The Journeyman – Brandon Kraft

Dropping Google Apps

I’ve been using a G Suite/Google Apps/Gmail for your Domain address for a decade at least. Generally, this had been fine for me until relatively recently. I can’t do the following with them:

  • Google Fi
  • Google Fiber
  • Family Sharing for Google Music/Apps/Movies

All in all, it hasn’t been that much of a pain but with Google Fiber, I get 1TB of storage that is attached to an account I don’t do anything with, our Google Music account is tied to a different account than my Google Assistant so “Okay Google play (something)” doesn’t work right and so on.

I’m thinking about consolidating everything to a single Gmail.com-based account and setup Gmail to send as my actual email address.

Anyone gone through a similar process? Ideally, I’d like to lose as little data but will assume there will be some along the lines of playlists, etc.

Originally Published:

Sol 5419

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Comments

8 responses

  1. Alan Bush
    Alan Bush

    I kept my apps account (grandfathered from the free days) and forwarded it to my vanilla Gmail address for exactly the reasons you described.
    The vanilla address is my Google identity for everything else, but I kept the apps mainly just to keep my vanity email.

    Reply
  2. Brandon Kraft
    Brandon Kraft

    Yeah, that makes sense to do it like that.

    Reply
  3. Brandon Kraft
    Brandon Kraft

    The email part is what I’m least worried about all-in-all. It’s all of the other data Google has on me (Drive docs, Photos, etc) that will be a huge pain.

    Reply
  4. Robert Landers
    Robert Landers

    If you have a dedicated server or vm, you could also set up your own email server that only forwards it to you. There’s some gotchas in the config, but it’s pretty straight forward.

    Reply
  5. Christopher Smith
    Christopher Smith

    I’ll give up my free Google Apps account when it’s pried from my cold dead hands.

    Reply
  6. Brandon Kraft
    Brandon Kraft

    I won’t cancel it—just making less and less sense to use it as my primary day-to-day.

    Reply
  7. Mark Zakariya
    Mark Zakariya

    I believe Fi is now available for Google Apps/Suite, but you have to manually enable it from the administrator section. Not sure that changes much.

    Reply
  8. Rachel
    Rachel

    This post details the process of changing email address along with all the connected Google services – a pretty thorough account with tips:

    https://ryn.works/2017/12/02/on-updating-names-and-email-addresses/

    Reply

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