Mike, First of His Name
I've been dreading this moment.
https://www.androidpolice.com/google-legacy-free-g-suite-accounts-ded/
Those of us who took up "free Gmail for your domain forever" back around 2008 are now faced with "pay us a monthly fee or lose every purchase linked to your account".
There's no ability to migrate apps, media, etc to another account of course. This feels like extortion.
Is it possible to get the ACCC involved in something like this? I have no idea how to navigate something like that.
Mike, First of His Name
I've wanted to get my domain away from this thing for a long time now but I'd hoped that the reason they never totally pulled the plug as because they know they needed a migration path to a normal, free account.
Hahaha of course not. It's just "pay us forever or get fucked".
Melissa Avery-Weir ๐ฎ:aceper:
@mike This is terrible news. I've got several domains tied up in this, and while I mostly moved my primary domain to gmail/fastmail a few years ago, the migration resulted in my Google Drive now being a hot mess of files with incorrect modified dates and broken sharing. Absolute mess.
Mike, First of His Name
@melissa yeah I'm not looking forward to this at all. I've mostly been using my "business" domain as primary via Fastmail for the last few years but there's so much linked to what I considered my personal domain under this setup.
One thing it's definitely ensured is that they've set a date for me getting Google completely out of my life. I'm never using any of their services again if I can help it.
Melissa Avery-Weir ๐ฎ:aceper:
@mike That migration nudged me into self-hosted stuff, to be honest. Not everything; after messing around with self-hosted webmail and CalDav, I've opted to pay for Fastmail, for instance. But I'm 100% with you on unGoogling as much as possible. I've been burned too many times by their shenanigans (Reader, the 1000 iterations of Talk/Hangouts/Chat, Picasa...).
Mike, First of His Name
@grumpysmiffy all we need is a way to go back in time to 2008 and tell ourselves what we know now. Easy.
Matthew "Smiffy" Smith
@mike Not putting too fine a point on it, but utterly fuck Google.
In the second of two gigs where Google Workspace is standard, but I pulled the plug on it personally a while back. Just dumped the search in favour of Bing last year.
Mike, First of His Name
@cstanhope I've been trying to untangle from it for a while but still can't change the fact I've got a lot of paid-for content linked to that account. I stopped buying things years ago because I kinda figured this day would come, but it still feels like a really dirty trick.
Plus I've got some family members under one of my domains and I'm going to have to somehow explain this and support them.
Kermode
@mike
Because of this thing in 2008 I stopped running my own relay with postfix - why fight the spam when goog will do it for free? I was really busy with devops.
Last year, for the first time since then, I set up a postfix again on one of my vps. Badly, I wasn't happy with it.
Last week I began toying with yunohost. Seems like postfix is a thing it does very well. In less than an hour I had made all the zone edits (it guided me even!) and had thunderbird and roundcube set up.
A 4โฌ/mo vps and yunohost might be a solution for your relative's emails. And yunohost doesn't mind more than one domain or subdomain. That bit seems really solid.
@cstanhope
Your friendly 'net denizen
@mike Thanks for the heads up. I've been using this free service for too long, but I was always suspicious of "free", so I at least tried to restrict my use of it to mail and docs. Time to finally find out how bad this will be. :/
Kermode
@mike Timely. I was just in the process of changing registrars for a non-profit I put on the free 'forever' thing way back when.
Google lied or redefined 'forever' - I'm not surprised.
Anyhow, saves me the bother and now I have no further obligation to that non-profit and I never have to touch google. Except for ad-blocked youtube. They've done me a favour really.
Elias Mรฅrtenson
@mike Oh great. My family's email addresses and Google accounts is on the legacy plan. We have exactly this problem.
Chirp! is a social network. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.1-beta0, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All Chirp! content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.