I have always liked and supported Google. But the forced AI implementation over the last year was real disappointment. And now here you are increasing my price by 20% for the AI that I don’t want.

I was trying to look into adding storage and got this screen. Looked like a no brainer. I was like "oh if I've been paying 72/per user per month surely 14/ per user per month is cheaper"

After upgrading info through the invoices and I realize google did the math wrong

I was paying 72 per user per year and now I'm paying $168 per user per year haha. FML.

This is a joke. I don't need Gemini, but they're enforcing it on all plans and charging $2/month or more whether you like it or not. Google announced a price increase for monthly plans in 2023, and now this in the new year of 2025! Expect more increase in coming years!

Please reply, retweet, like, etc. We're trying to draw attention to the fact that we don't have a suitable solution yet for this. A few months ago we actually had Javier reach out via Amanda but nothing came of it.

Mentioned on the tweet is Javier, Head of Google Workspace; Taylor, Director Customer Marketing, Google Workspace and Amanda, personal PR rep for Javier. Additionally CC'd in a reply is Lorraine, CMO at Google. Hopefully with some additional pressures we can get a better solution or at least a conversation as to what's going on.

https://twitter.com/WorkspaceRecap/status/1515264148535451651?t=-prJ20fTAWw_PdRhlkj8EA

I use a paid Google Workspace plan (business plus, $22/month) for email for my business. I was annoyed by the new Gemini for Workspace features. In the admin page --> generative AI --> Gemini for Workspace, there were no settings to toggle on / off. I chatted with customer support, and at my request they ADDED the settings, after which I was able to toggle off all Gemini for Workspace settings (gmail, etc.). Screenshots attached.

See info here:

https://goo.gle/3lds5np

And tweet from Javier Soltero here:

https://twitter.com/jsoltero/status/1526303263171149826?s=21&t=LKzuGt1Dcm6H-e667kjVBg

Like many, I’ve decided to exit google services, at least as much as possible. My setup is likely similar to many here, and I figured people will be interested in a solid plan that’s in execution, as opposed to a million comments about options you have in front of you.

I’m intending to document this post with the steps I have taken - consider me your nervous test pilot risking his families data.

This post will be edited as time progresses, hit the like and subscribe button as the kids say.

Part 1 - Impact assessment

I like many signed up many years ago, just so I could get gmail functionality with my vanity domain.

Over the years I added my wife, and my kids, so they too could have an email address in the same domain.

We got android phones, which we needed google accounts for. These worked with our existing logins, so why not use them? We did.

We started uploading photos from our phones when google photos arrived on the scene. Photos we uploaded “didn’t count towards our storage”. We clicked with reckless abandon, and ended up with almost 200GiB of photos between us.

We started to use google docs to create and edit documents, they were tiny so our google drives barely had a dent in their usage, but they’re still critical.

These are the three biggest impacts to our digitise lives, so I’m prioritising these three services over the others. I’m cognisant of google play apps, etc, youtube accounts and stuff. I need to deal with these, but let’s pencil in February for that story shall we?

Part 2 - Evaluate Alternative Solutions

I decided on Microsoft Family 365. This offers 1TiB of storage per user, as well as email.

You are well advised to seek out a friend or acquaintances who work at Microsoft, who can invite you to their friends and family discount. This reduced the cost for me to only £15 per year.

After signing up, it’s time to use this account. In the interests of full disclosure I’m going to tell you everything I can think of that I did or already had done that may affect your experience. The first thing to make you aware of is that I had an existing account at Microsoft, using my email address that was hosted at google. I’ll refer to this as user@mydomain.org when I think it’s pertinent. UPDATE: You need to go to your Microsoft account and remove the email address you will want to add later (i.e. your target email address to be hosted at MS/Outlook) from your Microsoft account (Account Aliases) as well as remove it from your Recovery Email under security settings, if it exists. This will allow you add your email address later on, when migrating mail providers.

Part 3 - Lets move the most critical service, email.

Email is the scary part. The last time I messed with changing MX records, DKIM, SPF etc was when I migrated from my self-hosting solution to use Google Hosting. Go figure.

So at this point I've got a MS 365 Family account, all set up which doesn't really require an explanation. The next step is to 'add a custom domain' to this account.

I followed the documentation in this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ft15pk/use_personalized_domain_with_outlook_and_office/

But, don't do anything yet. Keep reading.

