I use both mailbox and gmail. For people that are considering switching, some websites don't accept the mailbox domain, so be ready for that. Otherwise the service works great.
rendleflag · 52m ago
I’ve been a Fastmail user for years, having left Gmail. It works great and have nothing be but praise for them. I use my own domain with them so if I decide to leave it’s not an issue worrying about updating people with my new email.
palata · 49m ago
I was really happy with Fastmail as well. Before that I used ProtonMail, which was annoying because it forced me to install their bridge and use their encryption stuff.
After Fastmail I went to Migadu, and it's absolutely great. I have never seen support requests getting answers that quickly :-).
onlyhumans · 42m ago
Fastmail is kind of a weird service. If you stop paying they release your email for someone else to take over. Pretty unacceptable this day and age.
jeffparsons · 13m ago
This would be easily solved for customers who care about it by allowing you to pay a one-off fee to reserve the name for ~100 years.
Or they could just absorb that.
Any idea why it works that way? Have they offered an explanation?
I'm a Fastmail customer but I've never noticed this because I use my own domain.
FireBeyond · 12m ago
I use Fastmail with my own domain. I am not sure of the logic that says paying $60/year for email is fine, but $8/year for a domain is a bridge too far.
Do that, it's a non-issue, though I do agree with you that it shouldn't be a thing (or at least have like a multiple year embargo on the address).
NomDePlum · 26m ago
How's that different from any other provider?
Sayrus · 12m ago
Most prevent your username/email from being reused but restrict access or storage. From what I've seen, the delay often ranges from 30 days to years (but not guaranteed).
winrid · 11m ago
At the very least it's weird when you consider their privacy focused marketing and the fact that it costs them like nothing to delete the data but mark that email taken.
echelon · 34m ago
That is 100% unacceptable.
ternaryoperator · 47m ago
Like you, I am a happy long-term user of Fastmail. In addition to the excellent mail and calendar service, their tech support is top-notch: fast and generally providing the correct answer in their first communication.
TranquilMarmot · 4h ago
I spent the past month "de-Googling" my life after I saw a notice in my Gmail inbox that it was 20 years old. I took a step back and realized just how invested into the Google ecosystem I was. Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Maps, Keep, Photos, YouTube, FitBit, Android. Basically my entire digital life. My goal was more diversifying than security/privacy, but security/privacy is a really nice bonus.
I ended up going with Proton because they had a good solution for mail, calendar, and drive which I was looking to replace. I set up my custom domain to point to it and have my Gmail forwarding to it - any time I get an email to the old Gmail address I go change it on the website or delete the account altogether.
For Google Docs / Keep, I switched over to Obsidian and pay for the sync there. It's a great replacement for my main use case of Docs / Keep which is just a dumping ground for ideas.
For Google Photos, I now self-host Immich in Hetzner on a VPS with a 1TB storage box mounted via SSHFS. I use Tailscale to connect to it. It took a few days to use Google Takeout + immich-go to upload all the photos (~300GB of data) but it's working really well now. Only costs $10/mo for the VPS and 1TB of storage.
Android I think I'll be stuck on - I have a Pixel 8 Pro that technically supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there. Next time I need a new phone I'll take a serious look at Fairphone but I think the Pixel 8 Pro should last a few more years.
My FitBit Versa is really old and starting to die - I ordered one of the new Pebble watches and am patiently waiting for it to ship!
YouTube I'm stuck on because that's where the content is. I have yet to find a suitable replacement for Google Maps - OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.
crossroadsguy · 1h ago
Switch to an iPhone.
Apple's software and services (sync, drive, photo backup etc) are so inferior, especially compared with Google's (technically speaking), you'd be anyway forced to use third party (often cross platform) solutions. No risk of going deep into Apple's ecosystem ;-)
jordibc · 1h ago
I found myself in a similar situation and also started de-googling, which is much nicer and liberating than I was fearing.
I did the exact same thing with Immich (what a great software, by the way!).
And in case it helps:
Instead of always relying on google maps, I now mostly use CoMaps (https://www.comaps.app/). Way better than using directly OpenStreetMap. And for my Pixel 7, I switched to LineageOS with gapps (https://lineageos.org/) and I'm not missing anything and am very happy with it.
Also, I'm trying now Nextcloud (https://nextcloud.com/), with a setup similar to Immich, and now I do believe there is life beyond google, and it's a better life.
palata · 1h ago
> supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there
What are the tradeoffs? I have been following GrapheneOS for a while, and it doesn't seem like there are many tradeoffs.
> OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.
OpenStreetMap is a database, and most commercial services that are not Google use it. E.g. Uber or Lyft.
You just need to find an app that you like. CoMaps is nice, OSMAnd has a lot of feature but the UX is harder. And of course you can contribute to OSM and make it even better than it is! You'll see it's a great community!
BeetleB · 7m ago
Someone showed me OSMAnd recently while we were hiking. I installed it as soon as I got home. Great for hiking.
Then last week I used it for navigation (on a phone with no SIM card).
Absolutely. Terrible.
Worst navigation app I've seen. Told me to make a turn at an intersection that did not allow turns. Then at another intersection, it told me to "Turn left", but the display clearly showed it going straight. I'm guessing that the straight road probably is angled 1 degree or something at the intersection and the app was viewing that as a turn.
nine_k · 40m ago
Can you use GrapheneOS with your bank app? With a digital wallet for NFC cards? With Uber or Lyft? (Asking seriously, not rhetorically.)
callahad · 10m ago
My understanding from looking into this two years ago is that it's hit or miss for banks (depending on if they opt into device attestation stuff), no for NFC / Google Wallet, and yes for Uber / Lyft.
Apparently the common workaround for the Google Wallet stuff is to pair a GrapheneOS phone with a stock Android smartwatch.
BeetleB · 6m ago
Yes, these would be my concerns as well. In the past, I would install custom ROMs. Then I stopped doing that and would only root my device. But of late, way, way too many apps refuse to work if rooted (apps that used to be fine with it before).
Now I just accept life as it is.
jackthetab · 5m ago
This is a question that I rarely see answered but would love to know as well.
octo888 · 10m ago
Contactless payments is the the big one that doesn't work and probably won't. You can do in app payments via Google pay though
Many banking apps work fine though not all.
habi · 3h ago
> OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.
Was about to mention magic earth, but of course someone else has recommended it already. Was talking with a coworker about degoogling and they brought up this. Surprisingly works good enough where I live.
sunshinekitty · 1h ago
Haha almost identical experience but self hosting immich with off site backups. Wild how difficult it is to change your email with certain websites! Several months later still fighting with various sites.
I have an iphone so I use Apple maps and an icloud based obsidian vault, and that is all that is tied to Apple which feels fine for now.
palata · 57m ago
There is CoMaps on iOS that is open source and is based on OpenStreetMap. Highly recommended.
prof-dr-ir · 58m ago
I am very interested in moving my photos and data to a self-hosted solution but am a little anxious about backups.
Do you simply trust hetzner to not lose the data on your 1TB storage box?
(I am aware that I am currently trusting google and dropbox to do just that.)
xandrius · 45m ago
To be fair if both google and dropbox can't take care of 1TB of data, who can?
