Yea it is odd that not all Google accounts are the same.
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.
>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.
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.
> Google has decided to finally pull the rug out from under those of us who signed up for GSuite when it was free…and will start charging later this year.
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.
The email has not been sent to everyone yet, but it mentions "transition all remaining users".
I had this week to transfer a small account of 2.5GB between 2 google workspace accounts. All paid accounts.
It took 3 days to transfer the 2.5GB account with Google's data migration process. Downloading and uploading the emails with Thunderbird would have taken maybe 3 hours at most.
That's true about GSuite being crippled compared to Gmail, but I accepted that as the price to pay for having my main email use my own domain.
Re:Ask HN: Gmail account security
by Hnrobert42 on Sunday January 23, 2022 @09:50PM
(#30053154)
What features does GSuite lack?
Re:Ask HN: Gmail account security
by WillPostForFood on Sunday January 23, 2022 @10:26PM
(#30053393)
Two that affect me: can't use it with Nest, can't buy family plan YouTube subs.
Family sharing of Youtube TV is another one.
Re:Ask HN: Gmail account security
by dimitrisscript on Friday January 28, 2022 @01:19AM
(#30111261)
Can't share Google home access with another user.
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.
[0] https://accounts.google.com/signupwithoutgmail?hl=en