I'm surprised that you're using forwarding instead of giving your clients access using the gmail app and/or IMAP/SMTP. I've found this works better than forwarding, primarily because I don't then have to maintain my own reliable authenticated SMTP service.
Anyway, my personal experience was that the warning messages before deletion were over-and-above what could be deemed reasonable. They were sent to the domain administrator, and also to the email address specified when creating the account (i.e. to a different domain). The text was something like:
"We noticed that you haven’t used your Google Apps account for the domain [redacted].com in over a year. Please let us know if you’d like to keep this account."
All I had to do to keep the account was log in via the web, just once.
Totally agree. I did give them full access. I guess I would say it was an alternative to doing Godaddy forwarding addresses. Since Apps was free, it made sense to just set it up through Google and give them the benefit of having a rock solid system that was doubling as cloud backup.
In the past I've had countless scenarios where clients lost their entire computer, or mobile, and they didn't have any backup. The first thing they want to get back is their email. After digging in, they commonly had forwarders setup via their domain registrar, meaning they effectively had no backups on the server.
Apps was basically the free solution to that, with the added benefit of what you said-- having access via IMAP/SMTP.
Since most of these clients were local/small(one owner) businesses, most of them simply said "can you forward it to my personal email?"
Most of my larger small business clients accessed it like I would-- IMAP/SMTP.
My complain here is that Google wiped these accounts calling them inactive. In my opinion, inactive accounts should have been accounts with zero email activity, not zero login activity. But I guess it's too late now...
Comments
I'm surprised that you're using forwarding instead of giving your clients access using the gmail app and/or IMAP/SMTP. I've found this works better than forwarding, primarily because I don't then have to maintain my own reliable authenticated SMTP service.
Anyway, my personal experience was that the warning messages before deletion were over-and-above what could be deemed reasonable. They were sent to the domain administrator, and also to the email address specified when creating the account (i.e. to a different domain). The text was something like:
"We noticed that you haven’t used your Google Apps account for the domain [redacted].com in over a year. Please let us know if you’d like to keep this account."
All I had to do to keep the account was log in via the web, just once.
Totally agree. I did give them full access. I guess I would say it was an alternative to doing Godaddy forwarding addresses. Since Apps was free, it made sense to just set it up through Google and give them the benefit of having a rock solid system that was doubling as cloud backup.
In the past I've had countless scenarios where clients lost their entire computer, or mobile, and they didn't have any backup. The first thing they want to get back is their email. After digging in, they commonly had forwarders setup via their domain registrar, meaning they effectively had no backups on the server.
Apps was basically the free solution to that, with the added benefit of what you said-- having access via IMAP/SMTP.
Since most of these clients were local/small(one owner) businesses, most of them simply said "can you forward it to my personal email?"
Most of my larger small business clients accessed it like I would-- IMAP/SMTP.
My complain here is that Google wiped these accounts calling them inactive. In my opinion, inactive accounts should have been accounts with zero email activity, not zero login activity. But I guess it's too late now...