My solution against photo anxiety is to actually look at them and decide to physically print the best ones every year. More likely to be used as gifts or just fun to look through them in a photo album, nobody is going to sit next to you on a phone or computer but bring out an old photo album and everyone is on it.
thewebguyd · 12m ago
I do professional wedding photography as a side business.
Yes, please print your photos! I love it when my clients print their photos, and I print my favorites as well. There's still something magical about a real, physical photo vs. digital.
I have vast archives of digital photos and you know what? I barely look at them, but I have prints up all over my walls, in my wallet, etc and I enjoy them all the time.
nine_k · 38m ago
Back it up to S3 glacier, or to Backblaze. The cost of it is pretty low, much lower than a VPS / bare metal box + 1 TB cost for the photo app hosting.
floren · 4h ago
I've taken steps to degoogle too, but like you I've rather stuck on Android because over the years I've ossified a set of tools I like (KeepassDX and Syncthing are really important, and Firefox on Android is actually damn good).
pluc · 1h ago
GrapheneOS lets you use Play Store apps
Telaneo · 38m ago
Which you need to buy a Pixel to be able to use, Pixel being Google's phones. Bit of a Catch-22 there. I guess you could buy one used.
binaryturtle · 1h ago
How do you de-google yourself properly when every 3rd website stops working entirely unless you whitelist some google stuff in your content blocker?
themadturk · 42m ago
I've largely de-Googled myself, but not my family. The only Gmail I have is from a few old accounts that hardly ever email me anymore; I've been on Apple's email, calendar, photos, etc. for years, and use Kagi for search. Nor do I feel any pull back toward Google. The biggest involvement I have is for the correspondents I have who are still using Gmail; every time I email them, my stuff ends up in Google's system.
qualeed · 1h ago
1) "De-googling" doesn't need to be a binary, all-in or all-out situation. Any reduction in reliance of Google (or any single point of failure) is good. Diversifying the big stuff (mail, storage, etc.) is a great start. About last on the list is worrying about the occasional allowance for gstatic.com or whatever.
2) While I occasionally need to allow some scripts from google, it's absolutely nowhere near 1/3rd of sites.
jjulius · 1h ago
I've de-Googled myself and this idea does not match my reality.
bsoles · 3h ago
I am also in the process of doing the same with Gmail to Proton. The process isn't really that painful and kind of fun, actually. Anytime I get an email on Gmail, I go and update it to point to my Proton email.
palata · 1h ago
Note that they mention using a custom domain. I strongly encourage you to do this (sounds like you don't), because then you don't depend on the mail provider. After Gmail, I started using my own domain and changed provider every year (Proton, Fastmail, and I landed on Migadu).
The key is that if you have your domain, you can swap the provider and nobody has to know about it.
yahoozoo · 56m ago
What’s the point though? So you don’t come across as a Google shill?
palata · 48m ago
Not the author, but it's nice to support alternatives.
palata · 51m ago
> The last two providers offered true end-to-end encryption
This is not quite right. The only offer e2ee if you send an email to someone on the same provider (e.g. ProtonMail to ProtonMail). If you write to someone using Gmail, it's not e2ee.
IMHO this kind of e2ee is interesting for companies (because every employee is on the same provider, and it's better to have the internal communications on ProtonMail than shared with Google on Gmail), but for a personal email it doesn't matter so much.
What's really important is to have a custom domain so that you are not stuck with one provider.
giuliomagnifico · 39m ago
That's correct, I meant that you have to always use their app, whether to use e2ee or not. There is no IMAP.
Mailbox also offers e2ee via browser among the same mailbox users, but it also has IMAP and PGP.
cptskippy · 40m ago
Custom domains make it really simple to move around. I was able to move from Gmail to ProtonMail on a Sunday afternoon without anyone knowing that I'd made a change.
mixedmath · 2h ago
> This was a tough decision, having used Gmail since 2007/2008. However, I had to draw the line and stop giving Google my data for free.
>
> The problem with email is that everything is transmitted in plain text.
Interestingly, one of my biggest problems with Gmail is that they don't allow actual plaintext. I used to routinely collaborate with developers who were vision-impaired, and the official Gmail phone app wouldn't let me send them plaintext email. Instead, it was some sort of HTML thing. Unfortunately, we sometimes sent code snippets to each other over email, and though admittedly it looked more or less fine, Gmail changed the underlying representation enough that my collaborators' screen readers would mess up on the parsing.
This led to me leaving Gmail on my phone, which led ultimately to me leaving Gmail entirely.
johannes1234321 · 1h ago
I think you use the term "plain text" differently from the author of the post. I think they refer to the fact that there is no end to end encryption. Google has access to the clear text of all messages and can index/analyze them.
Sniffnoy · 1h ago
That sounds like a problem with the Gmail webmail client -- I don't think Gmail does that when used over IMAP with an external client?
dsissitka · 4h ago
Something to be aware of if you're considering mailbox.org:
Oh, thank you.
I recently considered moving from posteo.de to mailbox.org, but I think I won't anymore regarding such an issue took so long to even be considered as a problem and as I understand is still not solved.
giuliomagnifico · 4h ago
Oh, thank you. I didn't know that. Anyway, I'm not using a custom domain on mailbox, I use my custom mail domain with another service.
spapas82 · 1h ago
Unfortunately this is common in many smtp servers and is configuration dependent: After you authenticate as usera@example.com you can send emails as userb@example.com.
asteinbr · 10m ago
I’m going back to Gmail from mailbox.
The spam protection from mailbox is very poor.
Been there since many years.
NoboruWataya · 4h ago
I have been using mailbox.org for a few years and no complaints. I don't think the web UI is amazing but I use it via Thunderbird so it doesn't affect me.
If you use your own email client and your own domain name, you don't really need to worry about UI with email providers at all (as long as your provider supports those features). And your own domain name makes it easy to move around in future if you need to.
I don't really have any plans to move away from mailbox.org, though I just saw the post about Thunderbird offering an email service in the future. That might actually prompt me to move as I'd like to support the makers of a FOSS email client I've been happily using for years.
guerrilla · 4h ago
It doesn't sound like they do on-disk encryption like ProtonMail. Is that right?
gruez · 4h ago
You mean e2e? on-disk encryption (ie. "encryption at rest") is basically used by everyone, including gmail and outlook.
guerrilla · 4h ago
You can tell how well I've researched this ;) but yes.
burnte · 48m ago
Indeed. The HTTPS connection is enecrypted, and they TRY to use TLS first when delivering mail, but it will fall back to cleartext easily if the other end doesn't support TLS.
giuliomagnifico · 4h ago
Mailbox doesn’t support it, but on mailbox you can use your IMAP app with Proton not.
And on mailbox you can easily send and receive PGP encrypted mail on mailbox.org. They provide a page for key import, allowing you to send encrypted emails like regular mail when needed.
It’s your choice, if you always want to use proton mail app everywhere you can use proton.
guerrilla · 4h ago
I use IMAP with Proton. Thunderbird is my main mail client. You just need to install the bridge.
giuliomagnifico · 3h ago
Yes but only if you install the bridge as I wrote in my blog post, and on iOS iPadOS? You can’t use Apple Mail app.
mantra2 · 4h ago
I started the get itchy about so much of my life sitting on Google about 5 years ago, so I decided to take the leap to Fastmail and haven’t looked back.
