The Gmail app on my phone and in my browser looks a lot more yellow when I switch to my work account, and it’s all Google’s fault. Sometime in the last week or so, Google began slapping an “External” label in a shade of deep yellow on every message sent from somebody not in my organization.

Which, since I am self-employed, constitutes the rest of the population of Earth, plus every bot and script capable of sending me e-mail. Google describes the security measure it began enforcing in late April for Google Workspace accounts–the business accounts it once gave away for free as Google Apps, then turned into a paid service in 2012, then renamed to G Suite in 2016, and then renamed once again in 2020 to Workspace–as its way to help employees “avoid unintentionally sharing confidential information with recipients outside of their organization.”

But for solo practitioners who have no employees, it’s useless. It cannot teach me anything except that even when self-employed, I can still fall victim to IT department control-freakery–and that freelancers remain invisible to many business app and service developers.

(Fun fact about the obvious phishing message in the image here: Gmail’s spam filter did not catch it.)

A support note from Google indicates that Workspace users can turn off this warning. It does not explain why I don’t see that in my own admin console. But in a Reddit thread–once again, that site proved to be an underrated source of tech support—another Workspace user said legacy free accounts don’t get that opt-out. A frequent Twitter correspondent with a grandfathered free account has since confirmed that he doesn’t have this setting either.

I suppose Google would like me to upgrade to a paid account, but I’m already paying: $19.99 a year for 100 GB of storage. The cheapest Workspace plan would only give me 30 GB and cost almost four times as much. Since Google apparently can’t be bothered to document this new limit to free accounts, the answer there is a hard nope.

All the time I’ve sunk into investigating this problem has not, however, been without benefits. Thanks to some hints from my fave avgeek blogger Seth Miller, I figured out how to disable the also-useless default warning about replying to external e-mails. To do that, sign into your admin console’s apps list page, click Calendar, click its “Sharing Settings” heading, click the pencil icon that will appear to the right of “External Invitations,” click to clear that checkbox, and click “Save.”

Although Calendar is clearly not Gmail, this settings change seems to apply in the mail app too. At some point while I was futzing around with Workspace settings, I also found an off switch for the comparable warning about sharing Google Docs with outsiders–but now I can’t find it, so maybe that opt-out is now yet another feature reserved for paying users but not documented accordingly.