Email Google to terminate free G Suite users with domain email hosting

I have a lot (around 15 I think) of email addresses that I have set up for my domain over the years for various purposes. I'm going to have to dig into all those accounts and see how many I can eliminate before making the upgrade.

Ugh.

 

I finally caved in and set up my paid Google Workspace account. It was a process but I managed to get 16 user accounts down to just two.

Most of them were from employees or volunteers who I just gave email addresses out to over the years but most are no longer working with me, and others were email addresses I had just created because I was using the address in some capacity. Looking back, I'm not sure why I thought I actually needed to have full email accounts set up for these addresses (like the email address my XenForo forum sends email from) when an alias will clearly work just fine.

I will also admit it is pretty cool to have access to 4TB of Google Drive space now. Google Drive is extremely fast for me and I can upload/download files from it at almost the full speed of my gigabit fiber connection, so it's something we are definitely going to use.

Anyway, everything went pretty well but I ultimately caused one big problem that's worth documenting here...

For XenForo's Bounced Email Handling, you must have a dedicated email address that bounced messages can go to. XenForo then logs into that address and processes the messages it finds in there to run its automated account deactivation features. For my bounced email address I had obviously just set up a "bounce@mydomain.com" account to handle that and everything worked fine.

As part of this transition I decided to just set up a dedicated free Gmail account to handle these bounces. I got that set up and thought everything was working until I found out that my forum was not sending out emails any more!

My Postfix logs lead me to the problem, Amazon SES was rejecting messages with "554 Message rejected: Email address is not verified." even though the address I was sending from had not changed...

It turns out, every email address, or "identity" as SES calls it, must be verified with them. Because my original bounce handling email address was already @mydomain.com, it did not need its own verification. To fix it, I just verified the new dedicated Gmail address in my SES account and forum emails started working immediately again. An easy fix but it took me over 12 hours before I realized there was a problem so we lost a ton of notification emails.

Something to keep in mind if you are using XF bounced email handling!

**ALSO!**

You guys may already know about this, but during my journey I discovered Google Workspace Email Routing. It's a super-powerful email routing and filtering system built right into Workspace and could definitely come in handy.

 

Ah yeah, good idea!

Looks like you have a bit more time for all your transitions. Google has moved the date back to June 27 now.

Sign in - Google Accounts

 

Anyone else still getting emails from Google after upgrading to Workspace?

They're telling me I need to add payment information, warning about the implications, but I already did. I'm sure it'll be fine as everything is there in the account, but still a bit annoying.

 

I probably started bragging a little too soon about getting my email addresses down to two...

I typically interact with users using a more "public" webmaster@example.com address which I had connected to my site's contact form. Email comes from the form to my private Gmail address, then using Gmail's "Send Mail As" feature, I could just hit reply and they would only ever see my "public" address.

It worked great but now I realize that since deleting that webmaster@example.com account in my Google Workspace, it will of course no longer let me use that user to login with SMTP via the Send Mail As feature to send mail from that address. I tried signing in with SMTP using my other accounts on the domain but then the resulting email is shown as coming from that other address.

Bummer.