Didn’t need to do anything special for the migration. The in house importer they offer pulled over 80GB in a day and I was set from there.
Fastmail isn’t going to give you end to end encryption - but - I think just shedding a major Google service is a massive win privacy-wise.
I remember briefly looking into Proton but the search was awful.
mips_avatar · 4h ago
I'm thinking of leaving Google workspace for fastmail, but worried a bit about giving future employees email addresses/access. I hate being tied to Google but it provides a decent suite of things, and unlike M365 they actually work.
pndy · 4h ago
> I started the get itchy about so much of my life sitting on Google
For me and my partner was enough when Google started collecting info about purchases/delivery orders on gmail and dumping it in some separated page without any consent nor notification.
We moved to Proton but once they changed branding and starting introducing additional services beside mailbox we knew they enter milking-out path. Their newest AI plaything was reason to leave.
ryandrake · 4h ago
This solves the "dependence on Gmail" problem (which is definitely a worthy problem to solve) but not the general "dependence on a particular mail provider" problem. The next step in this walk-down-the-risk-chain is self-hosting on a VPS, where you're now just dependent on your VPS provider, and the next step could be self-hosting on your own metal, where you're now just dependent on your ISP. Happy trails!
palata · 46m ago
Self-hosting seems a bit extreme. The first step is actually to have your own custom domain, so that you can change provider easily. Granted you still depend on a provider, but you are not locked in.
mantra2 · 4h ago
What bothered me about Gmail was that it was central to my life and if something were to happen and they locked my account they have zero support.
With that out of the way I feel perfectly happy with FM — no need to go further down the paranoia hole.
TranquilMarmot · 4h ago
> self-hosting on your own metal, where you're now just dependent on your ISP
Your ISP, the hardware not failing, needing to do routine maintenance and (expensive!) upgrades, having room in your house, having consistent power to your servers, possible theft, natural disasters causing you to lose your home, etc.
There's a reason I use a VPS for hosting a lot of things haha. Mostly because I live in a small apartment and don't have room for a server rack.
ectospheno · 4h ago
Backup your data. Email is data. It is easy enough to do and frees you from many problems. You restore from backup and go on with life.
42lux · 4h ago
It's more about diversifying at least that was my intention when I moved mail to a new provider.
woodson · 4h ago
Unfortunately, most big mail providers won’t accept email from your self-hosted mail server, even with DKIM, SPF, etc. So, diversifying is as good as it gets.
immibis · 1h ago
Has this been tested recently? I had no problem sending mail to my own Gmail account from my own server. Even without SPF (then I got a bunch of spam spoof bounces and realized I forgot SPF)
ryandrake · 48m ago
I've been self-hosting E-mail for a long time (which itself probably helps with reputation), and I very rarely have deliverability problems.
lawn · 4h ago
Which is why you should buy your own domain so you can easily move to another provider.
And backup your emails of course.
tsimionescu · 4h ago
I wonder how many more people have lost access to their DNS than to their email account. When you lease a domain (you can't buy domains), you have to periodically renew your lease - this is much more likely to be a problem than typical mail accounts. And if you lose your domain, and someone buys it, they now get all of your email - a much worse situation than Google locking out of your account. And there is no chance to appeal - again much worse than even Google's terrible user help.
mxuribe · 46m ago
I have zero data to justify my assumption...but i assume less people lose their domain vs folks who lose access to their email. That being said, fully agreed that managing one's domain name - especially the one tied to your mail email address - is so critically important to protect. Big brand domain name leasers, er, um, i mean registrars (BTW, agreed with you on only being able to *lease* domains) tend to offer extra account protection like multi-factor authentication, which should be the bare minimum that is used. At some point, if someone is managing LOTS of domain names, i get that it can be a burden...but for low number of domains (or even just 1 or 2 domains for a family), i think focusing on good security and keeping on payment aspects is not so tough...and helps immensely from getting negatively impacted.
cosmic_cheese · 1h ago
It’s not been a problem for me. The registrars I use are pretty vocal about expiring payment credentials, and if I were really worried they allow stacking multiple methods to fall back on, some of which have their own fallbacks (like PayPal). In theory paying for longer periods in one go could help, but ironically that might make it worse since you’re more likely to forget about a renewal happening 5 or 10 years from now than you are one that recurs every year.
TranquilMarmot · 4h ago
I own a domain that I use as my primary email address, but it's a "premium" domain that costs quite a bit to lease every year. To me the main concern here is that my payment fails, I don't notice, the domain goes up for sale and somebody grabs it. Then they have access to everything.
So, I use my personal domain for all mail except anything that's "vital" like government websites, banking, paying rent, etc. for which I use my email provider's domain. And of course I'm registered with my domain registrar with a different email domain.
AnonC · 4h ago
If you can afford it, renew the domain for 10 years into the future (which means having it paid for till 2035, for example). Every year, renew the domain for one more year so that it’s always paid for 10 years into the future. If payment fails or you’re busy with something else, you’d still have several years of no worrying (some caveats and risks may still apply depending on the TLD and registrar).
TranquilMarmot · 4h ago
That's a good idea, I might see if I can do it. It was registered with Google Domains but got transferred over to Squarespace, idk if they offer long-term renewals.
immibis · 1h ago
I don't think long term renewals exist for premium domains.
You probably shouldn't use a premium domain unless you really need one. It's just a money grab by registrars and registries.
mxuribe · 34m ago
Hi @TranquilMarmot, first off, i think the recommendation from @AnonC on their long term approach to registering a domain name is absolutely brilliant! Do that!
Another recommendation you should consider is to find a domain that ends in one of the common top-level domains - like .COM, .NET, or .ORG - because for using with *vital government services* you would not believe how many good natured civil servants (or for that manner even customer service folks in private/commercial companies too!) have no idea that email addresses can end in something other than .com, .net, or .org...and if you try to give them an address that, say, ends in like .FR, or .CC, or .ME, etc...They will try to place a ".com" at the end of it! My experience shows that folks in the U.S. know far less about other TLDs...and are more likely to commit this error, but folks outside of U.S. are perfectly cool with all manner of different TLS. I have had a somesurname.CC domain name as the mailbox for all my family members for more than a decade...and they are all trained to be LOUD and explicit when they communicate to government workers and customer service folks. So, i should have just gotten an easier TLD, but ah well. Live and learn! :-)
EDIT: Forgot to add that choossing the more common .COM, .NET, or .ORG TLDs for a domain name *tends* to be cheaper than many premium domains names. Each registrar wil of course vary, but mostly these tend to be reasonably priced.
mantra2 · 4h ago
Yeah, I was using my own (used Pobox for SMTP in Gmail) — admittedly that made the transition easier.
carlosjobim · 4h ago
There's no reason to self-host your e-mail server. As long as you own your domain, you can simply point the DNS to a different provider when you want to switch.
raffraffraff · 4h ago
I moved myself and my wife's business away from Google, but that hasn't been without it's issues. Even though we're using a globally recognised mail provider and have DKIM, SPF etc all set up perfectly, we get bounced or delayed by certain mail admins. There are also occasional delays and issues. One thing I'll say about Gmail is that it's extremely reliable.
