Migrating away google workplace as they abandon the g suite legacy free edition
Introduction
Google has caused huge headaches lately for small business owners and personal family domain owners who’ve been running through the google suite system for years. There has been a long term stance that the service would be free forever, but over the past few years they’ve been slowly forcing users to adopt google workspace for the price of 6$ per user per month. Thankfully I own my domain so have the control to move it out of googles sphere of influence, below I walk through my migration from g suite legacy to MXRoute, mostly so I don’t forget, but also it’s relatively interesting.
Getting ready for the move
Before moving the domains step one is to reduce the TTLs on the domain, in my case these were all set to 7 days. Simply update all MX and TXT records to be a small TTL (I used 300 for a 5 minute TTL)
TTL is the max life span a DNS will hold onto your domain record (A bad description from a front end engineer)
Because of my domains being previously set to a TTL of 7 days, I had to wait 7 days to begin my migration!
MXRoute
I decided on MXRoute to handle the hosting of my email, I’ve slowly lost the belief that the big companies are too big to fail, so based on the cost of MXRoute (I went for a lifetime subscription) and the stellar reviews one reddit, it seems like the obvious choice. I get the impression that the customer support can be a little demeaning, but I’ve been in similar positions before and supporting users who make the same mistakes over and over can cause the fuses to shorten.
I cannot express how important the email you get once signed up entitled ‘[MXroute] Important Account Information’ is and advise a backup to be made, for me I store this on my password manager
The MXRoute setup
To start login to your dashboard, for me the url is https://monday.mxrouting.net:2222/ ‘monday’ is the name of the server you’re assigned, which will be shown on the email i mentioned previously.
Go to ‘Account Manager’ and then ‘Domain Setup’.
Your Domain should be visible here that you’ll use for your email, if not add it now using ‘ADD NEW’ in the top right.
It’s now time to move the DNS records make sure you’ve waited for the previous TTLs to expire for a smooth transition.
Login to your DNS provider and add the MX records (Remember to swap your domain in my case ‘monday’ to match the email sent to you):
| Type | Name | Value | Priority | TTL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MX | @ | monday.mxrouting.net. | 10 | 600 seconds |
| MX | @ | monday-relay.mxrouting.net. | 20 | 600 seconds |
| TXT | @ | v=spf1 include:mxlogin.com -all | 600 seconds |