I mentioned below comment in another thread[0] some time back and I think it's relevant here too
Three months ago I picked up new hobby: Self Hosting. It has been an amazing ride. I learned a lot and I also get peace of mind knowing I am in control of my data. I understand that there is no self-hosted alternative for certain SaaS services but I think that will change as more and more people choose to be in control of their data.
Self-hosting is great, but self-hosting email is generally nothing but a world of hurt. That's the one thing I would always leave to an established company.
Been self hosting email since 2000. Very little maintenance. I lower risk by having less than 5 actual accounts, and of course normal anti spam measures.
This. I self-hosted from the mid-90s until giving up in 2017. My outgoing email was increasingly black-holed by major email providers. I eventually accepted that I would either have to give up on email or pay for hosting. At some level this feels like paying protection money, but there are a lot of things about the internet that don't match up very well with 90s idealism.
My experience as well. Self host email if you want most of your messages to end up in spam...that's even if your ISP allows a self-hosted email server on their network. Read the fine print first.
But pretty much everything else is super fun to self-host, especially if you get comfortable with docker and reverse proxies like nginx.
Nah, that’s FUD. I had a pretty easy time setting it up myself. You only have to setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Which is pretty easy by itself. You even have online services to check that you have set it up everything correctly.
That’s just where you’re getting started. The biggest hurdle is you have no reputation (or worse, you’re on a shared provider giving you negative reputation to start), and you have no good way to build that up as an individual person, and no good way to debug/appeal each case as your emails get rejected as possible spam.
I’m on hetzner. My IP address was in some dnsrbl lists. I appealed and got my ip clean. Now I can send emails to gmail and outlook and they arrive successfully. I don’t see where all this fuss comes. You set up your server according to google and you are good to go. That’s all.
Is there any way to guarantee your hosting provider does not access your data? That no one can read your storage volumes and a hypervisor can't access instance ram?
I haven't gone that route. Everything is in my home network hosted on couple of Raspberry PIs with HDDs attached. I am going to enable encrypted backups some time in future but I have not decided whether I will choose a cloud provider or choose to do it at my own off-site location.
It is possible to encrypt file system on VPS. Maybe you could look into it if you choose to go with cloud provider option. The main reason I avoid them is because of the uncertainty around pricing.
Encrypted volumes need to be unlocked, and that needs a key in RAM somewhere. The hosting provider has full access to RAM if they want to, and can extract the keys.
I’m not sure if people don’t understand this, or don’t care, but the tsunami of people using the Cloud points to it being some mix of both.
For the many families who have used GSuites for the past years, I would love to see a $3 / month / user, maximum of 5-10 users.
I am stuck in the same boat as many others who created it for the family 10+ years ago and now am going through how to move each service (GMail, Drive, Keep, Photos, YouTube etc etc) to a plain Gmail account. I have most of it worked out, but it is going to take a lot of time getting 5 people migrated.
Same boat except I have about a dozen family members. My annual bill is going to go from $0 to $61212. That seems like a pretty big jump considering that if we all just had regular non-commercial Google accounts, the total cost would be $0. I'm not opposed to paying something, but $864 per year just to have a vanity domain is a bit much.
It seems like Google really ought to consider adding a family plan SKU to Google Workspace, disabling all the business features, and charging $75/year for a whole domain.
Instead, the current path is going to piss off thousands of their most loyal power users as they force these graybeards to manually help migrate all their family members from the Legacy GSuite plans to vanilla Google accounts. Or worse, it's going to piss off all the family members that end up losing access to every email, photo, app, and doc they've acquired over the past decade on their now defunct legacy account.
Christ, does nobody at Google give a shit about goodwill?
I also have the $99 / year Microsoft 365. This gives you 5 people, 1Tb of space each, email, calendar, etc. $99 per year. Not per person per year. Just per year.
Sadly there are too many things I have tied to Google that I am not sure if I can make that switch to Microsoft. But it is getting more and more tempting.
> Christ, does nobody at Google give a shit about goodwill?
I am holding out a tiny hope that maybe if there is enough negative PR, Google will create a cheaper plan or perhaps provide an off ramp for people that want to switch/migrate to consumer accounts.
I'm in the same situation as you but I'm undecided, I might still pay the $6/m per user price. If I do so I will be disappointed in myself for paying the danegeld for the convenience.
