Farewell to G Suite legacy

Google has announced the plan of stopping their service of G Suite legacy free edition, and they are encouraging users to upgrade to a paid Google Workspace subscription.

Whether or not you choose to upgrade to the paid version immediately, the G Suite legacy free edition won’t be available after 1st July.

Ten years after Google stopped signing up new users to the G Suite free edition, it’s really time to say goodbye.

FYI, see the link below:
Upgrade from G Suite legacy free edition - Google Workspace Admin Help

Alternatives

Many users like me, use Gmail in G Suite to set up a custom domain name for email, therefore, we can use a personalized email address, such as [email protected].

It’s important to look up an alternative if we decide not to upgrade to a paid one, otherwise, we cannot receive an email after the suspension of the G Suite service.

Here below are two alternatives I’ve found:

  • Cloudflare Email Routing
  • Office 365 Outlook with custom domain name

Cloudflare Email Routing

Cloudflare is a well-known cloud service provider, especially famous for its CDN and Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Cloudflare has a new service named Email Routing, which can create custom email addresses for your domain, and forward incoming emails to a set email address.

To use this service, you need to:

  • add a site of your domain name on Cloudflare,
  • change the nameservers of your domain name to the Cloudflare providing ones,
  • request the access to the beta program,
  • set up MX records,
  • set up custom addresses.

To request the access, enter the dashboard of your domain name, there is an “Email” with a beta icon. An instruction of request access to Cloudflare Email Routing service.

Since it’s still in beta, you might need to wait for several weeks until gain access to it.

The Email Routing setting page is like below. Cloudflare Email Routing setting page.

There is also an option of “Catch-all address“, emails sent to addresses that do not match the custom addresses you set would also be received and forwarded.

This means you can use any custom email address you want without having to create custom addresses in advance.

Office 365 Outlook

Outlook has a Personalized email address feature for users with Office 365 subscriptions, it’s quite useful if you both are an Outlook user and Office 365 user.

An instruction of setting personalized email address for Office 365 Outlook.

This feature request your domain registrar must be Godaddy, since I just transferred my domain name to Cloudflare, I couldn’t demonstrate it.

Backup your data from Google

And there is one last thing we need to do before we say goodbye to G Suite, backup your data.

Access https://takeout.google.com to download your Gmail and other sevices data.

Google takeout page.