steps taken for a suspended Google Workspace domain

Unfortunately, one of our domains missed out migration to non-profit edition. Copy-pasting from some email exchanges which happened, to document one possible way of dealing with such a situation.

The following were carried out:

1. For emergency continuation of requireduser@our-lapsed-domain.tld, our-lapsed-domain.tld was upgraded to Business starter. Would cost approx Rs. 250 per month, so instead of continuing this, we would migrate the users.

2. For doing this, the easiest way was to find out the admin account of our-lapsed-domain.tld in the legacy Google Apps for Domains.

Initially, many of our domains had been administered by Mr. MM's team, so I tried searching for their hand-over email which listed all assets and all logins, in which I had also been cc'd - found our-lapsed-domain.tld also in that list. Tried with its administrative account - apparently not logged in for many years - and enrolled in Business Starter.

There were 4 accounts seen - of which only the administrative account and requireduser@our-lapsed-domain.tld had any data.

3. Have started the migration of archived emails from supersededemail@our-lapsed-domain.tld (just for safety's sake, probably these have already been saved earlier) to currentemail@anotherdomain.org

4. Will delete notused@our-lapsed-domain.tld - since it seems to be not in use.

5. Since the current email id used by Dr. is in ourdomain.org, P has been requested to ask S to create requireduser@ourdomain.org. Once this is done, requireduser@our-lapsed-domain.tld will be migrated there - perhaps an outage of a day, which can be decided by requireduser at their convenience. Outage will be only in terms of accessing old emails. Fresh emails will go to requireduser@our-lapsed-domain.tld without any outage.

6. Once the new email id is ready, we can start forwarding new email which goes to requireduser@our-lapsed-domain.tld to requireduser@ourdomain.org - for this, I have used https://improvmx.com/
in the past, and seems to be a good service.

I can set up forwarding for supersededemail@our-lapsed-domain.tld to currentemail@anotherdomain.org also if desired. And adminaccount to orgadminaccount@gmail if desired.

7. Future - checking if there are any other domains which have been orphaned like this - I will check
(a) the hand-over email from MM's team
(b) the MX records in all domains which are under our control
and make a list of all domains which have emails enabled, and who administers them.

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Later, to S   ...
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So, the steps would be:

1. I would reset the pw of requireduser@our-lapsed-domain.tld

2. I would log in to requireduser@our-lapsed-domain.tld and ensure that IMAP is set to ON in gmail settings.

3. I would ensure that "Allow insecure apps" is set to ON in Google account settings

4. I would then give you the password, which you can use in Google Workspace Admin panel to do the migration.

5. The screenshots below explain the process.

6. I can also call you at 2.30 pm tomorrow if you want. Google's documentation for this is at https://support.google.com/a/answer/9476255

Scroll down to Data Migration

Inside Data Migration, choose the Add user link - 

In the next screen, you may see another option,

Choose source. There, you can choose "Google Workspace" as the source. Then, it will use IMAP with imap.gmail.com as the source. If it gives an option to choose the date, give a date very long back, like 2001 or something, so that all the emails will be selected. Then if it asks whether

Migrate Junk

Migrate Deleted

etc,

just choose the default, which is not to migrate Junk/Deleted. Etc. Then, you would see the following.

There, the source email would be

requireduser@our-lapsed-domain.tld

the Google Workspace Email would be

requireduser@ourdomain.org

and the password would be the password for requireduser@our-lapsed-domain.tld, which I will send you tomorrow.

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Later, after S had created the new account ...
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In case you use any other services - google keep, youtube, blogger, calendar, drive, anything else - please take a backup by logging on to requireduser@our-lapsed-domain.tld and then navigating to takeout.google.com

This is important, so please let me know once you have taken the backup (or let me know if you don't use any services except email.)

So, from 2 pm tomorrow or so, you would not have access to requireduser@our-lapsed-domain.tld

The emails will start getting migrated hopefully by 2:30 pm.

Depending on the total disk size as well as the number of emails, this process can take between 1-7 days.
(The migration happens via IMAP,
https://support.google.com/a/answer/9476255?hl=en
In our experience, if total emails size is less than 2 GB, it would take only one day.)

You will start seeing the newest emails - from the last few weeks - within an hour, and the older emails will continue to be added to requireduser@ourdomain.org over the course of the migration.