RandomBacon · 4h ago
What provider?
Running an online forum, I've encountered people using Atomic Mail, and that service has terrible reliability.
raffraffraff · 21m ago
Namecheap's "private email" service.
Telaneo · 2h ago
I've been pretty happy with Mailbox.org. The web interface isn't great compared to Gmail, but I prefer Thunderbird anyway for normal usage. They used to have a weird 2FA setup, but they've since switched to the same kind everybody else use, thankfully.
Microsoft's been a bit annoying, since some emails I've sent to @hotmail.com domains go to spam, but at least they do arrive and aren't just bounced, as I've heard from some horror stories. Sending to @gmail.com accounts seems to work perfectly though. I don't send a lot of outgoing mail from my personal account anyway, so it doesn't really matter in the end. Some mails seem to take longer to arrive, but I had that problem on Gmail too, so I don't think there's anything actually wrong per se.
I've been using Migadu for a low-moderate throughput inbox (within their micro tier limits) in the US and the IMAP4 performance is kinda awful sometimes. I'm not sure why :(
selkin · 4h ago
> The problem with email is that everything is transmitted in plain text.
That's not a Gmail problem, and no reason to migrate. Some use cases just don't fit email, and for those, we have other, more fitting platforms.
> So, I went with mailbox.org that still offers integrated PGP encryption, and if you want, you can always use external PGP too (which I was already doing with Gmail).
Ok, so now you have two problems.
charles_f · 1h ago
> That's not a Gmail problem, and no reason to migrate.
It is a problem with Gmail, because they're helping themselves into your email, as was explained by the author in the sentence immediately after the one you quoted:
> Technically, Google can store every message you receive and know everything, and U.S. agencies can request access to that data
selkin · 32m ago
(If it's a problem) it is a problem with every Email provider. It is part of the design.
joshuamorton · 1h ago
> because they're helping themselves into your email
What, specifically do you mean by this?
partomniscient · 4h ago
But we haven't started using regular expressions yet...!?
I was fortunate enough that my solution was to host my own mail server 20+ years ago and create a separate email address per relationship with a company, so I can tell the moment some 3rd party has been comprimised when I receive spam on a specific address. My personal spam has been minimal over time.
If for example moc.elgoog@mydomain.com gets spam - I know they're compromised or have sold me out.
Yes gmail has had something similar using the + character, but most people don't know about/make use of this and still abdicate spam filtering to things they don't understand like bayesian algorithms which suffer from false positives. (Have you checked your spam folder for our very important message...?)
Email has never been secure and despite modern updates, I still don't consider it as such. Then again I don't have much to worry about, so I'm ambivalent most of the time. That said, special 'fuck you' shoutouts to Ticketek for being compromised and their general ineptitude and shitfuckery in so many ways... It took them 2 months to respond to an issue I raised with them only to ask whether it was still an issue... (yes, it still is).
Unfortunately I don't know if you could easily manage to convince majority email providers you're legitimite with a new domain in this day and age - I suspect its now a major hurdle to overcome as I've read often enough of mail bouncing because "we've never heard of you until now, so we don't trust you" - which makes communicating with the majority of the world via email almost impossible to build up the trust level you're considered legitimite and that's despite all this extra DMARC, DKIM, and SPF and SSL/TLS supposed safeguards which have appeared over time and I've had to comply with.
Security as an afterthought means its still probably never going to be secure. I've always considered email the equivalent of transmitting plaintext and have always treated it as such. This has led to some pretty difficult situations where I don't email important stuff to a 3rd party just because they expect it and everyone else does it.
selkin · 3h ago
It can be summarized that the romanticized ideal of Email is long gone, if it ever existed. Today email is a way for others, mostly automations, to send you notifications.
Once you realize this, the "just keep whatever I have right now" is often the best solution.
immibis · 1h ago
Just don't send lots and lots of email. I haven't had a problem yet. But I mostly use my server to receive.
Speaking of which, receiving is free. There are no spam checks when other providers send email to yours. So feel free to only use Gmail when you need to send an email out to a big provider. It's still a 95% win.
litmus-pit-git · 1h ago
And I will be leaving Mailbox.org for Runbox, or Purelymail, or Fastmail. I have a few more months' credit remaining on Mailbox, besides I am yet to try the trials.
(This is for the author and anyone else) If you are looking for responsive (or even barely responsive) and responsible support responses whenever you need it, weigh your options very carefully about which mail host you want to move to. You might need it once or twice a year, but that might be crucial.
Edit: And if you can help it, and have your own domain, never use a mail host's domain-based email address (no matter how catchy and short that is) because it will be a headache switching away from it if you want to change your host.
palata · 45m ago
Have you considered Migadu? I don't have shares there, just a very happy customer :-).
AnonC · 4h ago
> The last two providers offered true end-to-end encryption
ProtonMail and Tutanota offer end-to-end encryption only when both the sender and recipient are using the same (i.e., ProtonMail->ProtonMail or Tutanota->Tutanota). If you’re emailing someone outside those or if you’re receiving emails from someone outside those, and you want encryption, you’d have to go to PGP (with its own complexities).
indigodaddy · 4h ago
Anyone considering a move should also look at NameCrane/CraneMail by the crew behind BuyVM. Solid service, incredibly reasonable prices, great community/discord. They are always looking to improve, extremely proactive and reactive to customer feedback and issues. No builtin PGP, but I believe that is out of their control as they use SmarterMail on the backend.
prmoustache · 38m ago
I would run away from any service that forces me to use discord fr support.
AnonC · 4h ago
I hadn’t heard of this and looked for it. How is Cranemail so cheap? I’m really surprised but also concerned that one can get 100 GB of space with unlimited mailboxes and aliases (with just a sending limit) for $10 a year (which gets even cheaper when paying for multiple years or lifetime).
indigodaddy · 3h ago
Not sure, but you could ask @Francisco here [1]. He might respond. He’s been around a very long time— certainly not fly by night, as I can understand thinking that at the price value.
Congrats for the move. "Away from Gmail" is by itself a happy title.
The report is also very good and that should be a service every other mail service could provide to people who want to move away from G'rab'mail.
Another curiosity is that you use the same password I use for everything: xxx
Simple to remember and nobody will ever figure that out! Wink! :)
charles_f · 1h ago
> To send encrypted emails, you just select “Use PGP encrypted” when composing a new message, after importing your private key, of course.
I love the concept of PGP and how well it seems to be integrated. I also don't know a single person who uses it or a provider/software capable of decrypting it. I think that's the biggest issue with PGP. Short of asking someone directly, you don't know if they'd be able to receive a PGP encrypted email, so you wont send one.
spapas82 · 1h ago
The whole point of PGP is to actually communicate (out of band) with the party you want to sent mail to and receive his public key.
It's no big deal if you really need to send a private message.
giuliomagnifico · 1h ago
Yes it’s very easy to use on mailbox, well I use pgp encryption with some friend and on Kraken (the crypto exchange)
luizfelberti · 4h ago
For those looking to break free and are considering self-hosting, I can strongly recommend Stalwart. I'm surprised how almost no one seems to have heard of it, but it's amazing (and supports JMAP!)
dcreater · 6m ago
I've wanted to self host but I've heard that there's high probability of getting blocked/marked as spam?
