Migrating from Google Workspace to Proton Mail (2024)

I recently completed migrating my Google Workspace account over to Proton Mail, and thought I’d share my experience and how it went.

So my backstory on this is I have been a Google Workspace user for many years now, way back when it was given freely to anyone. At that time I attached a custom domain and gave away “free” email addresses to family and friends. Fast forward to present day, and Google has not only started charging for Google Workspace, but has since increased prices as of 21 March.

I’ve been wanting to de-google my life to some degree anyway, so given the price increases, and the weird direction of Google with their other products such as Gemini, I figured now was as good a time as any to make the switch.

Proton Mail sells itself as a private and secure email platform. You can visit their site for all the marketing and details. While they have always been a solid private email service, their pricing and apps left a lot to be deired. That said, Proton has recently made a lot of changes to both their plans and their apps.

Proton’s revamped plans now make it a much more attractive option. Since my custom domain was not used for business, I only had a small number of users on my Google Workspace account. This made Proton’s family plan the perfect fit for me, and I suspect many others that signed up back when Workspace / GSuite was free. If you are using Workspace for your business, i’d suggest looking at Protons business plan instead.

I am not affiliated with Proton in any way, but I am rather pleased with the product and how easy it was to migrate my users. The proton family plan gives you the following for up to 6 users:

• Secure / Private email
• VPN
• 3 TB of storage
• Password manager
• Calendar

Making the switch to Proton was easier than expected. My main concern was how to setup all your users first before changing DNS and migrating mail.

In order to setup your users and their address, each user must have their own Proton account first. Then you will invite them to be part of your family plan, and THEN you can setup their addresses like you would in Workspace. I found this Proton article especially helpful with the entire process.

Here are the steps I took to migrate my account, in order:

• Sign up for a free proton account
• Upgrade to the family plan. Doing a multi-year commitment will get you the cheapest price at $20/month which includes all 6 users (not per user). This can be found at: Settings > All Settings > Dashboard
• Add your domain name. This is in Settings > All Settings > Proton Mail > Domain Names. Proton has a pretty easy to use wizard for setting up the domain names. I did the verification part and then stopped while I waited on my users to create their own proton accoutns. You can resume the domain setup afterwards.
• My users sent their proton user names to me, and then I sent them invites to join my plan. You can find this under Settings > All Settings > Family > Users and Addresses.
• After the users accept your invites, you will need to setup all the addresses for each user that were used in Google Workspace. What I did was looked at each of the alias for my users in Google Workspace Admin, and copied and pasted them into the setup dialog in Proton. To do this in proton, click the edit button for each user, then add address, then paste the address in and select the correct domain. Your custom domain should be in the drop down list. If it isn’t, that means you haven’t verified your domain yet. During this process, you can also allocate how much of the 3TB storage get’s assigned to each user as well.

• Once you have added all your users AND their addresses, you can go back to the domain portion and finish the domain setup. I use Amazon Web Services Route53 product for DNS, and had no problems setting up my custom domain and verifying all steps. It is also a good idea to setup a catch all address for your domain. You can read more about how proton implements catch all addresses for domains here. Essentially you just add another alias to your user account such as catchall@mydomain.com, and go to the actions dropdown menu under domains and click the set catch all button.
• Once DNS changes are complete you should start receiving email in Proton! Route53’s DNS refreshed very quickly for me, so this took almost no time.
• Next, if you want to import your old email from Google Workspace, Proton has made this extremely easy with a built in migration tool. You can find that under Settings > All Settings> Account > Import via Easy Switch. Follow the prompts, and give Proton access to your Google account and it will handle the rest. If you have a lot of email to import, it may take a while. The good news is you don’t have to stay connected, Proton handles if for you on their end and sends you an email when it’s done with a summary. Proton imported around 8GB of email and was done in less than 24hrs.
• After all email / contacts / calendar is imported, you are now free to delete users and your Workspace account. Google has a free tool to download all of your organizations data, so I suggest doing that first if you have anything sensitive that you absolutely can’t lose.

This seems like a long list, but it only took me an hour or so to do everything other than the data import which was just a set and forget process that ran overnight.

The only other things left to do would be to download the Proton Mail / VPN / Drive apps to your devices. I would also recommend setting Proton mail as the default mail app on your phone.

It should be noted that you can not use Proton with the default Apple Mail app on iPhone, you must use the Proton Mail app. This is because of the encryption that comes baked into to Proton.

Proton does provide a bridge app for Mac, so if you want to use your default Apple Mail app on the Mac with proton, that IS possible. You can get more information on the bridge app here.