Thanks for the explanation – I appreciate your help. Now I understand what you meant.
These accounts are POP (and I am the only user), so after Mail downloads the messages to my computer and I either delete or file them in On My Mac, the copies remaining on the Google server are not very useful to me unless my computer and all my redundant, on- and offsite backups fail or are otherwise inaccessible.
A new update. Not a whole lot of clarification, but at least some delays in the changes:
Does anyone know what’s happening to Google Voice (“Voice”) on G Suite Legacy free edition (“Legacy Free”) when transitioning to Google Workspace?
I don’t see Voice listed among the services for any edition of Google Workspace. It was included at no charge in Legacy Free but it appears to be an add-on for an additional cost for Google Workspace:
And I haven’t seen any mention of preserving Legacy Free Voice phone numbers as part of the transition to Google Workspace.
UPDATE April 11, 2022 6:10 PM
I contacted Google Workspace support four days ago and here is the relevant portion of the reply that I just received:
I understand you’d like to know what would happen to Google Voice numbers after you migrate to a Google Workspace subscription. Free Google Voice numbers will continue to be free and there should be no changes to the user’s account. All their data should be kept. If you need any of the features included with the paid version of Google Voice you can manually migrate the numbers to the paid version but that would be entirely optional.
If you simply wish you keep these numbers for free and continue using them like you have been doing so far you don’t really have to do anything. These numbers and their history will be kept on the users’ accounts.
I don’t know what will happen to your voice account. [Google Workspace Admin Help](https://Your organization can buy Google Voice as an add-on paid subscription to any Google Workspace edition.) says “Your organization can buy Google Voice as an add-on paid subscription to any Google Workspace edition.” So, probably, but not free?
Also, I see new info about the transition that I don’t remember seeing in this thread: There’s a “no-cost option” which drops mail and drops “the ability to manage multiple users” but keeps no-cost versions of Drive and Meet. That might be helpful for folks with a lot of GDrive stuff.
My second try at Takeout succeeded in giving me a copy of Drive stuff and an mbox of all mail for each account. I kept getting permissions errors but going back to the starting Google Cloud URL worked.
Also, the monthly fee for Business Starter when you upgrade seems to be on sale.
iCloud Mail with custom domain is still working nicely for me, so I’m ready to cancel my G Suite subscription.
I would leave the Google server in Mail for a couple of days after changing your MX record, as some SMTP servers won’t update and deliver to your host immediately. This ensures you don’t have any email falling through the cracks. But after 2–3 days (and certainly a week), you can remove the Google account from Mail as by then all SMTP servers will be delivering to the host specified in your updated MX records.
My take on the “legacy G suite” situation and what I did.
7 April – email from Google
Subject: [Action required] Upgrade to get started with Google Workspace
Banner head: What you need to know about your subscription
The links take you to description of what is going to happen;
I didn’t copy down the exact text, but as I read it – legacy could hang on, but they will not be allowed to have multiple users (as noted above) or keep their domain (as I read it) – they have to go to Gmail address with Suite.
Didn’t work for me – all 4 members of the family used the domain address as their primary personal email.
The issue then became effort and cost of switching now.
There are 3 levels of Google Workspace – Starter, Standard, Plus
Even starter is far above what is typically needed for a small business or personal (family) domain. 100 users, 30 GB/user (email, docs, photos), multiple domains, attachment size (send/receive) 25GB/50GB, catch-all address.
As regards Google Voice – that is ambiguous.
“Dial in (US & international numbers)* Yes”
" * Powered by Google Voice"
– not sure how they can say it is included if the Google Voice is extra
– haven’t gotten that far yet.
Costs
Usual is $6 per user per month
If switching from legacy
Free till 1 Aug 2022
then 12 months at 1/2 price = $3 /per user/month
then regular price
Best alternative I have seen (and is often spoken well of here) is Fastmail
$5 / user / month (unless your users can live with 2GB then its $3)
I have read the nice postings about using iCloud.com
– but there is no clear support for that transition (there is at Fastmail)
So … I have kicked the can down the road and signed on for Business Starter.