GTP · 3h ago
The problem with changing email provider due to privacy concerns, is that most of your emails will still end up inside Google's or Microsoft's servers.
I considered self-hosting my own email, as I already have a domain name. But this has always put me off. The reason I would still consider self-hosting is to have readily available email address for side projects, like if I want to receive email notifications from services.
But for privacy, you unfortunately don't gain much, as most of the people/entities you're exchanging emails with are using Google or Microsoft emails.
selkin · 3h ago
Even when they don't, it doesn't matter. Email wasn't designed for privacy or security, and can't accommodate those. Lucky for us, we now have much better tools for those use cases, so we don't need to clumsily try and fail to ducktape those use cases to email.
stkai · 5h ago
One thing I'd recommend is getting your own domain for email (looks like mailbox.org allows custom domains with some plans). You never know what will happen to your email provider in the future, so having the freedom to move your domain to a different provider is valuable.
octo888 · 1h ago
It comes with responsibility too.
Renewing your domain, keeping your registrar account safe, keeping your DNS records safe etc
Some people prefer a domain registrar that allows 10 year renewals so pick carefully as not all do
alchemist1e9 · 20m ago
It does and I’ve been hoping to see more discussion around best registrars from a domain security perspective. I looked into CSC (cscglobal.com) since it’s what a lot of big companies use, but it’s crazy expensive ($5K+/yr). Even worse, their contract is wild: no guarantee of registration/renewal, all fees non-refundable, they can hike prices anytime, liability capped at $5K, DNS is “as-is” with only credits for outages, and they can unmask WHOIS privacy at will. Basically you pay enterprise prices while they disclaim almost all responsibility.
AshLeece · 4h ago
This. This 100%. I hosted my own email for a good few years and decided to migrate it to icloud using the custom domain. A few mins of copying IMAP over and waiting for the DNS to propagate and it was like nothing happened!
giuliomagnifico · 4h ago
Yes, thanks. I already have my custom email domain, but this mailbox address is for everyday use, while I use my personal domain for private matters.
ellisd · 4h ago
Anyone using a half-Gmail / half-personal IMAP server to handle the reality that keeping 20+ years or email in Gmail will bump into the storage quota? I'm around 99.5% usage and just slowly deleting ancient emails with large attachments to make it another month.
Dovecot in my homelab seem doable to have an IMAP server to transfer the Gmail based emails to and maintain them indefinitely but would this be a maintenance headache? I've never operated it before and am curious.
mbirth · 4h ago
I’ve got Dovecot running in a Docker container on my Raspberry Pi. Moved everything over using Thunderbird. If you use mbox format, once done, you can turn the files read-only and Dovecot will still work. And you can throw a Solr server into the mix to get fast mail searches.
TranquilMarmot · 4h ago
I also ran into the Google storage quota after 20+ years of gmail + drive + photos. I ended up paying for Google One at $4/mo just to make it long enough to move all of data somewhere else.
How do you deal with emails bouncing or going to spam? I have been looking to move away from Gmail but last I read it was the only reliable option out there.
floren · 3h ago
You should be fine on the big providers. There's a weird horseshoe situation where anti-Google doomposting looks a lot like pro-Google FUD that I think leads people to believe only Google and maybe Microsoft are capable of sending mail any more.
Something like mailbox.org should be fine. Even a carefully-chosen VPS running your own email server should be fine (works for me, no delivery problems in ~2 years)
selkin · 3h ago
Tell me you haven't run a large email server without telling me.
There's a reason even large corporates that can easily afford the resources to run email their email themselves decide against it.
There are a handful of good providers, not just Google and Microsoft, but the two hyperscalers do have very good offerings, so of course they have a lot of the market.
floren · 2h ago
You're right, I run a small email server. I told you.
I moved my domain to ProtonMail at the start of the year and my only real challenge is shared calendars.
Does anyone have a suggested solution that allows multiple people to share and manage a calendars that isn't Google Calendar or locked to a particular platform (Apple).
mbirth · 4h ago
I left a week ago and went for disroot.org . But this is only my backup email address. My main is via my web hoster and a custom domain.
x0x0 · 4h ago
I'm going to plug fastmail. Rationale:
(1) tech support that actually reads your messages and replies with a solution demonstrating comprehension of the message that you wrote. Amazing. I've emailed them twice and gotten a great response both times.
(2) it is the best UI I've seen outside gmail;
(3) They have continued actively developing their UI, with nice updates released perhaps in the last 6 weeks.
(4) keyboard shortcuts that work
(5) Instead of inbox 0, I practice inbox 50k and it handles it fine.
(6) I just had a decade-anniversary there and I've never regretted it.
commandersaki · 3h ago
(1) tech support that actually reads your messages and replies with a solution demonstrating comprehension of the message that you wrote. Amazing. I've emailed them twice and gotten a great response both times.
Tech support forwarded an inquiry I was asking about an IMAP command in my MUA which led to an actual engineer that said my MUA was using an outdated/deprecated part of the IMAP protocol and provided the RFC for the new way of doing things, which then lead to a patch in said MUA. Very few companies offer this calibre of support, the only other one I can think of is Tarsnap.
(2) it is the best UI I've seen outside gmail
I think it's a much better UI overall than gmail; at least I found with gmail you had to manually paginate things, I can easily do a search in FM that might have 10000 emails over 20 years and I can usually jump to a specific month/year very quickly via scroll and then from there a specific day.
(5) Instead of inbox 0, I practice inbox 50k and it handles it fine.
Similar, 37k in my Inbox, nay issue. I have probably 200k overall across different folders. But I know I'm outsourcing a service, so I do full infrequent backups via IMAP.
Here's my (7):
Fastmail has the only web interface I've come across that handles (catch-all) aliases correctly and knows how to respond with the correct one every single time. Maybe roundcube/squirrelmail can do this, but roundcube/squirrelmail overall is not very good.
internet_points · 2h ago
> (2) it is the best UI I've seen outside gmail;
I'd say it's better (maybe gmail has features it doesn't, but fastmail does everything I need and loads much much faster than gmail)
datadrivenangel · 1h ago
Also a happy fastmail customer for the last several years.
johnplatte · 4h ago
Came here to say this. I've been with Fastmail a similar length of time and it just keeps getting better.
samuell · 4h ago
I thought protonmail was the go-to for de-googling.
andrewmcwatters · 1h ago
I'd really like to just run my own Postfix, Dovecot, SpamAssassin stack, but it seems totally discouraged these days just on the basis of email sender reputation.
9cb14c1ec0 · 1h ago
It's not as bad as some make it out to be. Check out Stalwart, as it is much easier for a newcomer to mail hosting to manage.
andrewmcwatters · 1h ago
Thanks! I'll check it out.
immibis · 1h ago
Just do it. You're allowed to have more than one address. You can keep using Gmail for important things while you experiment with your own server.
dustinfarris · 5h ago
how is this different from using PGP with Gmail?
giuliomagnifico · 5h ago
As far as I know, Gmail doesn’t allow saving PGP keys or using them to write new emails, whereas mailbox.org integrates the entire PGP service and to send an email, even from iOS where PGP apps are "ugly," you just need to do it from the web interface.
