How to move your business email from Google Workspace

Step 2: Choose how to copy your mail across

The admin panel includes a data migration tool that connects to your existing mailboxes over IMAP and copies messages into the new ones. It offers three paths.

A single mailbox suits a freelancer or a one-address move: simplest interface, least to configure. All mailboxes in your domain suits a team, with more options and more complexity, and filters, aliases and forwards can be imported from a CSV file. The third option creates new mailboxes without copying anything, if you would rather start clean.

Copying can run while Google is still handling your live mail. Nothing in this step interrupts anything.

Step 3: Connect to Google and run the import

This is where migrations most often stall, and almost always for the same reason: authentication. Google no longer allows plain username-and-password access from third-party applications, so you cannot simply type a mailbox password into the import form.

If you are moving a single mailbox, there is not much to it: you enter the address you are moving from, and the tool works out the provider and creates the new mailbox if it does not exist yet. If you are moving a whole domain, you get the full import form, and the Server type list there holds two Google options.

Step 4: Check the mailboxes, then switch mail delivery

Once the import has run, open the Mailboxes list and confirm that every address exists, that the right subscription is applied to each one, and that mail content actually landed.

The list shows usage per mailbox, so a mailbox reading 0% when it should hold years of mail is a clear sign the import did not finish for that user. Per-mailbox options such as aliases, forwarding, POP access and two-factor authentication are set from the same screen.

When the mailboxes look right, change your MX records: replace the Google entries with mx.inbox.eu and remove the old ones, or complete the nameserver transfer if you chose Option 1.

Then work through the DNS Settings section of the admin panel, which appears once your domain is validated. It lists every record your domain needs, with the exact host name and value, plus a status for each one, so you can keep fixing your DNS until every row reads as added. Two are required, and the panel is explicit about DKIM: without it, messages to Gmail and other large providers are likely to be rejected or filtered.

The records themselves are the same for every domain on Inbox.eu. Only the host names carry your own.

Replace yourdomain.com with your own domain. If you choose Option 1 in Step 1 and let Inbox.eu manage your DNS, these records are added for you.

The four recommended records are worth doing rather than genuinely optional. SPF states which servers may send mail for your domain. DMARC tells receiving servers what to do with mail that fails those checks: start with p=none, then move to p=quarantine once you are confident nothing legitimate is failing. The CNAME lets your users open webmail at mail.yourdomain. The SRV record lets mail apps configure themselves, and there is a fuller set of SRV records if you want clients to pick up submission and IMAP ports too. The DKIM and DMARC records have their own guide. Bear in mind that DNS changes can take up to 24 hours to appear everywhere.

Then test properly. Send a message from an outside address and confirm it arrives. Send one out and check it is not flagged. For the next 24 to 48 hours, watch both the new mailboxes and the old Gmail ones, because some senders will still be using cached DNS. When delivery has clearly settled, run the import once more to pick up anything that arrived at Google during propagation.

Step 5: Only now, close Google Workspace

Leave the Workspace subscription running in parallel for a couple of weeks. Yes, it costs one more billing cycle but it is the cheapest insurance in the project.

Before cancelling, clear the loose ends. Anything that sends mail through Google SMTP needs new credentials: your website contact form, invoicing tool, CRM, booking system. If your domain was bought through Google, transfer its management to Squarespace first, or you risk losing access to the domain itself. If you want mail to stop flowing through Google before closing the account entirely, you can turn Gmail off for your organization in the Admin console and leave the rest in place.

Then cancel, knowing what cancellation means. Google’s own warning is unambiguous: after you cancel, your users’ Workspace data is deleted and cannot be restored. On a flexible plan, charges stop immediately. On an annual plan, you are charged for the balance of the contract. Full deletion can take up to 90 days, and there is a limited window (51 days if you keep the organization account) in which you could resubscribe. Cancelling is not a step you undo.

What this costs

Price is a common reason small teams look elsewhere, so here are the published figures side by side. Compare carefully, because these are not the same product.

Mistakes that cause trouble

The failures are consistent and all avoidable: cancelling Workspace before confirming the new mailboxes work, missing aliases, groups and shared addresses in the inventory, leaving the MX TTL at several hours so the cutover drags, running the mail import only once and losing whatever arrived during propagation, forgetting the applications that send through Google SMTP, and skipping the SPF, DKIM and DMARC updates so outgoing mail starts landing in spam.

The short version: how to move business email from Google Workspace

Verify your domain without touching mail flow. Create matching mailboxes and copy the old mail across. Switch MX when the mailboxes check out. Watch delivery for a day or two, run a final import pass, and only then close the old account. Handled in that order, a small-team migration is an afternoon of work spread across two weeks, not a crisis.
And if you would rather not handle the DNS and IMAP parts yourself, you do not have to.