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Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by xerox13ster on Monday June 10, 2024 @02:02PM (#40636265)
I hope he never actually knows about this account before he's given access to it. I can imagine being raised with this being a thing and developing a mind palace around the contents of the inbox.

I can't imagine losing access to 18 years of life's history and memories because Google decided to kill free accounts, or charge more than you're comfortable paying, or they suffer catastrophic data loss. Or they decide to kill Workspace accounts and they can't be converted, and you are given the data in a mostly unusable format bc they weren't told how to export the data by the law.

I've lost entire wings of my mind palace because I lost a notebook, diary, hard drive, or published works and been bereft of that knowledge or those memories. Some wings I've been lucky enough to rebuild, others are like if the Notre Dame had never been visually captured, drawn, or scanned.

Imagine planning on recording 18 years of your infant's life--all their familial social connections and day-to-day happenstance; the things that make a person who they are--, preemptively, on Google's behalf. Then imagine not even having a guarantee that you will be able to use the data you collected for its originally intended purpose.

Set this up locally and in a format you control, and can secure yourself. Put it on a tape drive or on a USB in a digital storage preserver (something to power on the nand cells so they don't bit rot)

You don't know who your son is going to turn out to be. He might come to resent you for giving Google that level of insight into his life, or for recording it at all. After all, you have decided that your son does not have a right to privacy, and essentially given it away. Better to keep it local so it can be destroyed if that's what he would desire.

Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by geek_at on Monday June 10, 2024 @02:14PM (#40636410)
Valid point. I'm backing up my google drive to my NAS for the same reason and I should do the same with the email accounts in our families google workspace domain.

We're lucky to have snatched [ourlastname].[our countries TLD] so my son can have a really nice [email protected] address which in itself seems valuable these days.

I'm also worried that if he gets the account too soon and does some kind of unintended wipe, all data is lost so maybe the backup is the way to go

Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by shermantanktop on Monday June 10, 2024 @04:19PM (#40638452)
What’s your Google backup strategy? Last time I looked it required periodic manual steps.
Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by vmiklos on Monday June 10, 2024 @04:29PM (#40638590)
Plain mbsync works fine for email with an app password. APIs are there for contacts & calendar backup. I haven't tried backing up the rest.
Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by davchana on Monday June 10, 2024 @05:04PM (#40639081)
Not OP, but I have a Google Apps Script running on daily schedule which extracts every email older than 30 days as .eml file, renames it as YYYY MM DD HH MM SS SUBJECT.eml, saves in a Google Drive Folder with YYYY as subfolder. Drive itself is synced instantly with my hard drive, and I backup that drive occasionally (like around 3 to 5 weeks) to another local & rclone to Dropbox.

30 days so that I can have enough time to delete it. Trash & Spam is excluded, and every successful downloaded email is labeled to prevent it getting downloaded again in next run.

Originally 4 years ago when I started this script, it was timing out because of about 15 years of emails. I ran it for 6 minutes only, every hour. Now once it caught up, it needs only few seconds, and there are only like 5 to 20 emails caught in its daily net.

Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by jackofalltrades on Monday June 10, 2024 @07:26PM (#40640491)
Any chance you can share that script?
Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by davchana on Monday June 10, 2024 @09:34PM (#40641335)
Sure, I will post it on Gitlab, n will let you know. Need sometime to remove my own folder keys and stuff. Lots of things are simply hard coded.

This post was my inspiration:

https://www.labnol.org/code/download-gmail-eml-201028

Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by sebmellen on Monday June 10, 2024 @09:01PM (#40641122)
Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by corford on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @07:22AM (#40644948)
Convoluted but works for me: IMAP via Thunderbird then exporting the contents locally
Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by chrisweekly on Monday June 10, 2024 @05:40PM (#40639493)
Fastmail is a fantastic and inexpensive alternative to gmail.
Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by abraae on Monday June 10, 2024 @07:39PM (#40640597)
One cool thing about Fastmail is you can have multiple domains and email addresses, for the price of a single user.

e.g.

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

...all funneling into your inbox.