Anyway I wrote the details in the post.
Edit: I have to mention that I generated my PGP keys locally and then imported to Mailbox.Org
prmoustache · 34m ago
Do gmail prevents you from using a regular MTA these days?
immibis · 1h ago
Note that when you let a provider do PGP for you, you're not safe from that provider. It's one of the big problems with PGP: you can have usability or security but not both.
buran77 · 4h ago
You're doing it without Gmail.
colesantiago · 4h ago
How do I get my family to move off of Gmail?
I keep telling them that Google spies on you, but they don’t care because it is free and it works.
How reliable are these providers and what are the chances these providers emails would bounce or go to spam when sending an email?
prmoustache · 31m ago
If they don't care there is no problem for them to solve. Stop sending mail to them and bounce mails from gmail.
bsoles · 3h ago
I did it by moving to the Proton ecosystem: Proton Mail, Proton Calendar, and Proton Pass, with the added bonus of Proton VPN.
As much as I don't necessarily like it, I think we have to put a price on our privacy and personal data. And for me, paying for the Proton family plan seems like a good trade-off, at least for now. So far, I haven't got any emails to bounce when using the @pm.me or @proton.me email addresses, except once (I forgot which web site).
selkin · 3h ago
If they don't care, why should you?
They found a deal that seems to be ok for them. To get them to change providers, you need to suggest one that would be a better value, and to be honest, I don't think you can find one.
jeffbee · 4h ago
Maybe because when normal people hear you say "Google spies on you" they think you are a crank. Perhaps try to reduce it to a statement that conveys valid information.
dlachausse · 4h ago
I wish there was something like cell phone number porting for email addresses. I don’t know how it would work on the technical side or how you could secure something like that, but the idea of switching email providers is too daunting, so I stay with Gmail despite abandoning all my other Google accounts and services.
palata · 39m ago
It took me 20 years with Gmail to realise that I had screwed up by not starting with a custom domain.
When I finally changed, it was a lot easier than I thought. I just gradually migrated my accounts everywhere. I still have my old Gmail address, but I almost don't use it anymore.
Also (but I didn't try), couldn't you setup your own domain with Gmail? So that you still have everything in Gmail while you migrate all your accounts... but honestly for me it was really fine to deal with two email addresses for a while.
AnonC · 4h ago
The closest would be having your own domain that’s linked to an email service provider (like mailbox.org or Google Workspace or several others). But to your point of switching email providers being daunting, first buy your own domain and then use that domain with an email provider of your choice. Then start chipping away at the emails you receive in your Gmail account and switch each of those senders to your new domain (and a new email address there). Do it a few at a time, give yourself a whole year to complete it and get going.
It’s even easier if you list out the most important senders in a checklist and move those first. But give yourself at least a few months time. It’s certainly possible.
Once you have your own domain, future migrations to another email provider would be a matter of moving the emails and updating DNS.
RandomBacon · 4h ago
It exists: just port your domain name to a new registrar, and/or point your mx records to a new email provider.
Phone number is just a user number. Email addresses are a user name at a server name. A little harder to do if you're looking for something as ubiquitous as phone number porting.
The closest thing to a server name when it comes to phone numbers, would be the network it is on. For example, there is the public switched telephone network (PSTN), then there is the Defense Switched Network (DSN)
dlachausse · 4h ago
The problem is that I would still need to "port out" my email address manually to a new domain name. It's not an exaggeration to say that there are probably over a hundred places I would need to make that change.
carlosjobim · 3h ago
What's the problem? Do it during a slow day when you're bored. Doesn't take a lot of time or effort. Keep the old e-mail around for any strays that you forgot.
- update your email address as many places as you can
Semaphor · 4h ago
You kinda get that with your own domain. I think that's the best you are going to get
tsimionescu · 4h ago
Isn't losing your domain a huge risk for any common user?
palata · 38m ago
Well if you have any issue with Gmail, you're screwed. There is exactly zero support there.
With a custom domain, you can find a registrar where there are actual humans on the other side.
Semaphor · 3h ago
Unless you use some sketchy TLDs, I've not heard of that
tsimionescu · 3h ago
I've seen plenty of stories of people who forget or are unable for whatever reason to renew their domain names on time.
prmoustache · 25m ago
You are usually warned by email a lot of times before it ever happens. Make sure you receive them on devices and an email address you actually pay attention to. I also put an entry in my calendar a month before every renewal.
The funny part is you need an email address already to register a domain, at least during a bootstrapping phase. I have several domains across 2 registrars with renewals at different time of the year.
Telaneo · 2h ago
You can pay for your domain upto 10 years in advance. It's a frontloaded cost, but if you can do that (or even just 5 years), you'll have a pretty good buffer if you just happen to be busy at whatever time of year you need to renew. This assumes you still check up on your renewal yearly, but you'd need to do that anyway if you pay yearly.
After Fastmail I went to Migadu, and it's absolutely great. I have never seen support requests getting answers that quickly :-).
Or they could just absorb that.
Any idea why it works that way? Have they offered an explanation?
I'm a Fastmail customer but I've never noticed this because I use my own domain.
Do that, it's a non-issue, though I do agree with you that it shouldn't be a thing (or at least have like a multiple year embargo on the address).
I ended up going with Proton because they had a good solution for mail, calendar, and drive which I was looking to replace. I set up my custom domain to point to it and have my Gmail forwarding to it - any time I get an email to the old Gmail address I go change it on the website or delete the account altogether.
For Google Docs / Keep, I switched over to Obsidian and pay for the sync there. It's a great replacement for my main use case of Docs / Keep which is just a dumping ground for ideas.
For Google Photos, I now self-host Immich in Hetzner on a VPS with a 1TB storage box mounted via SSHFS. I use Tailscale to connect to it. It took a few days to use Google Takeout + immich-go to upload all the photos (~300GB of data) but it's working really well now. Only costs $10/mo for the VPS and 1TB of storage.
Android I think I'll be stuck on - I have a Pixel 8 Pro that technically supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there. Next time I need a new phone I'll take a serious look at Fairphone but I think the Pixel 8 Pro should last a few more years.
My FitBit Versa is really old and starting to die - I ordered one of the new Pebble watches and am patiently waiting for it to ship!
YouTube I'm stuck on because that's where the content is. I have yet to find a suitable replacement for Google Maps - OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.
Apple's software and services (sync, drive, photo backup etc) are so inferior, especially compared with Google's (technically speaking), you'd be anyway forced to use third party (often cross platform) solutions. No risk of going deep into Apple's ecosystem ;-)
I did the exact same thing with Immich (what a great software, by the way!).
And in case it helps:
Instead of always relying on google maps, I now mostly use CoMaps (https://www.comaps.app/). Way better than using directly OpenStreetMap. And for my Pixel 7, I switched to LineageOS with gapps (https://lineageos.org/) and I'm not missing anything and am very happy with it.
Also, I'm trying now Nextcloud (https://nextcloud.com/), with a setup similar to Immich, and now I do believe there is life beyond google, and it's a better life.
What are the tradeoffs? I have been following GrapheneOS for a while, and it doesn't seem like there are many tradeoffs.
> OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.
OpenStreetMap is a database, and most commercial services that are not Google use it. E.g. Uber or Lyft.
