goodbye, Google Workspace
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
On the weekend, I received an email from Google that they were cutting my legacy account on Google Workspace.
Dear Administrator,
We are writing to let you know that your G Suite legacy free edition will no longer be available starting July 1, 2022. To maintain your services and accounts, you need to upgrade to Google Workspace.
OK. I've been hosting email for the emuu.net domain there for many years. It was people like me, early adopters that promoted the use of their "Drive" and "Docs" and so on that made that service the success that it is, but never mind that. My family and I are out now that they no longer need us.
The killer app of Google Workspace for us is email, not online file management. I can get the latter through a non-domain account on Google Drive or any number of competitors (some of which, like Office 365, are vastly superior). So my first priority was finding a home for email.
The first thing I did was compare the price of their service (to which they will automatically transfer us) at $US72/year to some alternatives. I found Easymail by EasyDNS, which at $CA55/year is cheaper. But when I consider I'm already paying $CA15/year for them to host the domain, it's really $CA40/year, or about half the price of Google's offering. I've been using EasyDNS for domain hosting for a decade or more, so I'm confident in their service. Moving to Easymail I give up calendar functionality, but our phones and laptops have that covered.
As of Monday morning, all of our (tens of thousands of) email is now sitting on the Easymail platform, and I've moved our handful of Drive files away to Dropbox.
Here's how.
How to get off Google Workspace
transfer the email
I upgraded an existing domain registration on EasyDNS to "DNS Pro". There are instructions on the following steps here.This gives me up to 10x 5GB email accounts. I did *not* change the DNS to point to Easymail because I was concerned about how long it would take to get the existing mail across. This concern proved to be unfounded - I recommend switching the DNS records when you buy the DNS Pro account because it's easier than doing it manually. I then set up one account per person using the Easymail interface. There are a few glitches there on Firefox, I suggest using something like Edge for this. In each account I then used the "IMAP migration" tool. This requires that you enable IMAP on your existing Google accounts, as it will log into the Google account and simpl recovers all of the email. I suggest that you *not* set the account so that email is removed from the Google account when accessed by IMAP.
To set up IMAP on your Google account, click the gear icon in the upper right, choose "See all settings", then choose "Forwarding and POP/IMAP". On that page, click "Enable IMAP" and then ensure that the radio button "Do not limit the number of messages in an IMAP folder (default)" is selected. Click "Save Changes".
Find the "IMAP Migration" tool under "Advanced Settings" in the Easymail administration interface. This can take quite a bit of time, but you get an email saying it's started, a nice progress bar, and an email to say it's finished.
At this point there is a copy of the email in Google Workspace, and another on Easymail. And if the MX records in the DNS are pointing to Easymail, at some point new email will start arriving there.
Now, what to do about the accounts sitting under the Workspace on Google. It's great to have a live email account on Easymail, but I'd prefer to have an non-volatile archive of all the mail I had on Google Workspace. Here's what I did:
1. I set up archive accounts in Google like usernamesomain@gmail.com. These are NOT Workspace accounts.
2. I then went back to the "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" config page for each account in the Workspace and enabled POP. Here I clicked "Enable POP for all mail" and under "When messages are accessed with POP" selected "delete (domain) Mail's copy".
3. For each new
At this point, your new archive account will start retrieving email from your Workspace account and deleting as it goes. Doing this I transferred as much as 60,000 emails per account. It seems to collect 200 emails at once, and runs every six minutes. This took 30 hours for that big account.
forwarding
Having set things up so that archive accounts would drain the original Workspace accounts of email, then set up forwarding of any email that might still arrive at the Workspace accounts. Under each Workspace account's Settings page, I returned to "Forwarding and POP/IMAP", clicked "Forward a copy of incoming mail to" and entered the new archive account. I then selected "Delete (domain) Mail's copy".
final word
I wonder if Google's really thought this through. Because now I'll have to uncouple any Android phones from users on the emuu.net domain. This will potentially be a fair-sized problem for me and it might just be easier to move those of us not already on Apple phones to that platform and be done with it. My son's already on an iPhone, and so is my wife. Losing the Android services around a Google-hosted email service means nothing to them. My daughter, who doesn't yet have a phone, is much less likely to ever use an Android one because Google's cutting us off just prior to her getting her first phone.