Back on my birthday, The Verge reported what I heard was rumored to be coming: the service formerly known as Google Apps for Domains would no longer be free to early adopters like me. Now known as G Suite legacy free edition, it was originally a great way to get free email hosting using Gmail’s infrastructure.

At one point, I probably was admin on 7 or 8 domains that used this service – most of which were not businesses. In addition to my personal 7minutemiles.com email address, I also set up email for both kid one and kid two on their personal domains, along with a few charity and friend domains whose websites I hosted. Sure Google would mine the data in your email, but I thought that was a fair trade for good spam filtering and not having to manage my own mail servers (which I did for several painful years).

Google may change course for some users like me (after getting a lot of “feedback” on this plan), but I decided to start looking for alternatives. If I wanted to stay with Google’s Workspace product, the cheapest Business Starter plan was $6 per user per month. Many people like the Microsoft 365 options, which start at $5 per user per month (or $150 a year if you also want to get the Office apps). Lots of other services too at many different price points and service options. What to do, what to do?

I’ve been an iCloud customer for a few years now, first as a cloud backup tool for my iPhone, then expanding to lots of other uses: Photos, Notes, Calendars, Contacts and file storage via iCloud Drive. It really makes using multiple Apple devices much more productive. I paid for a 2TB plan with Family Sharing, so everyone in our family could have their phones backed up automatically. We had a free trial Apple TV+ account, then started experimenting with a paid Apple Music account. When the Apple One plan was announced, it was cheaper for me to switch to that. Turns out that gave me iCloud+ and the ability to use custom email domains with iCloud Mail. Intriguing…

With the Google May 1 and July 1 deadlines looming, I decided I needed to start early on a migration plan. Email addresses are tied to so many things these days, you can’t really just throw them away and start over from scratch. I wasn’t super concerned or worried about retaining old emails, but the mailbox on my personal account was 7.25GB in size (and must contain *some* things I want to keep). A few of the accounts I was still admin for weren’t being used any longer and could just be deleted. The three family domains were the ones that needed a plan. Here’s what I ended up doing for each one:

• Logged in to Google Takeout and downloaded all Mail data in MBOX format for each account.
• Logged in to icloud.com, clicked on Account Settings and then the Manage button in the Custom Email Domain section.
• Followed the directions on this page, then read up about the needed changes to DNS on this page.
• Since I use the Route 53 service on AWS for DNS these days, I had issues getting the Apple-supplied DNS information to work at first, but this great post by Dale Clifford helped solve that puzzle.
• Once Route 53 was changed correctly, logged back into icloud.com to finish setting up the domain in Account Settings.

After iCloud confirmed each domain was ready to go, I needed to turn on iCloud Mail on each device we wanted to use. This was troublesome for kid one and kid two, as you need to have a default iCloud Mail address defined before it will let you use your custom domain name account (i.e. – I also have davidmkingsbury@icloud.com, which doesn’t ever get used). We kept getting various errors setting that part up for them, but eventually a random iCloud Mail name took for each of them and sending and receiving worked right away on their custom domains.

We still need to take their MBOX files from the Google Takeout exports and import them to their new accounts, but that can wait for now. For my domain, I found that I could be connected to both the old Google mailboxes via IMAP and the new iCloud hosted mailboxes (also via IMAP) in Apple Mail on my laptop, then just drag and drop messages from old to new. This took a lot of time for thousands of messages, but I also didn’t have to manually re-sort messages after importing from the large MBOX file.

Congratulations if you made it to the end of this very long post. I haven’t done a long form post in quite a while, but it’s always good to document stuff like this for the random one in a billion person who might stumble across it while Googling for help on formerly great Google services…

Onward!