You just need to find an app that you like. CoMaps is nice, OSMAnd has a lot of feature but the UX is harder. And of course you can contribute to OSM and make it even better than it is! You'll see it's a great community!
Then last week I used it for navigation (on a phone with no SIM card).
Absolutely. Terrible.
Worst navigation app I've seen. Told me to make a turn at an intersection that did not allow turns. Then at another intersection, it told me to "Turn left", but the display clearly showed it going straight. I'm guessing that the straight road probably is angled 1 degree or something at the intersection and the app was viewing that as a turn.
Apparently the common workaround for the Google Wallet stuff is to pair a GrapheneOS phone with a stock Android smartwatch.
Now I just accept life as it is.
Many banking apps work fine though not all.
https://www.magicearth.com/ works well for car navigation with OSM data, and https://cycle.travel/ is the best way to navigate on a bike, also with OSM data.
In which country do you live, if I might ask?
I have an iphone so I use Apple maps and an icloud based obsidian vault, and that is all that is tied to Apple which feels fine for now.
Do you simply trust hetzner to not lose the data on your 1TB storage box?
(I am aware that I am currently trusting google and dropbox to do just that.)
My solution against photo anxiety is to actually look at them and decide to physically print the best ones every year. More likely to be used as gifts or just fun to look through them in a photo album, nobody is going to sit next to you on a phone or computer but bring out an old photo album and everyone is on it.
Yes, please print your photos! I love it when my clients print their photos, and I print my favorites as well. There's still something magical about a real, physical photo vs. digital.
I have vast archives of digital photos and you know what? I barely look at them, but I have prints up all over my walls, in my wallet, etc and I enjoy them all the time.
2) While I occasionally need to allow some scripts from google, it's absolutely nowhere near 1/3rd of sites.
The key is that if you have your domain, you can swap the provider and nobody has to know about it.
This is not quite right. The only offer e2ee if you send an email to someone on the same provider (e.g. ProtonMail to ProtonMail). If you write to someone using Gmail, it's not e2ee.
IMHO this kind of e2ee is interesting for companies (because every employee is on the same provider, and it's better to have the internal communications on ProtonMail than shared with Google on Gmail), but for a personal email it doesn't matter so much.
What's really important is to have a custom domain so that you are not stuck with one provider.
Mailbox also offers e2ee via browser among the same mailbox users, but it also has IMAP and PGP.
Interestingly, one of my biggest problems with Gmail is that they don't allow actual plaintext. I used to routinely collaborate with developers who were vision-impaired, and the official Gmail phone app wouldn't let me send them plaintext email. Instead, it was some sort of HTML thing. Unfortunately, we sometimes sent code snippets to each other over email, and though admittedly it looked more or less fine, Gmail changed the underlying representation enough that my collaborators' screen readers would mess up on the parsing.
This led to me leaving Gmail on my phone, which led ultimately to me leaving Gmail entirely.
https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-cus...
Been there since many years.
If you use your own email client and your own domain name, you don't really need to worry about UI with email providers at all (as long as your provider supports those features). And your own domain name makes it easy to move around in future if you need to.
I don't really have any plans to move away from mailbox.org, though I just saw the post about Thunderbird offering an email service in the future. That might actually prompt me to move as I'd like to support the makers of a FOSS email client I've been happily using for years.
And on mailbox you can easily send and receive PGP encrypted mail on mailbox.org. They provide a page for key import, allowing you to send encrypted emails like regular mail when needed.
It’s your choice, if you always want to use proton mail app everywhere you can use proton.
Didn’t need to do anything special for the migration. The in house importer they offer pulled over 80GB in a day and I was set from there.
Fastmail isn’t going to give you end to end encryption - but - I think just shedding a major Google service is a massive win privacy-wise.
I remember briefly looking into Proton but the search was awful.
For me and my partner was enough when Google started collecting info about purchases/delivery orders on gmail and dumping it in some separated page without any consent nor notification.
We moved to Proton but once they changed branding and starting introducing additional services beside mailbox we knew they enter milking-out path. Their newest AI plaything was reason to leave.
With that out of the way I feel perfectly happy with FM — no need to go further down the paranoia hole.
Your ISP, the hardware not failing, needing to do routine maintenance and (expensive!) upgrades, having room in your house, having consistent power to your servers, possible theft, natural disasters causing you to lose your home, etc.
There's a reason I use a VPS for hosting a lot of things haha. Mostly because I live in a small apartment and don't have room for a server rack.
And backup your emails of course.
So, I use my personal domain for all mail except anything that's "vital" like government websites, banking, paying rent, etc. for which I use my email provider's domain. And of course I'm registered with my domain registrar with a different email domain.
You probably shouldn't use a premium domain unless you really need one. It's just a money grab by registrars and registries.
Another recommendation you should consider is to find a domain that ends in one of the common top-level domains - like .COM, .NET, or .ORG - because for using with *vital government services* you would not believe how many good natured civil servants (or for that manner even customer service folks in private/commercial companies too!) have no idea that email addresses can end in something other than .com, .net, or .org...and if you try to give them an address that, say, ends in like .FR, or .CC, or .ME, etc...They will try to place a ".com" at the end of it! My experience shows that folks in the U.S. know far less about other TLDs...and are more likely to commit this error, but folks outside of U.S. are perfectly cool with all manner of different TLS. I have had a somesurname.CC domain name as the mailbox for all my family members for more than a decade...and they are all trained to be LOUD and explicit when they communicate to government workers and customer service folks. So, i should have just gotten an easier TLD, but ah well. Live and learn! :-)
EDIT: Forgot to add that choossing the more common .COM, .NET, or .ORG TLDs for a domain name *tends* to be cheaper than many premium domains names. Each registrar wil of course vary, but mostly these tend to be reasonably priced.
Running an online forum, I've encountered people using Atomic Mail, and that service has terrible reliability.
Microsoft's been a bit annoying, since some emails I've sent to @hotmail.com domains go to spam, but at least they do arrive and aren't just bounced, as I've heard from some horror stories. Sending to @gmail.com accounts seems to work perfectly though. I don't send a lot of outgoing mail from my personal account anyway, so it doesn't really matter in the end. Some mails seem to take longer to arrive, but I had that problem on Gmail too, so I don't think there's anything actually wrong per se.
Happy customer over a couple of years.
That's not a Gmail problem, and no reason to migrate. Some use cases just don't fit email, and for those, we have other, more fitting platforms.
> So, I went with mailbox.org that still offers integrated PGP encryption, and if you want, you can always use external PGP too (which I was already doing with Gmail).
Ok, so now you have two problems.
It is a problem with Gmail, because they're helping themselves into your email, as was explained by the author in the sentence immediately after the one you quoted:
> Technically, Google can store every message you receive and know everything, and U.S. agencies can request access to that data
What, specifically do you mean by this?
I was fortunate enough that my solution was to host my own mail server 20+ years ago and create a separate email address per relationship with a company, so I can tell the moment some 3rd party has been comprimised when I receive spam on a specific address. My personal spam has been minimal over time.
If for example moc.elgoog@mydomain.com gets spam - I know they're compromised or have sold me out.