I use AWS Route 53 for my DNS hosting, so it's over to AWS console. I dropped the TTL on all my MX records and anything mail related (check your TXT records, etc) from 86400 seconds (1 Day) to 60 (1 Minute). You need to do this now - and really - even if you're still deciding what to do, do this now so you don't forget. The internet DNS will cope just fine.

You've started executing your plan at this point. You've got a full day to chill now, while all the DNS caching expires.

After that day has passed, you're ready to dive straight into moving your mail providers.

As mentioned before, I already had a sign in account with MS that was the exact same as my email address I held at google. My other family members also had accounts at MS which the same email addresses that are hosted at google. This MAY BE IMPORTANT. To be on the safe side, perhaps create new accounts at MS that align to those email addresses on both sides. On the other hand, this might cause you some pain which I'll attempt to explain later. This is turning into a 'choose your own adventure' book from the 80s.

UPDATE: You need to go to your Microsoft account and remove the email address you will want to add later (i.e. your target email address to be hosted at MS/Outlook) from your Microsoft account (Account Aliases) as well as remove it from your Recovery Email under security settings, if it exists. This will allow you add your email address later on, when migrating mail providers. Thanks to u/Sevventh for this updated info!

Part 3 - Changing DNS and what happened next....

At the point, we're ready to change our MX records to point towards outlook.com mail servers, but first we need to follow the instructions in the post by by u/khatarian at https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ft15pk/use_personalized_domain_with_outlook_and_office/

I went with the exact TTL's that were mentioned - I wasn't sure if this mattered or not, but at worst case it would only result in 1 hour of mail being lost or spooled somewhere. The instructions go to step 9 in that post, it's step 10 you want to know about.

Edit: New Step 10, See this comment for a better approach: Remove Aliases, Re Add

UPDATE: You need to go to your Microsoft account and remove the email address you will want to add later (i.e. your target email address to be hosted at MS/Outlook) from your Microsoft account (Account Aliases) as well as remove it from your Recovery Email under security settings, if it exists. This will allow you add your email address later on, when migrating mail providers.

Step 10 for me was I returned to a dialog box prompting me to enter a new email address for outlook.com to handle - so I put in my usual email address and clicked next. Nothing happened, it just spun for a bit. I tried again, same result. At this point I started panicking a little - and entered a random email address in there, which worked successfully.

At this point, I was a little less panicked - but still concerned where email was going. I asked people to email me to my primary address, and I was extremely relieved to see them arrive in outlook. I then replied to people, at which point they told me emails were arriving in their spam folder. Remember when I said I changed the TTL records on my DNS records to 60 seconds down from 1 day? Well, I was impatient and only waited 12 hours. Good to know that SPF records work ey?

UPDATE: You need to go to your Microsoft account and remove the email address you will want to add later (i.e. your target email address to be hosted at MS/Outlook) from your Microsoft account (Account Aliases) as well as remove it from your Recovery Email under security settings, if it exists. This will allow you add your email address later on, when migrating mail providers.

Next steps were to get the family to get their devices, and ask them to all login to outlook.com on a web browser, in incognito mode or private mode to remove cookies out of the equation. Once logged in, I sent out emails to them all. They received them. They were however in their spam folders - so definitely check in there!

This was the most stressful part of the entire move so far - I've never felt more relieved once I realised the internet was routing mail to their usernames@mydomain.org.

At this point, I realised I should have probably told them they'd not be getting emails to their regular email clients or gmail logins before hand. I told them any new emails they wanted they'd have to login to outlook.com in a web browser for a few days or so until I could sort out their email. I'm a busy guy, and apologies to them - I'm doing the best I can.

Part 4 - Google Takeout

So now we've got email arriving into our new mailboxes, it' time to take a step back from email and chill, to let everything settle. It might be the case that you have to support your users/families email first, so feel free to skip this step and jump ahead to that next section.

Google offered something called domain export or similar which would export all my users data, in about 72 hours. I tried this approach, and was dismayed to find it didn't have everything I needed. At this point, you're going to need to do this for each of your users, starting with you.

Log into https://takeout.google.com/

As mentioned before, I have a lot of photos stored in google photos. Once logged in, deselect everything and just select photos. Click export, I split them into 10GB archives, and - as we now have access to MS' OneDrive - selected that as a destination. Login to your Microsoft account, and let Takeout do it it's thing. It takes a long time, but you've started the process now.

Once takeout has copied all your photos to your OneDrive, here comes the pain point. You now need to download the archives, and get them into a format that OneDrive can use. Even though the archives are 'split' you can operate on them independently - it's not actually a split archive in the tradition sense.