The transition is of course seamless – just give them a valid credit card and go ;-)))
Only other change of note is my email space did go to 30GB
I figure I have 1 year to decide before the cost goes to full price.
Bob
Sigh. I guess I will too. I definitely have to for my tiny company, even though there are only 3 addresses, because members of the staff love using Gmail in the web interface for some reason.
For my personal domain, that just my sister and I use, it’s a question of giving in to their blackmail or switching to iCloud email I guess. I’m really not quite clear how that works though, with the custom domain. Like my sister has her icloud account and I have mine. And, in fact, both our Apple IDs are in our personal domain already. And I have a 2 TB iCloud+ subscription which I could share with my sister. It’s tempting to move that over if it works well.
I really only use my @icloud.com account for push mail when I get server alerts at work.
Anyway, still thinking.
doug
Nello,
Thank you very much. That is both helpful and reassuring.
I personally don’t need anything beyond the free Gvoice – be able to give out a number and be sent a message (voice or text) that you see in email at leisure rather than having appear on your personal phone.
The only downside as the number gets older is the inevitable spam .
But that is obvious in the first sentence or in the fact that the message is “3 seconds” long ;-))
thanks again.
Bob
Well, so much for considering Apple iCloud+ custom email addresses as an alternative. This from a support chat just now. You can’t use 3rd party email apps!
I realise the response you received is from Apple’s official support, but I’m not convinced it’s correct. Normal iCloud email can be accessed from 3rd party email apps, so I don’t see why the custom email addresses couldn’t be. You should just have to set up the account with the iCloud servers and your standard iCloud email login, and add additional ‘from’ addresses to the account.
I guess it would be good if someone could test it. But in this case it’s not just a support person. It’s also what they say on their own support page.
I’m still in a quandary as to what to do with my legacy custom domain account.
I’m hoping to make this transition for my domain. I have to wait, though, for my son, who uses one of the domain addresses as his Apple ID, to switch to another email address. He’s a little busy, but as soon as he’s able to, I’m going to try to make the transition, and I’ll let you know how it goes to connect to the account from a third party app.
What’s the URL of the support page that says that Apple’s Mail.app is the only email client that can be used with an iCloud Custom Email Domain? (Please accept my apology if it’s somewhere in this thread and I missed it.)
It’s here: Use Custom Email Domain with iCloud Mail - Apple Support.
" * You can use your personalized email address in the Mail app on any device signed in with your Apple ID and with iCloud Mail turned on, and on iCloud.com/mail."
What were you doing before Google started offering free domain hosting for email? Can you go back to that?
Good question. I don’t even remember, it’s been so long ago!
Since I am a hosting service reseller, and I have other domains outside of Gmail itself, of course I could easily move my personal email to standard IMAP in the cPanel. I already have my lerner.net personal blog there.
That might be easiest if I don’t want to give in to Google’s blackmail for my personal account (though I’m already having to do it for my company account).
I sort of hate to give up multiple labels, but maybe that too will make life easier in the end.
And instead of fussing with issues with Mimestream and switching back and forth between Mimestream and Mail when something isn’t working right, I can just stick with Mail + MsgFiler on my Mac and Outlook on my iPhone (which at least has a decent filing feature).
Time to simplify life?
Is this really blackmail though? To me, Google is now charging for a service they previously offered for free, and I have the choice of either paying for it or using a different provider.
I feel it is. They turn the accounts into legacy account years and years ago, and therefore encourage you to use it more, and get you hooked with more family members joining in the “free” account, and promoting it to your friends, and using it for your work email too, and then - wham! All of a sudden you have to pay for each user.
If not blackmail, then maybe bait and switch?
Whatever it is, it leaves me feeling like I don’t trust them anymore.
Definitely blackmail. Google was never giving anything out for free.YOU were always the product, and information/metadata about you and your contacts was always being accumulated and sold or gathered and used by Google. They may have claimed to have stopped scanning the precise content of your messages, but I know for a fact that an otherwise unreferenced URL was included in a private email to a single person with a gmail address last year and it suddenly was in the Google main index, causing immense embarrassment and grief. Google is not to be trusted with private information of any type.