Yes gmail has had something similar using the + character, but most people don't know about/make use of this and still abdicate spam filtering to things they don't understand like bayesian algorithms which suffer from false positives. (Have you checked your spam folder for our very important message...?)
Email has never been secure and despite modern updates, I still don't consider it as such. Then again I don't have much to worry about, so I'm ambivalent most of the time. That said, special 'fuck you' shoutouts to Ticketek for being compromised and their general ineptitude and shitfuckery in so many ways... It took them 2 months to respond to an issue I raised with them only to ask whether it was still an issue... (yes, it still is).
Unfortunately I don't know if you could easily manage to convince majority email providers you're legitimite with a new domain in this day and age - I suspect its now a major hurdle to overcome as I've read often enough of mail bouncing because "we've never heard of you until now, so we don't trust you" - which makes communicating with the majority of the world via email almost impossible to build up the trust level you're considered legitimite and that's despite all this extra DMARC, DKIM, and SPF and SSL/TLS supposed safeguards which have appeared over time and I've had to comply with.
Security as an afterthought means its still probably never going to be secure. I've always considered email the equivalent of transmitting plaintext and have always treated it as such. This has led to some pretty difficult situations where I don't email important stuff to a 3rd party just because they expect it and everyone else does it.
Once you realize this, the "just keep whatever I have right now" is often the best solution.
Speaking of which, receiving is free. There are no spam checks when other providers send email to yours. So feel free to only use Gmail when you need to send an email out to a big provider. It's still a 95% win.
(This is for the author and anyone else) If you are looking for responsive (or even barely responsive) and responsible support responses whenever you need it, weigh your options very carefully about which mail host you want to move to. You might need it once or twice a year, but that might be crucial.
Edit: And if you can help it, and have your own domain, never use a mail host's domain-based email address (no matter how catchy and short that is) because it will be a headache switching away from it if you want to change your host.
ProtonMail and Tutanota offer end-to-end encryption only when both the sender and recipient are using the same (i.e., ProtonMail->ProtonMail or Tutanota->Tutanota). If you’re emailing someone outside those or if you’re receiving emails from someone outside those, and you want encryption, you’d have to go to PGP (with its own complexities).
[1] https://discord.gg/E8myb2AD
The report is also very good and that should be a service every other mail service could provide to people who want to move away from G'rab'mail.
Another curiosity is that you use the same password I use for everything: xxx
Simple to remember and nobody will ever figure that out! Wink! :)
I love the concept of PGP and how well it seems to be integrated. I also don't know a single person who uses it or a provider/software capable of decrypting it. I think that's the biggest issue with PGP. Short of asking someone directly, you don't know if they'd be able to receive a PGP encrypted email, so you wont send one.
It's no big deal if you really need to send a private message.
I considered self-hosting my own email, as I already have a domain name. But this has always put me off. The reason I would still consider self-hosting is to have readily available email address for side projects, like if I want to receive email notifications from services.
But for privacy, you unfortunately don't gain much, as most of the people/entities you're exchanging emails with are using Google or Microsoft emails.
Renewing your domain, keeping your registrar account safe, keeping your DNS records safe etc
Some people prefer a domain registrar that allows 10 year renewals so pick carefully as not all do
Dovecot in my homelab seem doable to have an IMAP server to transfer the Gmail based emails to and maintain them indefinitely but would this be a maintenance headache? I've never operated it before and am curious.
Something like mailbox.org should be fine. Even a carefully-chosen VPS running your own email server should be fine (works for me, no delivery problems in ~2 years)
There's a reason even large corporates that can easily afford the resources to run email their email themselves decide against it.
There are a handful of good providers, not just Google and Microsoft, but the two hyperscalers do have very good offerings, so of course they have a lot of the market.
Does anyone have a suggested solution that allows multiple people to share and manage a calendars that isn't Google Calendar or locked to a particular platform (Apple).
(1) tech support that actually reads your messages and replies with a solution demonstrating comprehension of the message that you wrote. Amazing. I've emailed them twice and gotten a great response both times.
(2) it is the best UI I've seen outside gmail;
(3) They have continued actively developing their UI, with nice updates released perhaps in the last 6 weeks.
(4) keyboard shortcuts that work
(5) Instead of inbox 0, I practice inbox 50k and it handles it fine.
(6) I just had a decade-anniversary there and I've never regretted it.
Tech support forwarded an inquiry I was asking about an IMAP command in my MUA which led to an actual engineer that said my MUA was using an outdated/deprecated part of the IMAP protocol and provided the RFC for the new way of doing things, which then lead to a patch in said MUA. Very few companies offer this calibre of support, the only other one I can think of is Tarsnap.
(2) it is the best UI I've seen outside gmail
I think it's a much better UI overall than gmail; at least I found with gmail you had to manually paginate things, I can easily do a search in FM that might have 10000 emails over 20 years and I can usually jump to a specific month/year very quickly via scroll and then from there a specific day.
(5) Instead of inbox 0, I practice inbox 50k and it handles it fine.
Similar, 37k in my Inbox, nay issue. I have probably 200k overall across different folders. But I know I'm outsourcing a service, so I do full infrequent backups via IMAP.
Here's my (7):
Fastmail has the only web interface I've come across that handles (catch-all) aliases correctly and knows how to respond with the correct one every single time. Maybe roundcube/squirrelmail can do this, but roundcube/squirrelmail overall is not very good.
I'd say it's better (maybe gmail has features it doesn't, but fastmail does everything I need and loads much much faster than gmail)
Anyway I wrote the details in the post.
Edit: I have to mention that I generated my PGP keys locally and then imported to Mailbox.Org
I keep telling them that Google spies on you, but they don’t care because it is free and it works.
How reliable are these providers and what are the chances these providers emails would bounce or go to spam when sending an email?
As much as I don't necessarily like it, I think we have to put a price on our privacy and personal data. And for me, paying for the Proton family plan seems like a good trade-off, at least for now. So far, I haven't got any emails to bounce when using the @pm.me or @proton.me email addresses, except once (I forgot which web site).
They found a deal that seems to be ok for them. To get them to change providers, you need to suggest one that would be a better value, and to be honest, I don't think you can find one.
When I finally changed, it was a lot easier than I thought. I just gradually migrated my accounts everywhere. I still have my old Gmail address, but I almost don't use it anymore.
Also (but I didn't try), couldn't you setup your own domain with Gmail? So that you still have everything in Gmail while you migrate all your accounts... but honestly for me it was really fine to deal with two email addresses for a while.
It’s even easier if you list out the most important senders in a checklist and move those first. But give yourself at least a few months time. It’s certainly possible.
Once you have your own domain, future migrations to another email provider would be a matter of moving the emails and updating DNS.
Phone number is just a user number. Email addresses are a user name at a server name. A little harder to do if you're looking for something as ubiquitous as phone number porting.
The closest thing to a server name when it comes to phone numbers, would be the network it is on. For example, there is the public switched telephone network (PSTN), then there is the Defense Switched Network (DSN)
- set up new email address, hosted where you like
- https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10957?hl=en (forward your email)
- update your email address as many places as you can
With a custom domain, you can find a registrar where there are actual humans on the other side.
The funny part is you need an email address already to register a domain, at least during a bootstrapping phase. I have several domains across 2 registrars with renewals at different time of the year.