/year price difference is well worth it. I’m sharing this because I wouldn’t…
For those that selected the paid option like I did before this was available - I DM'd @AskWorkspace on twitter, and they pointed me to this link https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213 If you follow the instructions and go to the '?' > 'Contact Support', there is an option for switching back to the legacy edition.
This is a relief. I might still move some of my personal domains off of GSuite, but the fact that I don't have to is honestly a real relief. And I wouldn't even mind paying. If you wanted to charge me just for email without any of the other stuff and not offer support, I'd pay $100 a year if you could give me unlimited (or even 25 or whatever the original number of email addresses was) separate inboxes. But when you…
This is great news for those folks that already were on the GSuite Legacy plan... but it's of zero help for folks looking to set something like this up now for personal reasons. I own my last name as a domain, and always thought it would be fun to use it for my primary email as firstname@lastname.com. Well... $6 a month for an individual "vanity" email address is already hard enough to justify once you realize Worksp…
If in 2007 or 2008, Google had positioned this as a business product (and they didn’t. It was literally called Google Apps For Your Domain, promoted as a free service, and people were told to sign up their families or use it for their websites to get all the benefits of Gmail (which was and remains free) but on your own domain), that would be one thing. If in 2012 when they made it a legacy service, they’d told us, you can continue to pay but it’ll be “$X per domain and you won’t get any of these extra business features,” that would have been fine.
If in February or March or whenever this was announced, they had said, “if you want to convert this to a personal Gmail account that has aliasing setup” or you want to again, pay per domain (not per account) and not get certain Workspace features and zero support, that would have been fine.
Instead, we were told a bunch of conflicting things, we were encouraged to upgrade to accounts we didn’t need or to migrate to other providers, or those of us procrastinators (me) held out some hope we’d get a solution like we got. And I’m genuinely thankful for that decision.
But I still agree that there is a market — maybe not a huge one, but a market, for hosted email on a custom domain aimed at individuals and families that doesn’t charge per address.
I’m sure you would risk cannibalizing some business sales for people who would want to be cheap and claim to be a family, but businesses too cheap to pay for email accounts usually just use regular gmail accounts anyway. And with the right restrictions (on number of accounts and of message volume sent), I think you could still have a profitable endeavor. At least I’d like to think so.
Alas.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the thing though... it doesn't need to be free , it can have some cost - just not $6 per user per month. That's difficult to justify for fun/vanity/family email addresses. $6 monthly with unlimited (or some high number) of family member users would be fine. Any cost at all will limit spammers.
It looks like Microsoft 365 Family will get you 6 users, 1 TB storage each user, a custom domain, plus a bunch of Office apps for $99 a year. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/microsoft-36...
Just moved my legacy plan over to the 'new' personal use/free plan and it seems fine. Good grief how this wasn't the plan from the very start is just beyond me. I hope the complete trashing of trust and perception with the earliest and most tech connected users was worth it, Google.
Edit: There's this summary, but nothing detailed so far:
Continue using your custom domain with Gmail
Keep using Gmail with your custom domain
Retain access to no-cost Google services
You will retain access to the no-cost version of Google Workspace services such as Google Drive and Google Meet, and additional Google services such as Google Search, Google Maps, and YouTube
Keep your purchases and data
You will retain access to paid content such as movie purchases at Google Play and data stored on Google Workspace
This option is for non-commercial personal use
Google may remove business functionality from this offering and transition businesses to Google Workspace. Additionally, this option will not include support.
I closed my GSuite account and migrated to Fastmail when the free tier shutdown was first announced. I’m glad I did. Fastmail does several things better than GSuite/GMail. It has a very nice UI. I was expecting a UI downgrade, but was pleasantly surprised. Also, migrating (including setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) was fast and easy. The $50/year price difference is well worth it. I’m sharing this because I wouldn’t…
In that that time:
* I have not had to worry that I’ll inadvertently trigger an account ban and lose my email account/all my email with no recourse.
* UI updates have been gradual, subdued and useful.
* Support requests have been answered promptly and have been extremely helpful, including one case where the web UI wasn’t loading through the corporate proxy, we determined it was the proxy (not their service) and an engineer STILL helped me with a fix after the ticket was closed.
* No significant (if any) price changes.
* No significant outages (that I can remember).
For those that selected the paid option like I did before this was available - I DM'd @AskWorkspace on twitter, and they pointed me to this link https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213 If you follow the instructions and go to the '?' > 'Contact Support', there is an option for switching back to the legacy edition.