And you can't convert your account to a regular Google account. I really want to untangle all this, but there's no way to (for example) export your Google Photos sharing settings and import them into a new account. I have hundreds of GPhotos albums, with many of them shared with various people, and if I migrate to a new, regular Google account, I'll have to manually set up all those sharing settings again. And this is just one of many difficulties; I'm assuming I'll also lose all my Hangouts/Chat history as well, with no ability to import the old history.
But I'll be doing all this sometime soon, as Google has decided to finally pull the rug out from under those of us who signed up for GSuite when it was free (well, "Google Apps for Your Domain", as it was known back then), and will start charging later this year.
This is all incredibly frustrating, and the level of lock-in is pretty severe after more than a decade of having this account. If I could do it all over again, knowing what I know now, I would have created a Google account without GMail[0], using my email on my custom domain, and hosted my mail somewhere else. Though, admittedly, back when GMail was first a thing, webmail otherwise universally sucked.
My favorite is that I cannot migrate my Nest account to a Google account because it does not support Google Workspaces accounts. I use it with my own domain and it is my private Google account.
If you think this is bad you should check out iCloud. They're all as scummy as each other about locking in users so the friction to leave is sufficiently high.
Do you have a citation for this? I heard last year they were going to start charging for new accounts, but that since I set it up on my domain in 2008 I was grandfathered into the free plan indefinitely.
Unfortunately... it was Google (so kind of hiring the wolf to care for my sheep, as it turns out).
And now they're cutting off all of us free tier folks. Which I can't fault them for, but still blame them for. Because I'm petty and entitled or whatever.
I'll lose important things like my Google Voice number that I've had for a decade unless I pay for a business account.
It is very frustrating. I did a lot with Google Apps on that domain, and migrating that stuff out to a consumer account is a painful process.
For me ideally I would like to move to something else (even paid) just because someday Google deciding to block me for whatever reason scares me quite a bit after having everything for the last decade attached to this account. I would like to export my emails, switch my domain to the new service, and import everything - but I have no idea how realistic that will be yet.
It lets me track who is sharing my email address and gives me control over that (set up simple filter to automatically delete any email received at [email protected] when I start getting spam on it).
It’s been really effective - such a part of my day-to-day flow now I can’t go back.
The transition was pretty painless. I setup an email forward from gmail to my proton inbox using [email protected], every email I received at that address I’d go update my contact information with. After a bit, I was able to turn off the forwarding. Basically the classic strangulation pattern for microservice migrations applied to email.
I adopted Fastmail for my domain email, and it has been a good experience (I do know that Fastmail is a five-eyes company with all the related issues around privacy, and I researched alternatives for several weeks, but I guess in the end I was willing to trade privacy for ease-of-use, uptime and various other factors).
Now I am looking into getting away from other Cloud-provided backups such as Prime Photos, iCloud, etc., moving to self-hosted NAS storage.
I'm documenting everything here if you're interested:
Well this is horrifying. Of course, not much worse than Google unilaterally and permanently banning a Gmail account.
that way I've got the comfort of gmails features but always have a "real" mailbox to fall back to if anything happens
She literally had to ask her friend, who asked me, I asked one of my friends to ask one of his friends who works at Google to put in an internal ticket. It was thankfully resolved quickly (she lost access to all her work materials), but the process is insane.
Use your own domain with Fastmail. Yesterday.
That way at least if you no longer can access your account, or you get banned, or whatever, you don't loose your address (since you can just move to another provider).
Also, use an email client on your PC (such as Thunderbird) and configure it to keep a copy of all your emails locally (and possibly have the PC backed up). That way if you loose access to your account you don't loose access to your mail, that you can even upload again in the new provider server.