> Yet, over the years, these accounts are just worse than free personal Google accounts. Because we are not a business, there is absolutely no benefit to these accounts whatsoever other than the custom domain. In fact, we can't even use the new version of Google Pay. It only works with free accounts!
I now feel that this was a favor in disguise: Google spent so many years blocking Domains accounts from new services that I never developed habits around using them. Switching away is just migrating email since they made it hard to develop any other source of inertia.
I am kind of in the same position. I have 4 people using our custom domain for email only given the pain google put on these accounts. They've each setup their custom domain email account to forward to their individual free gmail accounts. Does anyone have a recommendation for a new email service I can point my domain MX records at? I only need email forwarding for these 4 users using my domain and a catchall email forwarder for the rest.
I forward emails for custom domains from my registrars (Namecheap and GoDaddy) to Gmail. Then you can use a free Zoho account that lets you send email from your custom domain from within you Gmail account (sent via Zoho's email servers). It's a bit of work to set up but then you can do everything from within Gmail seamlessly.
I've been very happy with https://forwardemail.net but I'm planning to migrate over to Cloudflare's email forwarding service if it ever comes out of beta or I get accepted as a beta tester.
Some domain registrars provide this service for free.
I've always used a this setup, have my personal domain forward all mail to google, and I have my address with domain set up in gmail. Also, I think that's no longer an option - I realised a while ago, I couldn't add any more...
> Google spent so many years blocking Domains accounts
This wasn't "blocking". IIUC the problem is that these accounts have tigher data use restrictions so a lot of Google services never bothered to support them.
For example I believe that one restriction is that data can't be used to train ML models for other users. So if a service created one big ML model it needed to exclude these accounts. Instead of doing that and an audit they often just blocked those users.
Yeah, I’m sure there were some internal issues behind it but as a practical matter it meant that a lot of Google’s biggest fans were unable to try new services, often for as much as a year after launch. This was a staple comment on tech forums and I think it was a factor in their reputation faltering, similar to how Reader was especially impactful because so many journalists, tech bloggers, etc. used it. Losing the people who used to get their friends and family on board was probably not worth whatever they saved delaying that work.
I now feel that this was a favor in disguise: Google spent so many years blocking Domains accounts from new services that I never developed habits around using them. Switching away is just migrating email since they made it hard to develop any other source of inertia.