One tactic I am contemplating is using the Cloudflare Email Forwarder (https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/email-forwarding) - this way I can keep all the custom domain email addresses and groups/mailing-lists and redirect them to the new personal gmail accounts. Only problem is that email replies will originate from the new personal addresses.
For what it is worth, I ran into the problem of forwarding emails to gmail but having to reply with the gmail address when I setup email for my domain for my personal website. I have a vanity website and wanted to use the domain for email as well, but as little as I use it I did not want to pay even $6 a month for the privilege so I tried both forwarding and having gmail check “other accounts” using smtp.
My web host for my website gives me “free” SMTP services with my hosting so I did initially setup smtp for sending and receiving though gmail, but I ran into a problem where the web host’s smtp servers were often flagged as spam for outbound email, so that sucked. I could get email, but felt like I had to reply using my gmail address to guarantee delivery.
However, I had previously setup outbound email using AWS SES (Simple Email Service) for a different website that sends out transactional emails and had an idea. I setup AWS SES to send out my personal domain emails from gmail and now delivery is great. I rarely have emails flagged as spam. Unfortunately, AWS SES is outbound only, so you cannot use it for both inbound and outbound. I get inbound email to gmail by having it setup to check the web host’s smtp (but you could use forwarding like you mention), and I send outbound email through AWS SES with great delivery results, all through the gmail web client.
Now, this is not a route I would casually recommend. It is arguably a pain in the a* to setup AWS SES. But since this audience here on Hackernews is more of a geek/DIY crowd I thought I would mention it. You can setup AWS SES to send out emails from a personal account for pennies a month. You could arguably setup a Free tier AWS account and never go over the free limits. If you are willing to do some upfront work, it can be dirt cheap to do, and you get to learn the intricacies of email setup like SPF, DMARC, and DKIM.
> Only problem is that email replies will originate from the new personal addresses.
You can configure a regular gmail account to send from the custom domain. Visit:
Settings -> Accounts and Import -> Send mail as
You'll have to confirm ownership of the alternate email address, but it works fine. Even if the alternate email address is associated with a Gsuite domain.
I've looked previously, but it requested SMTP address + username/password. I wouldn't have those because that custom domain email address will be forwarded (receiving only - not send). Am I missing something here?
As long as your spf record allows Google to send mail, you can.
You need to setup an "App password" on your Google account. Then, when you create an alias, you enter smtp.gmail.com and your app password credential as the smtp server.
One problem I have found with this is that the iOS mail app does not have a provision for sending email through a different SMTP server. Has anyone seen a workaround for that? If you send a reply from iOS, even if you have configured the custom-domain email address as an alias on the account, recipients still see "on behalf of ..."
If you see my response above, the method I use removes that annoying caveat. Outbound emails are signed and validated using the custom domain through AWS SES and you don’t get “behalf of” label.
Seeing as this is going to be rather annoying process regardless, might I tempt you to consider non-Google alternatives for at least some of those services? Here are some that have good family/organisation support.
Protonmail[0], for example, has Mail, Calendar, and a Drive service. Pricing is on the high side, unfortunately.
Migadu[1] has Mail and Calendar, and pricing is particularly attractive.
I've considered switching to Migadu in the past, but an outgoing limit of 20/day on the "micro" plan seems weirdly low, especially considering they're advertising it as being for families. It would just take e.g. one family member sending holiday greetings to a few friends to use up everyone's budget for the day. Having your outgoing emails randomly delayed for 24 hours just doesn't feel right for me.
The next higher plan would already have me pay almost five times as much and apart from the higher limits just enables business features that are unnecessary for families.
Yah, I'm currently a (otherwise happy) Migadu customer, and I also think the send limit on the micro plan is strangely low.
I've only personally hit the limit once in the last two years, but I have a hard time believing that e.g.: 100 emails a day would impact their bottom line. I'm kinda tempted to just use Sendgrid's free tier for SMTP which is 100/d.
I'm okay with the $72/user/year price, I think that is fair for what is included. But I have 147 users on my family domain account, and it would be a nightmare for me to individually bill all of them to share the expense.
I can't see this being less than a 60 hour project for me to deal with in total, so the main thing I'm upset about is what I perceive to be a short amount of time to deal with.