We were spending way too much money on GSuite before realising this.

Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by cdmckay on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @01:42PM (#40649258)
You can do this with Groups in Google Workspace pretty easily.
Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by Pufferbo on Monday June 10, 2024 @11:20PM (#40641919)
Love Fastmail. It really is fast, sometimes feels like 2 or 3x quicker to get emails than Gmail.
Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by Slapping5552 on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @05:50AM (#40644355)
> We're lucky to have snatched [ourlastname].[our countries TLD

Been planning to do this for my family as well. But after my (admin) passing, and with multiple children sharing the same domain name, one of my children will have to be the domain admin for everyone in the family. This might be fine if they remain in good terms and have enough trust of the admin to not screw their primary online identity...

I have yet to figure this part of the equation out.

Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by 2Gkashmiri on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @11:18AM (#40647219)
I don't think that family member should be taught to treat this as a burden. Make them treat it as a professional work that has to be done or in absense of that, "teach" some other family member to take the torch.

I have a family member who I have been slowly teaching about tech. Not the how to run a server but the ideas and sometimes the specifics of something.

Most of the time they I force them to "figure it themselves" which has taught them more than tutorials ever could.

Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by Slapping5552 on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @11:40AM (#40647582)
My concern was more about trust and goodwill towards whoever ended up as the admin / custodian of the domain name
Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by dfee on Monday June 10, 2024 @03:27PM (#40637621)
> I can't imagine losing access to 18 years of life's history and memories because Google decided to kill free accounts, or charge more than you're comfortable paying, or they suffer catastrophic data loss.

Oof. Google now charges me more than I’m comfortable paying and want us to upgrade to the next tier due to data usage.

I’m happy to move off to another email provider, but my wife is upset that she’ll lose access to all the docs that have ever been shared with her on that Google Apps account. This is truly hell.

Apparently, after we migrate off we can recreate a free, non-email Google apps account “[email protected]”, but it’ll be empty.

Suggestions, and sympathy for poor decision making 10+ years ago, welcome.

Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by svat on Monday June 10, 2024 @05:26PM (#40639330)
Just curious: could you delete some of the larger files, or do something else to reduce the data usage, to stay within the current tier?
Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by dfee on Monday June 10, 2024 @06:28PM (#40639958)
Yes; that's a possibility, too. I'm trying to weigh whether that's the best course of action, or decouple our email and google docs.

I have seen price increases a number of times already, though. What started at $5/mo/user has increased. I do feel like a captive, which breeds a bit of animosity, though.

Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by nox101 on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @04:03AM (#40643745)
I’m not sure what your goal is

you can “make a copy” of the docs shared to you. those copies are yours and you can download them. they’ll be included in backups, etc

You can also share them with a free account and then have the free account make copies

Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by ck2 on Monday June 10, 2024 @04:27PM (#40638545)
Someday Google could very likely terminate gmail accounts that block youtube ads

Then there is this which just scrolls on and on forever

https://killedbygoogle.com

(or https://gcemetery.co )

Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by supportengineer on Monday June 10, 2024 @07:54PM (#40640702)
I don't see anyone mentioning Google Takeout (takeout.google.com) - it's easy to use.

I have a suggestion to make it easier - At the highest level of your Google Drive, make a folder containing the easily exportable types such as docs, sheets, pdfs, photos.

Re:Sending Emails to my three-year-old by xerox13ster on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @09:54AM (#40646214)
That's what I meant when I said they would be given the data in a mostly unusable format because Google wasn't told _how_ to export the data by the law.

When they shut down GPM I requested my listening data via Takeout and it was in a format that was absolutely useless to me. OP seemed to be in Germany so Google has been told by the law to allow data exfiltration, but as we've seen with Apple, these companies engage in malicious compliance and there's no guarantee that they'll get usable data from Takeout.

There's also no guarantee that over 18 years the EU regulatory bodies will remain uncaptured, and never reverse course on data controls such that Google could conceivably kill Takeout as a product due to "the excessive costs involved in supporting an organization wide data exfiltration tool"