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Transfer ownership of a Google mailbox to a Managed Account

Google supports two types of user accounts, managed user accounts and consumer user accounts. Managed user accounts are under the full control of a Cloud Identity or Google Workspace administrator. In contrast, consumer accounts are fully owned and managed by the people who created them.

It can be problematic when someone uses a corporate email account to register for a consumer service in Google before that corporation joins Google Workspace as a tenant. When this happens, there is then a conflict between the unmanaged consumer user account ([email protected]) and the tenant managed user account ([email protected]).

To fix this, Google has a process by which the unmanaged account is converted into a consumer account with an @gmail.com address. This process is called Sanitizing the Gmail account.

Sanitizing Google Accounts

The process to sanitize a Google account is shown below.

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