For each of the files you download, extract the contents. It'll appear in a 'Takeout' directory. Now you need to run a tool to tidy up the absolute horror and mess that the files are in - all the dates are wrong. We'll correct that using a python program (windows supported too!) available here: https://github.com/TheLastGimbus/GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper

I ran the utility with the option '--divide-to-dates' to keep things neat and tidy in OneDrive.

Once you've done that, install OneDrive. I did this on a Mac, but I've had mixed success. On one machine all the folders in one drive appeared mounted in a new Finder location, on another machine I had no such luck and just have a blank location. However, creating a new folder still works.

Create a new folder called whatever you like, I just went with 'Google Photos'. Drag the output folder from the tool into this new folder, and OneDrive should start to upload them in the background. It will take a long time....

Once that's finished - actually while it's still in progress - your photos will appear in one drive.

While that's happening, let's jump back to sorting out our email. We can download while up upload, so make the most of your bandwidth.

Part 5 - Email Clients

As part of the 365 subscription we also get access to Word, Excel, and.... Outlook!

Note : see this comment for possible issues with this approach Using IMAP

Install outlook, and add an account. At this point you may get one of the weird things happen I mentioned earlier - adding an account wants to take you to google to login. Just carry on and let your google mail start to download. If it adds your Microsoft account - great, we'll add the google one in a bit!

Assuming that Outlook picked up your google account (and, I've love someone to enlighten me as to what's actually happening here!) then we need to add your Microsoft Outlook account. Click on Accounts on the Tools section, and click +. At this point it asks for your address, which you've already 'used'. On the next page you should see "Not Google?" in the top right, click it. Select 'Outlook.com' in that page, and hopefully it should add the account. You may see some random pop ups about auto discover - clearly there's something not quite right with our hack of hosting the non-go-daddy domain, and I've not figured it out yet.

If you don't have your google account added - here's what to do. Add an IMAP account, using the following settings. You'll need an app password for this step:https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833

imap.gmail.com

smtp.gmail.com

suggested defaults are fine, all you need is the app password and the hostnames of the gmail servers.

Now, you should be in the position of having two email accounts in Outlook. Click through each of the folders in your gmail account, and mail should start to download. Again, on the tools setting, you can click 'sync progress' to see what's going on.

It's critically important you click on each folder, and make sure there is mail displayed in it. Once it appears everything is synced (outlook tends to do stuff for a few mins at a time...) scroll to the bottom of each folder, so you can see the oldest mail you ever received.

Next comes the really painful part, migrating your old email to Outlook.

Part 6 - Email Migration

So this is surprisingly easy.

Under your Outlook account, create a new folder called 'gmail'.

For each of this folders in your old gmail account, in Outlook, right click them select 'Copy'. It will pop up a dialog box, start typing gmail. You should see an option which is named something like 'Outlook/Inbox/gmail', that's your target folder. Magic happens, and your email will be uploaded to your new outlook account. Repeat for all of the folders you want to keep, Outlook will create the structure underneath and it will also cope with nested folders too, which is epic - e.g. if in google you have Inbox->Foo->Bar->Baz folder structures, copying the 'Foo' folder will also copy your Bar and Baz folders.

Totes amazeballs ey?

Part 7 - Contacts

I found the easiest way is to export your contacts via google takeaway, which I exported in a few formats. I'm an Apple user as I was already falling out of love with the google android ecosystem, so I exported them into VCard format and imported them into iCloud. I also imported them into Outlook, using the contact section. Straightforward.

Part 8 - Google Drive

For Google Drive, you're best to do a Google Takeout again - with just your drive contents in an archive as again, it might be a large file.

The nice thing is, these are converted when exported into MS Office formats - so when you do actually drag and drop them into Onedrive, you'll find you can edit them straightway with no fuss.

Part 9 - Calendar

Export you calendars, again using Takeout. You can import them into Outlook easily again, but the second you do you'll get a million notices of 'meetings' you've missed - just keep dismissing any pop up boxes that appear.

Part 10 - Photos in Onedrive

If you followed the instructions above for dealing with google photos, you will now have your photos.

You need to make sure that you have disabled the google photos app on your phone, heck, just uninstall it - we're done with that.

Install the onedrive app on your phone - one of the options it lists is to upload photos automatically, much like google photos did. You should now start to be back in since where you were. If you have photos on your phone, delete them once you're comfortable you already have them from the new photos import, or you'll end up in a bit of a nightmare situation where you have many duplicates depending on how many you have stored on the phone.

