How to transfer your OVH mail address to G Suite

I recently moved from OVH to DigitalOcean to host my blog. Previously, my ovh mail address was marie@girlknowstech.com. On the other hand, with DigitalOcean, emails aren’t included in the offer. Edit: I use SiteGround now, and I am very happy with the switch!

So now I’m using G-Suite to get a professional email address (like marie@girlknowstech.com). I had some problems making this transfer, so I figured it might be good to document the process for other people who are trying to do the same thing as me.

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Steps to transfer your email from OVH to G-Suite

Creating your G Suite

1. Log in to your OVH customer area
2. Delete your email address from your OVH client space to free it. Unfortunately, I forgot to do this before my hosting expired. So I had to make a support request to OVH so that they could do this step for me!
3. In the “Domains” section, choose the domain where you want to transfer the email address
4. Turn off the transfer protection (since this is what we want to do right now!)
   
   
5. Go to the homepage of G-Suite
6. Click on “Get Started.”
7. Enter your information and then click “Next”
   
8. In my case, I still have a domain name at OVH for now, so I choose the first option and enter “girlknowstech.com”
   
9. Enter the email address you want to forward and a password
   
10. Click on “Accept and Sign Up”, and that’s it! You should now verify your domain name. Google already has a good documentation to do so! If you encounter an error message at this stage, go to the bottom of this article.

DNS Parameters

1. Go to the OVH client space and select your domain name
2. Go to the “DNS Zone” section, and delete the three records with the type “MX” and with the domain “girlknowstech.com” – the one you want to transfer the email.
3. Open a new tab, and go to this Google page. The table shows the DNS entries you need to add on OVH. It should look like this:
   
4. Go back to the tab with your OVH client space, click on “Add an entry”
   
5. Under “Mail Records”, select MX, like shown in the Google documentation, then click on “Next”.
6. Fill in all the required fields, like shown here:
   It is important to add a dot “.” at the end of the “Target”
7. Click on “Next”, and then repeat steps 5 and 6 for all the lines in the table shown (5 lines). In total, you will add 5 entries in total.

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Verify your domain

If you use a domain already registered elsewhere (at Namecheap for example), you will have to prove to Google that your domain name belongs to you. To do this, the steps look very much like what we just did with the addition of DNS MX entries.

1. Still in the OVH client space, under « Domains », click on your URL and then “DNS Zone”
2. Log in to admin.google.com with your G-Suite address
3. Click on “Verify Domain”!
4. Follow the three steps like shown in the screenshot below. Google explains very well what you need to do.
   
5. To complete the fourth step asked by Google to verify the domain ownership, on OVH, click again on “Add a DNS entry”.
6. As the type, select TXT.
7. Fill the input with what’s asked, and given by Google earlier:
   
8. Go back to Google and check the box about adding the MX entry (the last step).
9. You can now verify your domain!
   

Problems that may occur

This problem caused me a lot of problems during my transfer:

The error message is: “That address is currently used by a personal Google Account. Use a different address for your organizational Account.”

Even after reading the documentation provided by Google, I did not understand why I was getting this message saying that my email address is already being used by a personal account. It turns out that as I was transferring my emails on one of my personal Gmail accounts (girlknowstech@gmail.com), my address marie@girlknowstech.com had been added in my account settings. Here’s how to remove it:

1. Go to accounts.google.com
2. Under “Personal Info & Privacy”, click on “Your Personal Info”
3. For me, the email address “marie@girlknowstech.com” was in the list of emails connected to my account “girlknowstech@gmail.com”, that’s the reason why I couldn’t register marie@girlknowstech.com at G Suite.
   

Conclusion

Finally, this article is finished! It’s quite long, but it’s because I tried to provide as many images as possible so you can follow the steps easily, for those less used to doing this kind of implementation! I hope you enjoyed this article and that it will save you time and prevent you from losing your business address for 1 week like what happened to me. facepalm !