No. This isn’t about Gmail. It’s about G Suite (formerly Google Apps), which was a business offering from the start. It certainly also contains a mail component based on the same technology, but it’s not Gmail.
If your address is somebody@gmail.com, you are not affected.
When many people, myself and family included, first associated our own custom domains with them, there _were_ no "Google Apps" other than gmail. Google Calendar wasn't a thing, neither was Google Docs, Google Sheets, nor Google Meet. Android didn't exist, neither did Fi. Youtube was still its own property with its own separate accounts system.
Later on, when they started building new offerings, including those that became known bundled as "Google Apps", they continued to conflate the account usage with these several other services. When they decided this was something worthy of charging, they promised "free legacy" edition use indefinitely to users, calling them pioneers and champions of the service, as a way to thank them for their evangelism. The growth of periphery services continued, and now legacy users are faced with a hostage situation for all their data and purchases associated with their accounts.
If you use GSuite Legacy for personal email, you would have the choice of switching to a paid plan, or migrating your email to a personal account (or any other email hosting provider.)
If you use a personal GMail account, there is no change here that applies to you.
> There is no such migration plan offered, it's unclear how to do it, or if it's possible.
I think you would just create a gmail account, then add the G Suite account in the settings of the new gmail account so it will download all of the G Suite email through POP3 or IMAP.
Definitely give yourself a few days for this before the cutoff -- I've had gmail pull years worth of email from another account and it will eventually hit a rate limit and go very slow.
Makes sense. I wouldn't assume it'll work until someone reports back after trying it -- these legacy free G Suite accounts are often treated weirdly by google, and not available for various kinds of integrations.
I use GSuite Legacy for a personal email only. So migrating my foo@customdomain.com to a @gmail.com is fine. However, I didn't see anything in the article that indicates that this will be offered or even possible.
There are a few ways to achieve this technically, even if Google isn't going to be super helpful.
If you use Google's tedious Takeout service, you can get a big zip file which will contain an .mbox file with all of your email. But note, labels don't really apply here, so it'll be one giant folder with all of your email. (That was my experience trying to use ImportExportNG, an add-on for Thunderbird.)
You can also use an application like Thunderbird. Connect via IMAP to your GSuite Legacy account. Connect via IMAP to another account; can be Gmail or another provider. Drap and drop folders and/or individual emails between the two. Works surprisingly well, albeit not particularly fast. I copied about 100,000 emails yesterday evening. The nice thing about this preserving labels/folders.
There are tools in some email providers that would let you login to your GSuite Legacy account and import/copy all email.
