I’ve been paying for a Google Workspace account for years, largely because I wanted to use my own domain for email. Recently I realised that email was pretty much the only part of Workspace I was still using. Everything else I needed was elsewhere, even search! Google what has become of you?

I was already paying for iCloud+ (we’re a fully Apple family), and it turns out that includes support for custom email domains.⁠⁠ So I decided to move my email to Apple and see if I could stop paying Google without losing my Google account.

The good news is that I could. The less good news is that 20+ years of email takes a while to move.

My domain is registered with Hover, so the first job was to add the DNS records Apple provided. There were records to verify the domain and set up email authentication, and two MX records to tell the internet where to deliver new mail.

Once those were in place, I removed Google’s MX record and finished the setup in iCloud. After a couple of test messages in both directions, my existing email address was working through iCloud Mail.

The address itself hasn’t changed. It’s just the service behind it that’s different.

I’ve also stopped using Spark and moved to Apple Mail, which makes more sense now that the account is with iCloud.

The bigger job was the archive. I have more than 250,000 messages going back 20+ years, and I still actively search that history. I didn’t just want a backup file sitting on a disk somewhere.

I used Google Takeout to export the mail, then imported the resulting MBOX file into Apple Mail on my Mac. That gave me a local copy under “On My Mac”. Which I then copied into an iCloud mailbox so that the history is available and searchable across my devices.

The import was the quick bit. Uploading that much mail to iCloud took days. And I’m keeping the Takeout export just in case.

The calendar was much simpler. I exported it from Google as an ICS file and imported it into iCloud Calendar.

The important thing for me was that I didn’t want to lose my Google identity. I still use the account for YouTube and to sign in to other services.

It turns out that cancelling Google Workspace and deleting the Google account are two different things. I enabled Cloud Identity Free in the existing Google organisation and checked that it was assigned to my user. I then cancelled the paid Workspace subscription, not the organisation or the user account.

Google warns that cancelling Workspace removes access to services such as Gmail and can result in data being deleted, so this is definitely the point to make sure anything you need has been exported or backed up first.⁠⁠

After cancellation, YouTube and my Google sign-ins still worked with the same account. The Admin console now shows Cloud Identity Free as the only active subscription, with no charge.

I’m still paying for iCloud+ and the domain, of course. But I was already paying for those. There’s no longer much reason for me to pay Google for an email service I’m not using.