So far my best bet looks like signing up as a Fastmail reseller so that users can be directly billed by Fastmail. My preference would be to stay with Google because of all the issues I think I might run into by migrating off of it (mostly related to using it for authentication for other services, which is a practice I no longer do, but did for some time).
If Google would allow each user to pay separately for what they need, then that would be an easy decision for me, because I want to stay, but I don't want to pitch 146 other Wikman's to pay me to pay Google.
Also in that very same boat. I'm prepared to go through the pain of migrating email, calendars etc. - but I've not been able to find out if there's any way to retain the app / video purchases made under the Google accounts that are part of the workspace.
For anyone else frustrated by the vague mercurial umbrella language surrounding "GSuite/Workspaces/GApps"[1] and who this announcement applies to:
> Users of Gmail who retain the "@gmail.com" domain suffix and have free Google accounts that give them Calendar, Drive, Docs and so on will not be affected — at least for now. [2]
> This change applies only to those people, often in families or small businesses, who have been using a Google service that gave them free custom domain names and associated email addresses. [2]
That article makes it sound like Google is paying for your domain registration. To be clear, it let you use your own (purchased elsewhere, though that could be Google Domains) domain for gmail. Also in the time since signups for the free tier closed, it's grown a load of business-y features too.
I was going to go Zoho. All I care about as a premium service is reliable email with a custom domain. This looks like it delivers it for either free or £10 a year (depending on requirements). Much cheaper than Google's offer.
Same here, i have little to no use for any of google's other services...i just need solid email service with my custom domain name. My early tests with zoho show it to be pretty good. Also, i follow @kevq , and he seems to be happy with zoho: https://kevq.uk/reasons-why-zoho-mail-is-better-than-gmail/
I chose purelymail.com after seeing a discussion about it here on HN. Fastmail was my other option that I was thinking about, but Purely was a lot cheaper, and I don't actually use those email addresses much yet.
I didn't get an email either, but given I had to migrate a few organizations together I didn't want to take the bet on if I was affected or not. They're providing free through July, and half off through July 23rd 2023 to me, and I don't mind paying the costs personally, it was always a matter of just not having the time to migrate various accounts together.
I'm in the same boat. I have no idea what to think. Maybe somehow some of us are still getting it free? Or somehow they forgot to email us and we're suddenly going to lose access?
Wonder if it's a region by region notification. I'm in the EU. I did get an email from google last year that they were updating my account region from undefined to Ireland...
If the administrator left the company, can a user become an admin?
Yes. Current users can ask to become an administrator on the account by completing this form. Users will be required to prove domain registration ownership by creating a custom CNAME or TXT record. If the domain registration verification is successful and none of the existing administrators object, the user will be promoted to the super administrator role.
They don't care. At all. You are the product, not the customer.
Why inform you of anything?
Google does this all. the. time. If you use any google product, expect to lose it without a moment's notice, no recourse, and tough beans if you don't like it.
It would be interesting if it didn't, which could suggest there's a different free product. "Google Workspace for Nonprofits", for example, seems to be unaffected by this change, and still free.
Many essentially ordinary Google account holders were incentivised to convert their accounts into domain (now G Suite) accounts for e-mail purposes. However, this has always had adverse consequences because many Google services don't support domain accounts and there is no way to undo the conversion (see https://support.google.com/a/thread/129862070/wind-up-organi... ). This just burdens those users further.
The failure of Google to offer a way out of this trap means it must be politically and/or technically difficult. I used to work at Google a few years ago and I can substantiate that everything is politically difficult and I've seen enough of the way domain accounts were implemented to believe it could be technically difficult too.
I'm sure it's terribly difficult. Back in the day, you couldn't sign into two google accounts at once.. But even back then, in 2006, they were begging users to get themselves into this situation. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30011523
Google already has a mechanism to convert EDU accounts to standard gmail accounts. So most of the work is already done, it would just need to be tested, UI and docs written, etc.
After spending years at Google, the one question you need to ask for these types of "features" is who is going to get promoted for it? It is such a promo-driven product development culture.
So for those of us that got in this a decade ago, and have been running an entire family on it, what should be the chosen migration path?
I've already got nextcloud hosted locally, and could easily add calendar support.
