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Gabor Szarnyas edited this page Feb 13, 2023 · 12 revisions

Google Workspace

Using a Google Workspace email account as an alias from Gmail

When setting email aliasing from another Gmail account, Gmail returns the following error message:

Authentication failed. Please check your username/password. Server returned error: "535-5.7.8 Username and Password not accepted. Learn more at 535 5.7.8 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=BadCredentials s21-20020a05640217d500b0046267f8150csm6336871edy.19 - gsmtp , code: 535"

Working around this needs multiple steps:

  • Ask the Google Workspace administrator (root user) to turn on access for "Less secure apps" (either globally or specifically for your user).
  • Go to the Email settings of the user you want to use as an alias and allow IMAP. To do so, Under "IMAP access: (access Gmail from other clients using IMAP)" select Enable IMAP.
  • Go to the Google Account settings of the user you want use as an alias. Under Security, select Less secure app access and turn it to ON.

Once these were taken care of, you can:

  • Add your alias with its full username (xx@yy.zz) and password
  • Receive the confirmation email, open the link and click Confirm.

Moving a folder from a personal Google account to a Google Workspace account

Moving a Google Drive folder from a personal Google account to a Google Workspace account is challenging. The first step is sharing it from the personal account with the Workspace account but after that, the naïve approaches fail:

  • It is not possible to transfer the ownership of the directory from a personal account (external user) to a user in a Google Workspace organization (source):

    You can't transfer ownership to or from an external user, such as a personal Google Account or a user in another organization. This limitation is to protect user and company data from unauthorized transfer and access.

  • It is not possible to copy a shared folder on Google Drive's web user interface (source):

    Since Google has removed the function of making a copy of the entire folder, if you want to copy the contents of the entire folder, you need to sort all the files into a folder in advance or make a copy of the files one by one to My Drive.

As of February 2023, the following workaround works:

  1. Share the directory from the personal account with the Workspace account.

  2. Open the Workspace account in the browser. Select the directory (e.g. dir_old), press Shift + Z, and select Add shortcut to add a shortcut (dir_old) in the Workspace accounts own drive.

  3. Start the Google Drive desktop client and log in to the Workspace account.

  4. Synchronize the dir_old directory in mirroring mode.

  5. Once the synchronization finished, create a copy of dir_old named e.g. dir_new using the file explorer

  6. Wait until the Google Drive client synchronizes the directory back to the server.

  7. Detach the dir_old directory from the Workspace account (e.g. by revoking the file sharing from the personal account to the Workspace account).

Some caveats:

  • Shortcuts cannot be transported this way: they will result in an error ("Some errors occurred" -> "View" -> "Can't upload some files"). (Note: when synced, shortcuts are represented by 0-byte files on the disk.)
  • Obviously, all folder and document URLs will change.
  • Sharing settings will be lost, including link-sharing settings.
  • The titles of the documents are captured in the filenames of the documents. Therefore, special characters such as slashes (/) are dropped from the titles.

These caveats imply that all documents that were previously publicly shared using link sharing need to be 1) configured to be public again 2) their links need to be replaced.

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