Google made a few days of the vacation period really exciting for me. 🎅 I have been using the domain berta.hu, both for my blog and for <firstname>@berta.hu addresses in the family. I expected such addresses to be stable. How naive!

I have been using Google Cloud since 2019, moved there my website and my DNS. My old spam filter could not cope with the incoming spam so I gave in and moved my mail under the protection of GMail (see Bruce Schneier's writeup on Feudal Security). I did not want to expose other family members to this, so left my mail server at my previous provider and set up GMail to POP3 my messages.
This worked well and my spam problems disappeared (Google is a powerful sovereign).

Google recently announced that from January they will shut down the feature of GMail being able to POP3 other accounts. This put me in a rough spot, because I can direct all berta.hu mail either to Google or to the other provider. I either had to migrate off Google or start using their mail servers. Such is the beauty of cloud☁️: you migrate to new tech when your provider decides so... fun Christmas. 😄

Adding new Google Workspace users for other family members would be the straightforward solution, but it adds per user 💵recurring costs (Google is a powerful sovereign). For a company, a new employee means growth with more revenue, but such costs will not pay off for a family domain. Furthermore, my sister Gyöngyi Berta is using her <firstname>@berta.hu account for her consultancy business, running her podcast, etc, so her priorities are different and she already has her subscriptions.

Options:

• Can your Google workspace users have different packages? → yes, above a certain # of users only → NO
• Can you entitle someone outside your Google Workspace subscription to have addresses from your domain? → NO
• Can you purchase more storage space for your Google Workspace? → yes, but it is sooo expensive you are better off adding users → NO
• Redirection service such as improvmx? → NO, I don't want another cloud service
• Custom mail server and forwarding messages? → NO, I don't want to manage my own mail server
• Migrating off Google? → maybe, but not in a few days
• Can you set up free aliases in Google for redirection only? → no such option, but...

Solution I found: Google Workspace admin console allows deep configuration of e-mail routing. You can make Google forward mails for unknown addresses on your domain to another mail server (i.e. have some mail accounts at Google only the rest on your on prem servers). I could also configure Google to forward certain messages to other GMail accounts.

Lessons learned:

• Family domains can get tricky when family members grow up and their priorities diverge.
• Simple things can get 💵 expensive if you use #cloud.
• If you have a family domain, check for better options vs Google.

Notes:

• While GMail shall be unable to POP3 other accounts, one shall still be able to POP3 their GMail messages into their desktop mail client. That feature is not affected. Please find more info here.
• As of Jan 4, 2026, the POP3 feature in GMail still seems to work.
• Kudos to Gemini, it was very useful for exploring options in Google services and advising on the setup.
• Google is a powerful sovereign 😄🎅

This post was first published on Linkedin here on 2026-01-04.