The missing piece of the puzzle is email, and how mad android devices are going to get when their "google" email address no longer points to a google service.
Personally, I will lilely setup an on-prem Exchange instance and start mirroring content, but its a tool I happen to know well.
My real plan is to wait for enough pain at Google by other nerdy employees to either solve the political or technical issues migrating out, or for this policy change to go away.
I'll have my bags packed, but I still have hope that July is far enough away to not have to turn out the lights behind me.
I'm of the opinion that if they're willing to do a halfassed implementation like this now, they can walk it back and try again later after the initial shock has worn off.
The trust that the product will remain is gone. I guess I need to start packing my bags too.
We have very basic free tier (allowed to send up to 3 emails per day for each mailbox if mobile phone is validated). We haven't deleted any validated domain for 15 years and will not do it in the future. We have also option to import all your mailboxes from gmail with google admin credentials.
We self host everything ourselves in Latvia (EU country). Mostly in biggest data centre here (DEAC company). One of DEAC data centers is located in former Soviet nuclear bunker so your data is quite safe ;)
Thank you for the answer! Selfhosted in Europe is what I guess I hoped to read. The soviewt bunker is a bit cringy but nice touch. I really consider switching - I just registerd a free address to play with the UI. Is there anything specific I should watch out where the freemium differs from the business plan?
Most of the servers are actually in newest DEAC data centre and not the one in the bunker. The biggest difference I can think of is sending limit. You get the same support even if you are free user (human phone support, support chat, contact form). IMAP access (with custom password) will be enabled only if you validate mobile phone number (Anti spam measure). Our files storage has limited parallel download limit for trial/free users. We also have native iOS/Android apps
I just tried to sign up for this after my failure to set up iCloud email, but the signup screen tells me my 100 character random password is weak and the continue button doesn't do anything. Starting to think I've been cursed by Google.
OK, I've passed that hurdle by using a much weaker password, but now I'm in, I've paid for five users, and I've validated my domain, it won't let me create any users. When I click on the Users & Inboxes section it tells me "The minimum requirements to create new users are HTML or TXT validation" and right under that it shows my TXT record as validated. And I got several emails from you telling me that it was validated.
I found the issue: we had only 32 char limit for passwords which is quite silly nowadays as password are always hashed. We have removed this limitation and soon will release the change in prod
Hi. I will check password and validation issues in monday morning. You can try to click validate (Recheck validation) button manually if there is problem with domain validation by CRON
This seems like a brilliant opportunity for you folks to collect a major number of freemium businesses including 5 of mine but I agree with the other commenter that the low level of disclosure isn't comforting at all.
I use this service for my whole family (5 adults) so to continue would cost me $30 per month forever. Sux.
Moving email service is not such a big deal, but we have hundreds of Google Docs files to try to transfer. My research indicates this is a laborious process.
I made my move a year or so ago. moved my email to go through improvmx.com setup all my domains and aliases to Gmail accounts and pay the $9 a month for smtp from them too. setup everything to go to Gmail and my outbound to go through the smtp servers. works great!
i can switch providers as I please and every user can use their preferred provider. my mom likes outlook.com so her email goes there instead of Gmail. if I want to switch to proton, I can change just my own and move it there.
I still use Google but moved all my stuff to consumer googlw with Gmail. Only thing I lost was Google Android apps purchases.
Movies could be moved through MoviesAnywhere with some
Get the users, then figure out how to bill them is getting a bit old now.
To try and migrate my email I just bought a Hetzner Webhosting package for 1.9 euros a month for my custom domain. There is an option during the order to use your own domain but leave the registration/dns settings where they are.
I'm now trying to figure out how use a subdomain on my current registrar to test the Hetzner mail. Currently the default mx is G Suite Free.
If all goes well this may be my migration path from Google. I'm grateful for what I have had for free from Google but I am weary of their killing stuff.
You had an absolutely free service built on top of ad revenue. Now that free service has to pay for itself (due to investor or executive pressure). They are charging what is arguably around the same price point as alternatives with high feature parity.
