Disable the G Suite and Fixing Email Forwarding Issue in Google Domains

I recently purchased google domains and accidentally clicked “Enable G Suite” and found it hard to disable it.  To my surprise a normal email forwarding is also not working however my website is opening perfectly with the nameserve I have given.

On Clicking the Admin Console link (as in above picture red underlined) it took me to G Suite log-in where I don’t have an account in G Suite and gave me error (as in below picture).

After a while I found that there is no direct “Disable G-Suite” button, however I can delete the G-Suite resource records details under DNS section.  This deletion eventually disabled the G-Suite.  Pardon me, I could not screenshot the G Suite settings in below picture because changing it causes my website goes dead and it takes about 2-4hrs to become live again.

Then I enabled “Email Forward Only” option under Configure Email, this brought up the resource record as above.  Then after 2-4hrs, my normal email forwarding started working perfectly.

If you have enabled Email Forward only instead of enabling G-Suite, you would see only the E-mail forward resources.  In case of G-Suite enabled, you will find this Email forward resource record replaced by G-Suite resource.  Google says that enabling G-Suite will still forward the emails, but in my case that didn’t work.  After disabling G-Suite and enabling “Email forward only” option, I found that Email forwarding worked for me.  One thing to note is that I’m not a G-Suite subscriber and that may be the reason why it’s not forwarding emails.

Update 07-Jan-2018:

I found that I was confusing between the Google Cloud-DNS and the Google Domains.  Clarity between them gave me clear picture of how these works.

There were resource records in both G-Domains and G-Cloud-DNS.  The point is that I can use either one of them but not both.  To use G-Domains, I have to use the name-servers (NS) provided by G-Domains.  To use the G-Cloud-DNS I have to use the name-servers provided by G-Cloud-DNS.  In my case the NS differed between them such a way as table below

I was using my G-Cloud-DNS by providing the above G-Cloud-DNS NS in the G-Domains.  Once I have provided G-Domains with other NS, the resource records set in that new NS will come into effect and all resource records in G-Domains becomes invalid.  I had wrongly setup my email forward in G-Domains which became invalid after changing the NS to G-Cloud-DNS.  This was the cause of all such confusion of why email forwarding were not working.

There were two ways to fix this issue then.

1. I can keep the G-Cloud-DNS as my NS and update the Email forwarding resource record (MX record) at G-Cloud-DNS.  This can be done by copying the same email forward resource records from G-Domains (under Config DNS) to G-Cloud-DNS.  In this case I added following MX-resource record to G-Cloud-DNS

   

2. I can keep the G-Domains as my NS and add “A” record and “CNAME” record of my cloud website to G-Domains.  In this case I added following “A” record and “CNAME” record of my cloud website to G-Domains

   

Both of these methods forwarded my email perfectly.

Ajay

Ajay is a professional developer and architect of NI-LabVIEW applications with extreme interest in getting the hardware connected to LabVIEW and automating the stuff.  Recently he is also putting his hands in NI-TestStand to get very dirty on it. He is also a good mentor for the various interns in his career.  He is ready to help the people in techie roles.