Google keeps legacy G Suite alive and free for personal use Google has quietly dropped its demand that users of its free G Suite legacy edition cough up to continue enjoying custom email domains and cloudy productivity tools. This story starts in 2006 with the launch of “Google Apps for Your Domain”, a bundle of services that included email, a calendar, Google Talk, and a website …
There are many tools you can use to manage the spam on your mail sever, from reputation lists (IP, domains, etc.) to tools analyzing the messages themselves. You need to configure everything yourself, though.
You will also need a "clean" IP to send mail and configure SPF/DKIM/DMARC to ensure the mail you send are better accepted, and less prone to be marked as spam. Nothing very difficult, but it may need some experience with mail servers configurations.
I've noticed they are very fussy with SPF records. I've had various issued, including someone complain that I don't reply to their emails (because their SPF record is slightly wrong). I never even get the emails (not even in the Spam folder). They (and I) use Google Workspace...
It's not about being unappreciative of getting something for free. My biggest problem was with the part that I pay for. My domain registration is attached to my G-Suite. They had no problem transferring it over from GoDaddy when I set up G-Suite. But Google didn't offer any way to manage it after I shut off G-Suite. (you log into the management console with an email on your domain, that goes away when you kill your G-Suite subscription) They won't let you manage it from a GMail account. And then GoDaddy wants to charge you to transfer it back to GoDaddy from GoDaddy Wholesale so that I can pay for my renewals from my GoDaddy account.
All I ever used G-Suite for was emails for my personal domain. I simply swapped my MX record to a forwarder, parked the domain, and actually have a better process set up with some filtering rules to handle multiple 'mailboxes'. The end result of dealing with customer support is I'll not be doing business with GoDaddy ever again and I'm evaluating my future business with Google. I have clients on Google Maps and I personally use Google Fiber. BTW, Google Domains support was down right rude.
I signed up for the new personal G-Suite option, but only so I can manage my domain until I decide which registrar to switch to.
I've been using a basic free gmail account and then adding my domain addresses as alias's.
Initially that meant an account on my webhost that gmail slurps from (deleting as it goes) but with cloudflares new (free) email routing that's no longer required and I can treat the gmail account as if it were a custom domain one (simply setting the custom domain account as default send).
Can also manage multiple accounts under the one gmail, so I have the benefits of reliable storage, spam filtering and simple mobile app with push notifications, all for free, with very little set-up.
Well, it's a been a signal to look at migrating... And to be honest if they could just get their act together and allow stuff to be migrated wholesale to personal gmail accounts there would be alot less kickback.
If they can do that in the next twelve months, and then try again - I don't think there would be nearly as much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
It does include email.
For me, changing the mx records to point to my self-hosted exchange server rather than google is not a big deal - a few seconds on OVH's control panel plus maybe a minute or so to set up the accounts on Exchange, then copy the old emails across to the new mailbox and change the account settings in all the email clients.
I mostly use it for YouTube, so migrating all that across to a new gmail account is doable but much more of a pain.
Apparently not, you keep everything but e-mail (unless maybe you were part of the beta program 15 years ago...???).
If you've setup a mail domain and have used Docker before then "mailu" has some good options: https://setup.mailu.io/1.9/
Allowing Google or anyone to siphon your MX is pretty crazy by today's standards and I'm surprised it isn't considered a red flag in security. Think about it... you care about 2FA and such but you're willing to let a 3rd party siphon a major authentication source... fuk'n nutz.
Reach out to support (yeh I know, but it turned out to be pretty painless).
I upgraded to the paid account also, however I reached out to Google support via chat session yesterday.
After explaining the situation hey put me through to their Billing department who've moved me back across to this option once I'd confirmed it was for personal use only.