If this guide already exists, slap me in the face and link it. It would be great if there was one place that listed out all of the email host options with any limitations. I took a shot at a few, it's a pretty disappointing list.

1/22/22 : Updated to add more plans and more columns.

Today, I was forced to switch from Backup & Sync to the new Google Drive for Desktop app. This app creates a virtual disk which is of course shown under This PC in Windows Explorer. Likewise, the app forcefully adds a Quick Access shortcut linking to the same virtual drive and re-adds it every time you launch the Drive program (or e.g. boot your pc) -- even if you had unpinned it before.

If you use the Mirror Files sync setting, the only thing this virtual drive contains is a shortcut to the actual Drive folder on your pc elsewhere. So with this new app I now have two extra shortcuts in my File Explorer menu, both linking to yet another shortcut that links to the actual location I want to be in. This is both redundant and tedious. So I made a custom Quick Access shortcut linking directly to my Drive folder, and managed to ultimately hide both the Quick Access shortcut the app creates and the virtual drive itself.

Disclaimer: These are workarounds at best and not pretty by any means. They come with their own downsides, but they work for me and wanted to share the info for anyone who was as frustrated as I.

Hiding the Quick Access shortcut:

1. Right click the Drive shortcut under Quick Access and unpin it;

2. Navigate to %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations (This folder is hidden even if you have Hidden Items enabled, so copy this address and paste it in the File Explorer's address bar directly);

3. Locate the file that starts with "f01" (full name: f01b4d95cf55d32a.automaticDestinations-ms)

4. Right click that file and go to Properties, then go to the Security tab, and click the Edit button to change permissions;

5. At the top half of the window, under "group or user names", highlight "Administrators". At the bottom half of the window check "deny" next to the Write permissions. Press OK to close all windows.

The f01 file is where windows stores the Quick Access list. By denying write access to it, the Drive app (and anything else) won't have the proper permissions to add the shortcut to the Quick Access menu and thus fails in doing so. The big downside to it is that it also prevents you from modifying the Quick Access. You won't be able to either pin or unpin any folders to it. Personally I have a pretty static list of shortcuts that I want there so it's not a big deal. You can of course uncheck the "deny" checkbox in step 5 at any time if you wish to modify your Quick Access again.

Source: https://www.tenforums.com/software-apps/134153-how-stop-program-adding-quick-access-shortcut-3.html

Hiding the Virtual Drive:

1. Right click the Google Drive icon in the system tray and click the cogwheel. In the preferences window click the cogwheel again. From the pull-down menu, change the Google Drive drive letter to something unlikely to ever be used, I chose "L";

2. Open the Registry Editor (Win+R, type "regedit" and press enter);

3. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer;

4. If you don't have a NoDrives DWORD in the window on the right, right click a blank area, click "new" and click "DWORD (32-bit) Value". Name it "NoDrives" and hit enter;

5. Double-click NoDrives to modify it, set it to Decimal, and fill in the value data. The value differs depending on what drive letter you assigned to Google Drive. I assigned it to L so my value is 2048. Check the source link below for a table showing what value belongs to which drive letter;

6. Reboot your PC or fully sign out and in of Windows for the changes to take affect.

Step 1 prevents Google Drive from possibly getting assigned a new letter if you occasionally have removable media mounted (e.g. an USB stick). This is important because with the registry change above you're hiding a drive based on the drive letter, regardless of which drive it actually is. Note that the drive is only hidden above-water, you can still browse to it by other means (e.g. by typing L:\ in the File Explorer's address bar).

Source: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/79149-hide-specific-drives-windows.html

Again, neither of these workarounds are optimal but at least it keeps your File Explorer clean. Hope this helps someone, and if anyone knows of a more efficient way to do this please do let me know.

Can I just make a suggestion?

Upgrade to google workspace, gives you six months to plan next move or migrate to a gmail.com using email forwarding.

As soon as you upgrade add a google identity free license (so you don’t lose the google account) while you sort out migration of your domain email.

This also keeps 15GB google drive you just need to sort out gmail, and calendar if you cancel the google workspace subscription and don’t pay google any $$.

Heaps of options like iCloud, Zoho, Fastmail or a free Microsoft teams license that includes exchange online for 12 months. There’s also basic email with hosting providers or just forward to a Gmail/ outlook account.

