Gmail/Gsuite Legacy accounts (1 Viewing)

  • Topic Starter rlm
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rlm

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Anyone using the supposedly free-for-life GSuite Legacy email accounts? The ones that Google has reneged on, now forcing us to either lose our 16 y/o personal email accounts (that are connected to all our personal online accounts for banking, billing, schooling, medical, utilities, travel, etc, etc), OR pay $15.60 + tax per person per month, so around $600/yr for the 3 of us! They are going to give a discount the first year, but screw-em, I'd rather just leave now.

Basically they're forcing us into paying for full business suite accounts for all this extra crap services that none of us wants or needs. We just want to keep our existing email accounts and that's it, but they aren't giving that option!

So now I'm checking out email hosting alternatives.

MS Office 365 Family plan is a pretty good deal at $109/yr for up to 6 accounts, and that includes not only email on a custom domain, but full apps for word/excel/powerpoint/outlook/etc for all those accounts too, on up to 5 devices per account. Not that I ever really use the Office apps much and could easily survive without them.... The only shitty caveat to that is they require you to have your custom domain registered with GoDaddy for the email to work with your domain. Ugh.

I also have some business email accounts also set up on GSuite Legacy, and I had a bunch of them set up simply because I could, so why not. But having to pay monthly for email accounts that have very little usage is going to have to end if I have to pay for them. When it comes to business accounts, MS and Google are more equally priced. So I may have to suck it up and pay the $16/mo for one primary business email account... Just not sure if I'm going to move them all to Microsoft or split it with the business one at google and the personal ones at Microsoft, or go with some other email provider altogether.

Anyone else use email accounts on their custom domain? What email hosting provider do you use? Anything besides Gmail or Microsoft worth looking at for business use?
 
Google's new pricing is really annoying. Huge jump in cost just to get from 30GB to 2TB and more video calling features, it's really a pain.

If you want complete control, there's the Exchange Online P1 plan with 365 if you just want emails... It's 5.10/mailbox. Or get the Business Basic license for 7.70 (went up from 6.10 recently), and you get 1TB OneDrive included (along with SharePoint/teams, and a bunch of other features).
 
MapleDots said:
I use gmail for my business accounts but only pay for one license, I wrote a tutorial about how you can run multiple accounts on one license.



https://dn.ca/topic/427/run-multiple-workspace-gmail-accounts-on-one-license-legal/

The tutorial is a bit old now but the principal is the same.


The control account filters all of the different email accounts and it works wonderfully well.

From our personal email account perspective, I think the $109/year for 6 accounts on the 365 Family plan is about the best deal around that I've found, and it includes the full office suite for everyone, whether we need it or not. Just 2 paid accounts exceeds this price with fewer features.

For business use, [notify]MapleDots[/notify] multiple account hack isn't going to achieve what I need because all of the email addresses must be @mapledots.ca in your example. All aliases would have be under the same domain. Another problem is that if you've created accounts for other family members or friends, they need to know _your_ master password in order to send outgoing messages via SMTP - which obviously feels like a big risk as well. Unless I'm misunderstanding something, you're solution would be limited and not much different from just standard email aliases for yourself. What is the advantage? Just the ability to _send_ emails from an alias rather than just receive them? I feel like I must be missing something here.

The problem I'd like to solve is the most cost effective way to have multiple business email accounts on _different_ domains, for example: info@abc.com, info@def.com, info@ghi.com, etc.... That's what that free legacy gsuite was giving us. Now I'll have to give up the additional domains or pay.

[notify]Groot[/notify]'s option would work because I can buy _only_ the email services, but still at a cost of ~$60/account/year, so it still ads up quickly. But it looks like maybe GSuite will have a basic plan that is only slightly higher priced. I was thinking that basic plan was the %50 off discount for the first year, but if that's the long term price for basic email, then that's more tolerable without having to migrate.

All these services are trying to steer you into the full-meal-deal, but for people who want multiple accounts, the problem is that I don't need multiple licenses to gsuite or 365 or whatever. Why would I need a dozen licenses to use Word/excel/etc...? Having the option to choose what features you want (a la carte) for each user is they way they should do it. This way you can buy one master account with access to all the apps (like office), but the remaining accounts can just be email alone.

I think in the end, I will need to drop a bunch of email accounts I've kept simply because it was free and easy. Then I'll have to choose one "master" account that includes the full suite of services either by Google or MS, then buy additional email-only services for my additional accounts I decide to keep.

Right now Microsoft's 365 family plan is by far the most cost effective as my master personal account, then maybe use the Exchange Online P1 plan for the additional business accounts.

I just discovered that Google has a service called Google One which seems to be similar to MS 365 Family Plan, designed to be shared with your family members, albeit with one major caveat. Google One doesn't seem to allow a custom domain, whereas MS 365 Family does.

I'd be interested in converting to a paid version of Google One to share with my family _IF_ they allowed the custom domain option. At this point, MS 365 Family seems to be the winning option.

Unfortunately, I'm not even sure I will be able to use this option either. When the domain I use for personal email was purchased way back, there was a handshake agreement to allow the old owner and friends to continue to use _their_ email accounts on the domain, which I've obliged for the past 16 years or so. But if I go to a Family plan which is best for me, I screw them and they lose their old email addresses which have decades of history to them. Sometimes it sucks being a nice guy. So now I'm trying to decide how far do I bend over to just be nice...
 
This really sucks, as one of my low volume accounts is affected. I'll likely end up sticking with their paid account, although it's a shame they broke their promise. I only need email, not all the other stuff. [I have 5 other paid user accounts on different domains, which I'm happy with] They really lose goodwill with this decision.

The other option I'm considering is to go with Tucows OpenSRS Hosted Email:

https://opensrs.com/services/hosted-email/

which would cost me $0.50/month for that one mailbox.
 
Just host it with a webhost, free IMAP for everyone :D

Anything reliable like Exchange/Google, will cost per mailbox. It's just where the industry is at, and it doesn't look like it will let up.

Even a custom domain at Proton is USD$4/mo
 
I use and like fastmail for my own company, some of my clients use Gsuite and some of my own customers are still on OpenSRS's hosted reseller email product. And yes, some of them are on a CPANEL account too.

That being said, WHC is planning a new email product at the moment, but we're still in the planning stages at the moment.

Does it matter to you in which country the email is stored? Since you're coming from Google, I guess not?
 
FM said:
Does it matter to you in which country the email is stored? Since you're coming from Google, I guess not?

Yeah, I think going forward I would shoot for Canadian based hosting. Back when I got that google deal, it wasn't an option to choose Canadian based options.
 
rlm said:
Yeah, I think going forward I would shoot for Canadian based hosting. Back when I got that google deal, it wasn't an option to choose Canadian based options.

Yeah, it's definitely something we see as a priority for our solution (and I personally too, I host my personal email on our own server that is based in Germany on our own server).
 
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Thanks for that update!!
 
Alas, I was using it for one of my corporations (a dormant one), so I couldn't use the 'personal' option. I sucked it up and ended up paying for it....
 
I was with Hostgator for a few years but switched to Canadian based hosting with a Canadian company (Canspace) 5/6 years ago. Actually how I first met Frank [notify]MapleDots[/notify]. I was having some confusion setting up wth Canspace (my bad not theirs) and I reached out at dnc.ca [notify]MapleDots[/notify] replied and we talked on the phone and he helped me get sorted as he was familiar with them and then we talked domains for a while

rlm said:
Yeah, I think going forward I would shoot for Canadian based hosting. Back when I got that google deal, it wasn't an option to choose Canadian based options.
 

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