This document describes how you can remove Gmail from an existing consumer account to enable the user account to be migrated to Cloud Identity or Google Workspace.
If your organization doesn't use
Cloud Identity
or
Google Workspace,
it's possible that some of your employees have been using Gmail accounts to
access Google services. Some of these Gmail accounts might use a corporate email
address such as alice@example.com as an
alternate email address.
Gmail accounts are owned and managed by the individuals who created them. Your organization therefore has no control over the configuration, security, and lifecycle of these accounts, which means they can't be migrated as is. By removing Gmail from affected consumer accounts, you allow the user accounts to be migrated to Cloud Identity or Google Workspace.
Consider removing Gmail from an existing consumer account if both of the following conditions apply:
- You want to migrate the user account to Cloud Identity or Google Workspace and retain the user's settings and data.
- You don't use the email functionality provided by Gmail.
If you want to retain Gmail functionality, or if you want to avoid engaging the owner of a Gmail account, consider sanitizing the Gmail account instead.
Before you begin
To remove Gmail from a user account, at least one of the alternate email addresses of the Gmail account must correspond to one of the domains that you've added to your Cloud Identity or Google Workspace account. Both primary and secondary domains qualify, but alias domains are not supported.
The following sections walk through the process of removing Gmail from a consumer account. The steps must be performed by the owner of the Gmail account.
Export Gmail data
Before you remove Gmail from your user account, you must export your existing Gmail data. You won't be able to access that data after you remove Gmail from the account. (Non-Gmail data is not affected.)
For information about how to export your Gmail data, see Download your data.
Remove the Gmail service
In the Google Account dashboard, open the Data & personalization page.
Under Download or delete your data, select Delete a service.
Click Delete a service. You might be prompted to enter your password again.
Click the delete icon next to the service you want to delete.
In the How you'll sign in to Google dialog, select your corporate email address and click Next.
Carefully read the explanations on the next screen. If you're sure you want to proceed, select Yes and click Delete Gmail.
It might take a few days until your corporate email address becomes the primary
email address of the user account and the Gmail data is deleted. Although you
won't be able to receive or send email using your @gmail.com email address
anymore, the address remains associated with your user account and you can
continue to use it to sign in.
Migrate the user account
When the removal process has completed and the user account has been updated to use your corporate email address as the primary email address, your administrator can migrate the user account to Cloud Identity or Google Workspace like other consumer accounts. For more information, see Migrating consumer accounts
Best practices for administrators
We recommend the following best practices for working with Gmail accounts:
- Prevent other users from assigning a corporate email address to their Gmail accounts by proactively provisioning user accounts to Cloud Identity or Google Workspace.
- Prevent new Gmail accounts from being granted access to Google Cloud resources by using an organizational policy to restrict identities by domain.
- Prevent Gmail accounts from being given access to Google Marketing Platform by using a policy that restricts sharing by domain.
What's next
- Review how to assess existing user accounts.
- Learn how to sanitize Gmail accounts.