Google No Longer Moves Legacy G Suite Users Despite Admin Console Warnings

Legacy G Suite users recently freaked out when another new “transition” message popped up in the Google Admin Console. “The transition to Google Workspace has begun,”said a new message that suddenly appeared on people’s accounts. This comes after Legacy G Suite users experienced a controversial transition last year, when Google’s opening stance was to close their accounts if people didn’t start paying, but were eventually persuaded not to. A Google spokesperson told us that the Workspace transition message was “a bug that caused an old banner to appear last year and our team is working on removing it. Currently there are no more changes

We got a few questions about this post and this Reddit post has people wondering what’s up, but it’s just a bug. This is great because Legacy G Suite users have already gone through enough. As a reminder, Google is currently offering businesses the option to pay a monthly fee for a Google/Gmail account that ends in their own domain name instead of @gmail.com. Today it’s called “Google Workspace”, but due to Google’s constant rebranding, it was first called “Google Apps for Your Domain”, then “Google Apps”, and then “G Suite”. Google’s custom domain service hasn’t always been a paid service, and hasn’t always been exclusively for businesses—it was free from 2006 to 2012. Google even offered these accountsfamilies. as a way to let everyone have the same email address. Some people have done just that, which means that today they get a paid service for free.

Last year, Google’s accounting department turned its Eye of Sauron on these longtime users and threatened to take away their nearly 16 year old accounts unless they started paying business rates for these previously free and not necessarily business accounts. Following Google’s public outcry in ultimately left those “legacy G Suite accounts”alone, forcing users to confirm they were using their accounts for “non-commercial”purposes. After that, everything settled down.

By the way, Google Workspace for personal use would be a great product to sell to Google. We’ve previously complained that while Apple and Microsoft are selling email services to consumers with custom domains at a reasonable price, Google isn’t, and only offers corporate email at much higher prices. Much of the problem with the Legacy G package is that these personal users have nowhere to go inside Google.