Google isn't "killing" anything, they are just asking users to start paying for it. Perhaps that loses them some users, but they are clearly after something else here (revenue, maybe they have data on how paid users behave differently, perhaps spam/bad actors are a concern on the free plan, idk)
I don't think it's dramatic. There are a couple points to consider:
First, yes, what they've been offering us has value, however, regular Google accounts are free. So asking us to pay $72 per year per user over the standard $0 just for a vanity domain is a little steep. Especially when many of these installs aren't businesses, they're just family domains.
Worse, the bait and switch here is unreasonable. There's no documentation or tooling for migrating from the legacy accounts to vanilla Google accounts. Suppose I don't want to pay $864/year for my family domain. What am I supposed to do with the gigabytes of emails, google docs, photos, app purchases, etc?
Is the choice here really either A) pay up, or B) all your shit goes in the digital dumpster? That's a rotten fucking way to treat somebody that's been advising people to use Google services for over a decade...
If you bind users by offering free without a clear time window ("30 day trial") you should simply not be allowed to shut the service off unless you go out of business. You front loaded your market position on a certain premise. Pay up.
Switching service is neither easy nor free for most users. I wouldn't mind a world where businesses limit free to much longer time frames (say, 5 years) but make it blatantly obvious at sign up. The user can then make an informed choice on whether they are okay with your offer or not.
This would be entirely acceptable if Google Accounts and Workspace weren't inseparably linked. I've got 15 years of purchases made using my Google account - now I'm forced to pay monthly if I want to retain the things I've already paid for.
Except that the closest alternative to a G Suite legacy edition is a free Google account at $0/month. And if you fork over $6/month for the cheapest Business Starter, you're actually getting a worse service than the people who buy additional space for their free Google account - they'll get 100 GB for $20/year while the $72/year G Suite gets you 30 GB. The only benefit for the G Suite is the custom domain, everything else is just downsides.
Respectfully, I was in the 2006 Beta Test for "Gmail on <your domain>", and it's simply not appropriate to refer to these legacy accounts as "free services".
The program was designed to get family mail admins to bring users to gmail en mass. See this: https://imgur.com/a/wQdMCIz
Good point. I think I go that far back too or there about.
I don't think it's the money that bothers me. I just don't trust what I commit to in Google land will be around in five year's time....and I also didn't 'buy' into workspace, just email with custom domain.
It all feels a bit like being part of someone else's experiment :-)
> Google isn't "killing" anything, they are just asking users to start paying for it. Perhaps that loses them some users, but they are clearly after something else here (revenue, maybe they have data on how paid users behave differently, perhaps spam/bad actors are a concern on the free plan, idk)
For many of these users, Google is asking them to pay for... not really anything in return. Maybe they only used the custom email domain, maybe not even that. Maybe they're just asking them to pay for the continued ability to pay for other services like Android apps, YouTube Premium, extended drive storage etc, and continued access to things like Docs/Hangouts that other users will continue to have for free.
>Google isn't "killing" anything, they are just asking users to start paying for it. Perhaps that loses them some users, but they are clearly after something else here (revenue, maybe they have data on how paid users behave differently, perhaps spam/bad actors are a concern on the free plan, idk)
The fact that google/alphabet is a ad company meaning, all their service is target at mining your data email and everything!!! Nothing on google ought to be charged in this case, in fact they really ought to be paying us for using their service, because they are making money from our data.
Your premise is incorrect. Workspace shows no ads, and the privacy policy is extremely clear on the data in Workspace not being used for any kind of ad targeting.
9 years ago, which was the last time this was available to sign up? It had a few other features, like docs/drive but regular consumers had access to pretty much the same.
12 years ago when it was first available? Yes, it was just email at your custom domain.
So for a lot of affected users they've gradually been dragged along as it becomes a more and more business focused product, then Google turns around and wonders why it's giving us these business features we don't care for/use for free. But because in that time Google has pushed to have everything Googly linked to a single Google account, we have a lot of regular consumer stuff linked to the same account.
I've been trying to switch to iCloud email today, but apparently you need to set up an @icloud.com email address before you can use your own domain, and every single thing I've tried I get back a "This address is taken" message, even with entirely random strings [0]. They also have a 21 character limit, just to make it harder.
I've had this issue before - some combination of relaunching System Preferences, toggling the "iCloud Mail" checkbox and smashing "OK" repeatedly eventually made it work.
I set up my @icloud.com email address on my iPhone. It suggests available alternatives. Once you migrate your own domain, you can just use that instead, and never have to use the @icloud.com address for anything externally visible.
