One of my domains was with google legacy so it does affect me in a manner of speaking but I have not used that domain for email for years. I may just move it to Cloudflare email forwarding and call it a day.
Anyone caught in this and what are you plans ?
The worst part of this is if you had been buying apps using your free legacy google account, you must pay for Google workspace if you want to keep your purchases (apps, books, movies etc)
Damn, right between the eyes for me.
I need to ponder this a little bit.
Well, ugh. I have a family domain that my siblings and their children (as well as my own family) are all using. If this means what it seems to mean, we’ll have to figure something out.
On the plus side, since everyone has an iPhone and an iCloud account, the simplest solution for email and calendars might be to just move the domain away from Google to iCloud. The Google Play store will be a challenge, though not for me.
I upgraded one of my two “G Suite legacy free edition” accounts to Google Workspace last year. I only use the remaining free one to forward single use email addresses to my GW account (i.e uber@mydomain.com, walmart@mydomain.com, etc.) .
I’ve not been notified yet, but I will just add my second domain to my existing Google Workspace account. There is no charge to do this.
Wait…Gmail is still free. G Suite was presumably emails at a private domain. And you can have a Google account without having a matching Gmail account. I’m not sure what the lock-in is here … ?
If your domain is registered at Hover you can forward your “legacy” email address for $5/year. Other domain registrars probably offer something similar.
On second thought that would probably work everywhere except Google. And Legacy G Suite users that have been using “Sign in with Google” have another problem.
Suppose you had a free google legacy account and bought tones of apps in the last ten years. If you do not upgrade to google workspace, eventually this account will become inactive meaning that you won’t be able to use it.
There is no way to move your google legacy account to a regular gmail account. Not at the moment anyway.
Legacy google account is the one with custom domains but it has access to all the other google services as well. Such as YouTube, photos, google play store, drive. Therefore, depending on your use case, you may losing more than just emails
A Google account is not the same as a Workspace account so you would actually lose all your purchases if you don’t start paying for the legacy account…. You can make a free google account with your personal domain e-mail address, but would be a new account and Google will not transfer data/purchases.
I know when I pulled my stuff out of a legacy Google account way back I hadn’t made any purchases, but I thought there was some way that I was able to hand off some of the services / data to the new account.
That’s pretty crazy that losing an email address - no matter what it is - would result in losing all of one’s apps. I would think they’d have a way to add a secondary email, or change it out, or something like that.
Sorry but I’m kinda fuzzy on what you mean here. Which “apps, books, movies etc” will I lose if I don’t upgrade?
Didn’t get the mail yet, but looks like I finally will be lo(o)sing my last (weak) tie to Google…
(Kept it around because it was free; never actually used it)
If I understand correctly, any that you bought while signed into the Play Store with an email address belonging to the account that must now be upgraded or lost.
It’s kind of like losing the email address that serves as your Apple ID.
Solution for those who want to keep your purchases without the rest of the Google stuff or paying…
A reddit user of course, pretty much you sign up for their free cloud identity service so your account lives on.
I have an old google free account (I’m assuming G Suite but it’s been so long, I don’t remember what it was called when I signed up) that gave me 10 user accounts under my one domain. Does this mean that I would have to pay for each user account separately?
Except you can change your Apple ID email address. 
Yup. Unless you got rid of some of them, obviously.
Thanks. That’s what I assumed and was afraid of. Time to start backing up and deleting accounts that I don’t need.
This is bad news for me. I have a Gsuite account which I use to access 16 of our family email addresses. I am going to have to figure out how I can separate my domain account/email addresses from Gsuite and then how I migrate our existing emails to the domain hosting company storage.
It hasn’t been said in this thread yet, but it’s worth underscoring: this is further evidence that trusting Google to keep doing anything they’re currently doing is a terrible plan.
I mean, this is true of anyone or any company to some extent, but it seems like Google genuinely enjoys growing its graveyard more than any other group I know of:
Edit: holy, I haven’t actually looked at that list in a while. That is a long long list…
I would say this true especially if they’re doing it for free. Google’s job is to make money. So even if something is ad-supported, if they have a hard time getting enough money from the ads to cover the back-end costs (hardware, employees to write code, etc.) it’s going to disappear. Or if a critical employee decides they don’t want to work on it anymore. Or any number of dozens of other circumstances.
I’m not really worried about things like Google’s paid email offering disappearing, but their whole marketing strategy for everything - at least in the beginning - was “this is free!” And those products continually fail.