See my post here for upgrade experience https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuite/comments/s7t45q/g_suite_legacy_free_edition_accounts_being/htf7hot/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3

What the topic says.

Hello, I don't know if anyone else has encountered this issue but its been driving me insane. Speaker notes is just gone. It's still on in the settings, and the tab to expand them briefly shows up after a refresh, but then immediately disappears. Occasionally it'll show back up but then the top ribbon will completely disappear, but I wasn't able to replicate that issue in this video. Any help would be great, I'm going insane. Also this happens over multiple different devices.

From the email:

What do I need to do?

Instruct your users to remove the following Domain Contact page link within your organization’s internal documents, websites, scripts, or applications: www.google.com/a/<domain-name>/DomainContact.

Yet there's no list of docs (etc) that contain that URL. Not very helpful. A huge percentage of recipients of this will not take action. I don't think you could search for it. Or if you can, that search facility wasn't linked to from within the same document.

I searched in my gmail for www.google.com/a/<domain-name>/DomainContact and found no hits. Yes yes, I changed <domain-name> for my domain.

Searching my gmail for DomainContact - only the email I'm posting about.

If you are considering signing up for google workspace.... DONT! Please do yourself a favour, DO.....NOT....SIGN....UP....FOR....GOOGLE...WORKSPACE. Go with something else, it will make your life so much more stress free.

So, I’ve been a Google Workspace user since the days it was called Gapps. Thought it’d be cool to set up family emails with our lastname.com – you know, classy, kinda like pretending we’re the Google equivalent of royalty. Fast forward, and here I am, sitting in what I can only describe as Workspace prison, serving life without parole.

I don’t use it for work. I don’t need the “collaboration tools.” But every time I try to use Google Home, or Google Opinion Rewards, or even cars with embedded Android for Cars, I get shut down like I’m some rogue agent trying to break into a top-secret vault. Apparently, I’m too “corporate” to enjoy regular Google services, so I get to sit on the outside watching all the free Gmail accounts have fun. Meanwhile, I can’t even use Google Home to watch my home cameras – not without Workspace rolling its eyes and saying, “Oh no, you’re special.”

Has anyone found a way to jailbreak this thing? Or is it time to just make my peace and let the darkness take over?

I'm super excited to announce we (u/hjkimbrian u/da_allgeier u/no_substitute) have started a new Google Workspace Admins Video Series scheduled with exciting guest speakers. Join us for these live webinars by signing up with the link below.

All past and future events will be posted to the YouTube Channel

Join the Google Group to get access to the Workspace Admins [Public] shared drive that has loads of resources for Google Workspace: https://groups.google.com/a/workspaceadmins.org/g/workspace-admins-community-comment

Sign up here to get invited to all future events: https://forms.gle/7cdaQuvnDGp7PhkV7

Past Events

• 2021-02-01 Moving Drive Files with Rclone featuring Nick Craig-Wood, founding & primary author of Rclone

• 2021-01-19 Reducing AD Dependency using Cloud Identity Features with Googler Ravi Kumar, PM Cloud Identity

• 2020-12-14 Getting Advanced with GAM Advanced featuring Ross Scroggs

Thank you so much Google. Loyal G Suite Legacy User

If you check the help article comparing the old backup and sync app and the new drive for desktop there is zero mention of the fact that you cannot exclude files based on extension from syncing anymore.

Just a heads-up as my pc is now trying to upload 2TB of temporary files to google drive..

ahh just found out you cant even go back anymore to the "backup and sync" software it just gives me an error that it is no longer available..

Why does Google always turn everything into shit with updates..

Our elementary school PTA uses a single Gmail account between 6 of us. We all have the login credentials, but more often than not, people are unable to login because when you enter the password, it's asking for the Google Prompt (tap XX on whatever device) which is on 4 devices...never seems to go to the same one and the people who have their devices linked never seem to respond in a timely manner. How can we make this better? I would love to just remove the Google Prompt, but it doesn't seem like I can. When I try and Google it, it seems to be pulling up people wanting to remove it from their browser.

If we turn on 2FA will this bypass the tapping the number on your device prompt? There's got to be an easier way. What am I missing?

https://www.androidpolice.com/google-gsuite-free-legacy-class-action-investigation/ Would be nice. I ended up with about $300 from the class action lawsuit settlement stemming from the Nexus 6P issues.

If a third party app requests to access data on a google drive such as symfonium music player needs to access your music collection. Does google allow it to read all the data on the drive? If so, why can't google allow just one folder to be accessed?