I followed the instructions for setting it up on iPhone and iPad too but there’s no option to switch it on there on either device. If I search for it in settings, it shows up in the results but tapping that takes me to the place where it should be. https://twitter.com/drcongo/status/1484592787634937858
The lack of clarity is yet another irritating part of this. Like others, still no email for me. I've been reading that there will be a more gentle onramp than this seems to indicate, where those who "transition to paid" get one more free year, and then another year at 50% off. So anyone really tied in who wants more time before jumping ship that could be useful, but it'd be nice to actually have that all laid out officially in a mail.
So would an official transition method to personal. I submitted a link to https://www.39digits.com/migrate-g-suite-account-to-a-person... (2017) with a few notes [0] earlier today which seems to still mostly work. But the lack of purchase transfer means the pain will vary massively. Those of us who only used it as one of many possible custom domain email systems purely for old school client based IMAP email of course have the easiest smoothest pass. Jumping to something nice like MXroute or Migadu pretty much covers it (though I wish they had some sort of burst send pricing or option) and is smooth enough. Calendars and the like aren't bad either, and there are plenty of generic online storage options. At the opposite end are those with thousands of dollars or more in purchases tied to the account, or massive use of other services. As of right now they seem really screwed.
As much as anything the sheer lazy shoddiness of this change is the irritating bit. I don't begrudge them a bit charging for a decent service, or cancelling offerings even. It might be dirt cheap but it's not free and they're offering some value. Ideally they'd have a basic paid tier for non-money making usage, and indeed that is missed in the brave new subscription world in general, but it is what it is. But it's just plain unprofessional not to even notify broad swaths of people, to leave open all sorts of questions about details, to not have any kind of purchase transfer for those who depended upon it, etc. The should be law mandating the ability to transfer purchases between accounts within the same service as a basic minimal floor, and that at least is not a unique Google problem in the slightest. Seems more the rule than the exception for digital software stores of all kinds. Going between services is reasonably more complicated, but within the same one shouldn't be impossible.
Is there any way to migrate one "google for your domains" account to a @gmail.com account?
I am looking on transferring:
* Google maps location history (have it there since 2009).
* Google photos of all the family accounts + plus partner sharing.
* Google drive
* Gmail
* Google extra storage (that I pay already for).
As far as I know, there are no way to migrate cleanly the data. Only crappy ways if possible at all.
I get the need to make me pay for the services (and I'm happy to pay if it's worth it), but why the downgrading of services after paying for things. There are various little tick boxes in their comparison table where the "legacy" accounts have a feature that "basic" doesn't have, but are present in standard (I'm looking at you noise cancellation in google meet).
Also, why the heck hasn't google solved the "GSuite users can't use this service" problem yet? I've been on GSuite since the beginning, and now I actively avoid google services because I'm sure they won't work with my google account.
I'll most likely end up paying the fee, but why can't they just be a little nicer about it? Google Homespaces would be awesome, parental controls, mailboxes, custom domains, shared calendars, and I'd probably pay a pretty penny for it too.
Have not looked extensively into alternatives but AWS WorkMail looks interesting. Not significantly cheaper but looks like a more predictable option. With Google you never know what is around the corner, I feel.
If your account is foo@gmail.com, you're fine. You just have a regular consumer account.
If your account is foo@mydomain.com, but gmail doesn't handle your mail and you're unable to access admin.google.com and you signed up for your own account rather than having it created by an employer or educational institute, then you're probably fine. You have a regular consumer account, but not at the gmail domain.
If your account is foo@mydomain.com and gmail _does_ handle your mail, you are impacted by this. Or if you originally set it up as some form of gsuite or workspace or google apps for your domain account (you'll know if you did).
Does that mean that the free "Google Docs", "Google Sheets" etc. will no longer be available then? Or is "GSuite" something else? I haven't been able to figure this one out with certainty...
Docs/Sheets/etc haven't been announced to be going paid or unavailable for regular google accounts and that's a bigger shit storm whenever they try it. GSuite/Workspace accounts are something different to just having access to these services which you have if your account came from your school/employer or if you ever signed up to the product that was named at various times:
I too put more effort into keeping my grandfathered account than I ever got out. In my case it was my login getting trapped up by extra "security" to verify from a "previous device" when all such "devices" were long gone browser sessions, and having to go through the support bog to regain access.
