Freeing your domain from Google Workspace

As you may now, Google is going to charge us $6 per user for using our personal domains from Google Workspace. Here is what I am doing to free myself up from Google workspace.

Note that I am happy to forward my emails out of my personal domain. If that is a hard requirement for you (to not forward email out of personal domain), this is not the page for you.

My family uses Google workspace heavily.

• We all use *.anands.net email addresses. Few of us use it as a way to forward our emails, some of us use it as our primary email (login to gmail.com using *.anands.net)
• Some of us backup our documents to drive.google.com and photos to photos.google.com
• Contacts are stored in Google contacts
• We also use Google domains for domain management

Move your email

A few years ago, I stopped using my anands.net email using gmail. I logged into gmail settings and setup a forward rule to forward all emails to my personal gmail account.

I don’t remember what the trigger for doing this, but for a couple of us, this was where we started. This is not ideal, since I still use anands.net email address and the forwarding happens at the email client level (we will get to ideal state in the last step).

For my kids, they started using anands.net emails when they were too young to create their own gmail accounts, so they were using gmail.com but logging in using their anands.net logins.

So for them:

1. Create a personal gmail account

The first step was to create a personal gmail account.

2. Allow POP3 access in your personal domain email

In gmail settings, allow POP3 download for all emails.

3. Allow Less Secure App access in your personal domain email

Head to Google security: https://myaccount.google.com/security and enable less secure app access. You need to be able to POP emails out of your old account to your new account. This took me a while to do.

4. POP emails to your new email address

Login to your new email address at gmail.com, go to settings — Accounts & Import. Add a new email to import emails from.

The username is your personal domain. POP server, port and SSL enabled (see below).

If you allowed less secure app access, Gmail will do its thing and import your emails over a day or so.

5. Configure send email as in your new email address

If need be, you can setup your personal gmail address to use your personal domain email address.

At this point, you should be receiving all email in your new email address. You can also add a forwarding rule to your personal domain as I indicate in the first image above, but that is optional. Our goal is to get rid of google workspace.

Export data from personal email account

The data we needed to extract from personal email account is Google Drive, Google Photos and Google Contacts. You can either download the content from each of those manually, or you can use Google Takeout to extract the data. It is currently running for my kids.

Most likely, the photos will go to iCloud and documents will go to google drive on the personal email account.

Within 30 minutes of requesting takeout, my daughter got her content via multiple zip files.

Disconnect Google Workspace from Google Domains

Here are two domains from my Google Domains. anands.net is setup for Google Workspace. norcalhiker.net does not. Our goal is to get to this. The easiest way to do this is to add a email forward in google domains.

The easiest way to delink Google Workspace is to create an email alias at Google Domains level. When I went to Email for a domain and added an “Email forwarding” address, Google said that since I have Google Workspace configured, my forward won’t work. If I needed email forward, I need to delink Google Workspace. That is what I did. That delinked my workspace from my domain.

Email forwarding can be configured at each email (or alias level) here. Set this up here and at this step your personal domain is free of Google Workspace.

Update 1

Bulk uploading Google photos has been unfunny. Google does not have a bulk uploader anymore. Picasa does not work and their recommended solution, Google Drive uploads photos to Google Drive. You can pull them from photos (only photos, not folders) and it creates copies of photos. Idiotic.

There is an open source CLI , which can create duplicates if you run it repeatedly (which you will). There is a paid desktop solution which seems to work (at least the first 500 free uploads). It is a shame that Google does not have an easy way to upload photos (or transfer them).