The trick to leaving Google Workspace is never having a scary cutover day. Set up and test everything while Google still delivers your mail, then switch one DNS record at the end. Here is the weekend plan.
Leaving Google Workspace feels risky for one reason, and it isn't the new software. It's the cutover. You picture the morning you switch everything across and then spend the day wondering whether a client's email is quietly bouncing into a void.
So don't have that morning. We built the migration so you set up your mailboxes, move your old mail, and put your whole team on email.eu while Google keeps delivering your email exactly as it does today. Nothing changes for the outside world until the very last step, when you point one DNS record at us. If something's wrong before then, you fix it and nobody notices, because your real mail is still flowing through Google the entire time.
That's why a job that sounds like a quarter-long project is, for a team of five to fifty, a weekend. The order is what matters. Here it is, day by day.
| What | How it moves |
|---|---|
| Automatically. The migration engine copies every message and folder over IMAP, or from an MBOX archive. | |
| Aliases (info@, support@) | You recreate them in the dashboard. Unlimited on every plan. |
| Calendars | Export from Google as ICS, import into your calendar. Open standards; steps below. |
| Contacts | Export from Google as vCard. Same as calendars. |
| Files | Download from Google Drive, upload to your Drive. Manual, so leave time for it. |
| Docs, Sheets, Slides | Export to .docx, .xlsx, .pptx. Still editable in the office suite. |
| Vault, Apps Script, AppSheet | No equivalent. Check the comparison before you commit. |
Mail is the part we automate from end to end. Everything under it is either a short export-and-import using open formats, or a manual copy. The last row is the one to take seriously: if your company runs on Apps Script or lives inside Vault, there's nothing here that replaces them, and you want to know what does before you book a weekend.
This first hour doesn't touch your current email. You're laying track.
Sign up. About a minute: your company name, your domain, a plan, a code to verify your email, a payment method. Plans are €7 or €14 per seat per month and you only pay for the people you add, so start with the team you know you're moving. You're not billed until your first invoice.
Verify your domain. The dashboard gives you one TXT record to add at your DNS provider. It proves you own the domain and does nothing else; your email keeps landing at Google. A few minutes later your mail server is ready and your own mailbox is live.
Invite your team. Everyone gets a mailbox on your domain, plus calendar, drive, docs, chat and video behind a single login. They can sign in tonight. Mail between the new mailboxes works straight away, while the outside world still reaches everyone through Google.
Lower your MX TTL. While you're in the DNS settings, find the MX records and drop their TTL to 300 seconds. You're not changing the records, just shortening how long the old ones are cached, so Sunday's switch spreads in minutes instead of hours.
Your mail. Open Migrations in the dashboard. For each mailbox you give it the old provider's IMAP server and an app password, and it copies the lot: every folder, every flag, read and unread. It reads from Google and never writes or deletes anything there. The password is encrypted, used only to run the copy, and deleted the moment it finishes. As an admin you can run these for your colleagues, so one person can work through the whole team.
Two things about Gmail catch everyone:
myaccount.google.com/apppasswords and can delete it afterwards. The server is imap.gmail.com, port 993.A few gigabytes copies quickly. A decade of archive takes a few hours, which is exactly why this is the Saturday job and the switch waits for Sunday. The copies run in the background with a progress bar, so kick them off and get on with the rest.
Your shared addresses. Recreate info@, support@, billing@ and the like as aliases in the dashboard. As many as you want, on any plan.
Calendars and contacts. There's no one-click import for these yet. It isn't much work, though, because both sides speak the same open standards. Export your calendars from Google as ICS files and your contacts as vCard. Connect your email.eu account in a desktop app — Thunderbird, Apple Calendar, Apple Contacts, anything that does CalDAV and CardDAV — and import the files there. They sync up to your account and appear everywhere, webmail included. Most apps find the right servers from your email address alone; about fifteen minutes a person.
Your files. Download what you need from Google Drive and upload it into your Drive on email.eu, through the web or the desktop sync app. If you'd rather grab everything in one go, a Google Takeout export works too, though you'll want to request it the night before because it can take a while to prepare. Google Docs, Sheets and Slides come out as .docx, .xlsx and .pptx and stay editable in the office suite. For a few people this is an afternoon. For years of shared drives it's the longest single job of the weekend, so split it across the team.
Then try to break it. This is the whole point of doing it before the switch: everything you've set up is live and testable while Google still holds your real mail. Send messages between the new mailboxes. Open the calendar. Dig through the copied folders. If something's off, nothing is at stake and you have the rest of the weekend to sort it.
Top up the mail. Run each migration once more. It only pulls what it doesn't already have, so this pass sweeps up everything that arrived since Saturday and finishes fast.
Go live. Hit Go live on your domain. The dashboard hands you the records to publish — MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, all generated for your domain — and you paste them in at your DNS provider. This is the real cutover. Once the MX record spreads, which is minutes if you lowered the TTL on Friday, new mail comes to email.eu instead of Google. The dashboard watches your DNS and flips the domain to Live when it sees the change. The authentication records go in at the same time, so your outgoing mail is signed properly from the first message.
Check it. Send yourself something from an outside account — a personal address is fine — and reply to it. Make sure the dashboard says Live.
Set up devices. Webmail already works. For Mail, Outlook or Thunderbird, most clients configure themselves from your address; the IMAP settings are in your dashboard if a client asks for them.
Don't cancel Google straight away. Mail sent during Sunday's propagation window can still reach the old Gmail inboxes, so on Tuesday run one last top-up to collect any stragglers. Once calendars and files are where they should be, downgrade or cancel Google Workspace and have everyone delete the app passwords they made.
After that your mail and files sit in the EU, run by an independent European company, on infrastructure with no US providers anywhere in it. You can reach all of it over the same open protocols you'd use to leave — IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV. We think that's the part most "European alternatives" quietly skip: it should be as easy to walk away from us as it was to walk away from Google.
A few things can turn a smooth weekend into a messy one. Check these first.
If your setup is bigger or knottier than this — hundreds of seats, compliance rules, a domain history with some scar tissue — talk to us before you start. We'd rather scope it with you than read about it in a support ticket on Monday.