It always seemed like GApps on a custom domain would be good for something. But whenever I looked none of the services were compelling. Other side of the lock in looking glass, I guess.
Given the dilemmas I'm seeing other people face (eg family got used to gmail on the domain, and either having to walk everyone through migration, or just give up and pay the Danegeld), I'm glad I dodged that bullet!
About the only Google service I rely on is Voice, which would be easy enough to move except I don't know any other VOIP providers that are as a good as being accepted for snake oil 2FA and the like. I think Google gets a pass due to Project Fi. Does anyone have any recommendations? The best option running seems to be getting a paygo SIM, pop it in a stationary cell modem, and use that for snake oil 2FA. but shrug
Shoot! I've got one tied to a really cool five letters dot com I own since forever. It changed names I don't know how many times ("Google apps for domain" ?, "G Suite" now "Google Workspace" and I don't know how many other names). Heck, I had since back when you could switch the free ones from one domain to another one. Then they tied it to the domain.
It's been a good ride. I take I'll fork out the 5 EUR / month or so for the basic plan.
I've been using this as my primary personal domain when Google was encouraging normal users to switch to this. For the last half decade this has included the account associated with my personal Android purchases.
It sounds like there is no migration path to keep these without paying the extortion... At the very least I've been unable to find anything about it.
I have fiber and cell service associated with this account. What happens to those?
I don't know about fiber or cell, but I was able to keep access to my purchases after canceling the legacy subscription and replacing it with "Cloud Identity Free Edition" subscription.
Thanks for that, definitely puts part of my solution at ease. The other services worst case scenario I'll have to cancel and resubscribe to which will be annoying but at least I don't loose my purchases.
I would gladly pay something which aligns with why I started using this in the first place - an easy way to keep my family members connected. I wish they had an inexpensive 'family' or 'personal' plan instead of everything focused on business.
But it's been obvious for awhile now - the old 'do no evil' Google is long gone. Long live profits and ads and screw everything else.
Google One is inexpensive, but if you have your own domain, in Google's world you cannot be anything but a business and therefore cannot get anything other than business plans.
While this is annoying to many of us, if it diminishes the general public expectation that that online services should be free and subsidised by advertising/marketing/related services, that would be good news.
I'm not particularly optimistic about Google though, as they can charge for their services and continue the whole data-gathering game...
Have google given any insight at all as to what will happen to users purchases and so forth? Is it fair to assume that we either pay up or lose access to that which was purchased?
In addition does this mean @gmail.com users should consider whether or not they could be subject to the same unexpected alteration regarding their own accounts?
It's pretty bad messaging that Google didn't spell out that out or anything else with what happens if you don't want to upgrade to paid G Suite on the linked page. The only thing they have is a link to takeout which implies to me that everything will be wiped if you don't upgrade. I'm always shocked at how badly they fumble consumer messaging.
It's the min 3 users package that's annoying me. Looks like I need to go through a reseller to have a 1 user package. Also iffy if my Google Fi etc. will work or if I have to pay extra.
Assuming you meant VPS, the biggest pain is that these cheap VPS cycle through IP addresses so frequently you're almost guaranteed to get an address on your box that is blacklisted, so all your outgoing mail is ending up in the recipients' spam box, if it gets there at all.
That said, I've been using https://mailinabox.email/ on a $2/mo VPS for about a year, for specific low volume e-mail, and I haven't had too much trouble.
I already have a VPS for many years and it didn't change IP addresses ever. I need a simple way to make it my email server when I have to get away from Google.
In that case, I can say mail-in-a-box is easy, however it does work kind of like an appliance and expects that the server is only being used for mail-in-a-box.
You could move whatever's on your VPS now to a new one, and then put mail-in-a-box on the old one that's had the consistent IP?
Alternatively, you could set up inbound forwarding to a personal e-mail (most registrars include free e-mail forwarding IME -- if yours doesn't, transfer it over to Namecheap), and then use an SMTP service for outbound mail from your domain (you could use Mailgun, SMTP.com, and many others). All of your inbound mail will be free, and if you find that you need to respond with your domain, you'll be paying way less than $6/mo for your outgoing.
