Switching from Google Workspace in a weekend

Moving your company's email sounds like a big job. Mostly, it's waiting. What matters is the order: set everything up first, bring your old mail along, and only at the very end change where new mail arrives.

Until that last step, nothing changes for anyone who emails you. Your Google account keeps working the whole time.

Before you start

You need two things:

• Access to your domain's settings. Your domain is the yourcompany.com part of your address. Its settings are with the company you bought it from. If you're not sure where that is, whoever built your website usually knows.
• A list of who needs an address. Your colleagues, and addresses like info@ that the team shares.

Friday: start your workspace

Sign up with your work email and your company name. We send you a code by email, and you're inside in about a minute. We take your logo and colour from your website, so it already looks like yours. Your workspace gets its own address, like yourcompany.email.eu.

Most teams pick Team, at €19 per person a month without VAT. It adds shared inboxes, chat, the company drive and shared calendars. There's no free trial, but you can change plan any time from Settings.

Friday: add your domain

To use your own domain, you add one record to its settings. A record is a single line of text that proves the domain is yours. We show you exactly what to copy and where to put it.

This doesn't touch your mail yet. New mail still arrives in Google as it always has.

Saturday: bring everyone and everything

Invite your colleagues. Then bring the old mail over. Gmail is one of the choices, next to Outlook, iCloud and any other mailbox. Your contacts, calendars and files come along too. Everyone keeps working in Google while it moves.

On Business, at €29 per person a month, we move everything over for you: mail, files, calendars and contacts.

Word and Excel files open in Docs and Sheets, and you can export them back. If someone prefers Apple Mail, Outlook or Thunderbird, or the mail app on their phone, that works with Email.eu too.

Sunday: change where your mail arrives

This is the step that actually switches. In your domain's settings there's a line that tells the world which company receives mail for your domain. It's called the MX record. You change it to point at Email.eu, and we show you what to fill in.

Change where your mail arrives last. Until then, nothing changes for anyone who emails you.

From then on, new mail arrives at Email.eu. The change can take a little while to reach every mail server on the internet, which is why Sunday is a good day for it: there's little mail, and nobody is waiting on an answer.

Keep your Google account for a little while, so you can check that nothing was left behind. Then cancel it.

Monday morning

Everyone opens Email.eu and starts on Today: their meetings, the mail that's theirs to handle, and anything that came back from snooze. info@ is a shared inbox now, so the team can answer it together. We wrote about how that works too.

And if you pay for Zoom, Calendly or Slack today, have a look at Meet, the booking page and chat before those renew.

Written by the Email.eu team in Groningen.More from the blog