The whole process took about 25 minutes and was surprisingly easy (unlike every other interaction I've had with Google support).
i had also "upgraded" to Starter (in the early days of this month) and even foolishly decided to use the "pay early" option, to cover at least a year of service for my account, just to make sure that my domain keeps working
(all my home utility bills are tied to dedicated email addresses in this domain, they are collected via a catch-all mail routing rule in a single account mailbox)
i had to contact Google Support for going back to GSuite legacy and for getting a refund for that "pay early" rushed payment... but they didn't actually do anything yet for me :(
They just told me i was added to a queue for GSuite legacy rollback and that i had to wait for them to get back to me and with that refund.
I guess that means they are now flooded with requests for rollback from users... we'll have to wait and see...
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I am a paying customer of workspace for my company and where I work. The first decision put the task of migrating my personal stuff away on my long-term radar. Backing out at the last minute really bothers me more. Why can't they make a business decision and either immediately fix a mistake or stick to it? I trust them less at this point, and would not be against moving my work accounts elsewhere. When will google stop shooting itself in the foot...
I set one of these up a long time ago for my sisters family (6 people) and that was going to be a lot of pain to sort out, or expensive and turn the family into a business for some reason...
And for myself I set it up but I only have one user, and would love nothing better than to be allowed to convert it to a normal google account - if I could keep using my own domain. Would be happy to pay a reasonable amount for this.
I'm not disagreeing, but am asking philosophically - what other offerings (from other vendors) similar to Apps For Domains are still around and available after 15+ years? And for the people who migrated off Workspace since this story started back in January, how many of them are now on services that will be around in 15 more years?
I migrated my secondary domain to Zoho back when all this started, but I have little confidence (or even expectation) that Zoho will still be around in 10 years. It will probably be sold off, rolled into something else, then quietly disappear.
Not to give Google too much credit after all the carnage of side-projects they've binned in the past 10 years (I still miss their SMS query service), and their generally creepy spy-on-everything culture, but they did a pretty good job keeping Apps for Domains and its decendants up and available for us moochers to continue to use. What they'll do going forward remains to be seen, and this whole dust-up does show some cracks in their resolve. But, eh, what other good, long-term options are out there? I would _never_ use Office365 for this kind of thing (personal domain), as it's too expensive, and I deal with it at work and loathe their constant mucking-about with it and breaking/changing things for no good reason other than "new shiny-shiny better".
Everybody's got their own preferences, but I just do not host my docs on some-one/some-company else's computers.
If I want to remotely work on a doc on my home PC, I RDP into my home PC over SSH. If I want to work on a doc simultaneously with someone else, then that doc will a text doc (not a binary and/or proprietary-format doc), and that's what SCCS/RCS/CVS/Subversion, et. al. are for. (Git is not so good for individual files, as it's oriented to file-set changes.)
"Everybody's got their own preferences, but I just do not host my docs on some-one/some-company else's computers."
Oh, I'm in total agreement there. I've never used Docs or GoogleDrive in any significant way. I was more referring to the email service that's part of Google Workspaces. That's the only component of the entire offering that I really use, and it has worked pretty well for my needs since 2006.
Why does everyone on the Internet insist on services they get being free? You all realize that even with free services the company providing them is getting something in return from you.
Yahoo mail is my “junk mail”, it is my oldest mailbox (dating back to mid 90s) and I use it exclusively for things that require an email address and I don’t want to give out one of my other ones. Still, I pay $20 a year for the “ad free” version so I can read it from my favorite email client.
Same as paying for an annual O365 family subscription - I’d rather give someone a small amount of $ and know what the cost is vs. getting something for free and wondering what I gave up in the terms of service.
Literally 3 days after I migrated my family mail, contacts and calendars to Fastmail.
I've just seen too many Google services come and go, and while gmail was lovely while it lasted for me, it's too much of a hard dependency for me to rely on the whims of the marketing and finance departments of a conglomerate in terms of what they whether they want to continue a free product.
I guess I can continue to use G as an SSO provider for the time being, but am slowly going through my various services to ensure I have an email-based backup login, in case they decide to pull the pin on that service as well
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