Comment by jug
5 years ago
This makes me anxious about my long time Gmail address. Back then I got it just because it and Google was cool, and their services had a good reputation. It was a different Google back then. If they had launched it this year I would never have got one because chances are it would have been cancelled by 2025. Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google. And it's not that hard to replace, but just a bother to inform some people and update account details.
Start the process of getting out right now.
Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product.
I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since 1995.
[1] http://www.iki.fi/
> Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer
Google now sells domains, as well as email through GSuite.
I use them a lot on new projects, because I find them so insanely convenient, but I can't help shake the feeling that now I'm both the product and a paying customer.
So I'd probably nuance your words with: "select a provider whose livelihood depends on your custom".
If you want to get your own domain to take control of your identity, do NOT under any circumstances register it through a hosting package. Ideally keep it separate from everything, including your email provider.
And do NOT register it through a provider whose only support is Machine Learning!(tm).
Can you access the DNS records of the domain you bought if your Google Account is ever locked?
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Or better yet, get the domain elsewhere. (Not GoDaddy either.)
You can the use whatever service you want. G Suite, Exchange Online, roll your own, …
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If you get your own domain, get one on a well-known TLD (e.g. .com, .org or your own country code). If you get a gTLD that's not well-known, there are some endpoints that will block you because your email is "not valid".
It's not a big deal. I've had a .so domain for a decade and have only had to use a different email a couple times.
There is a different danger however — after about 8 years the annual fee went from about $15 to $60.
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Things like .rocks, .guru, .club, and all those other recent gold-rush gTLDs have been a disaster from the spam standpoint*. It doesn't help that some registrars are complicit via allowing massive bulk name purchases, so I see zillions of somebody@{random-word-1}{random-word-2}.goldrush addresses, all with valid DKIM/DMARC.
* Not to mention phishing. Is that link going to foobank dot com or foobank dot club?
Ironically enough, .email is considered a spammy TLD according to the Spamhaus TLD check.
Is .dev or .io considered a well-known gTLD by now? I’m in process of setting up email for my .dev domain.
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This is true, I bought a .club domain and had to realise that some providers classify it as spam.
I can happily second the Fastmail recommendation. I self-hosted mail for 17 years and there's nothing I want that they don't do.
I've had an email on a personal domain for years.
But I still use my old gmail for one thing: Point of contact for the my domain registrar. Do you have any suggestions for how I can solve this?
In my case, I use Fastmail to provide my email.
With it, I have email from multiple domains doing what I want. I also have a <username>@fastmail.fm which has only been provided to one person: my domain registrar.
If you pay someone to handle your email this is a good approach, IMO.
Two domains registered at two different places, then cross-connect them at the registrars. To keep it fully distributed, you'll want to host one domain at one provider and the other one at a second one. (I do this - it's ~$10 USD/mo for both providers email hosting and ~$10/year to register each email domain, usually big discounts if you purchase for many years at once)
A second hosted email domain has an additional benefit - it allows you to also control your recovery (secondary) email, such as you'd add to your banking/financial website, etc. and not have any of your email options where they can be taken away like this post. It's trivial to have one of the email hosted providers do an IMAP pull from your GMail account, so you can still keep it around just manage it as an external account (such as for your Android login needs).
Thank you. I have been on the fence for a bit. But I will initiate project leave Gmail and Gdrive now. It will take me a year, but the deliveries and the final goal is clear.
Any thoughts on getting your own domain and then still using gmail for receive email on that domain?
I actually have my @gmail.com address redirect to Fastmail, I have a filter on the Fastmail inbox that shows me mail sent to the gmail address.
I go through the filter every now and then to see which services are still using my old address and change them to use the newer one.
It's also a nice way to find out how horribly some services have f-d up the change process. One had a non-working change email button and the CS rep just deleted my old account and told me to create a new one.
One just plain doesn't let people change their email. At all.
Combined with regular backups (maybe to an offline client, using IMAP?), sounds like a good idea to me.
Actually, I've been thinking about doing the same thing.
But i don't know much about emails.
That fi TLD and "1995" jolted a name out of the old memory unit: anon @penet.fi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer
I pay Apple for my email address, although I’d prefer to run email off my own domain.
Why don't you just do it? It will cost you like one or two coffee a month, but the feeling of security (as in "they won't close my account for nothing") is worth a lot more.
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Yes, the good old Don't Be Evil days. I've asked so many people if they can remember Google's old slogan. Nobody does.
Their new slogan is hilarious. It's not even one slogan, it's three:
* Respect the user
* Respect the opportunity
* Respect each other
The first one is obviously a joke, because nothing says "respect the user" like canceling a beloved service with millions of users, or "updating" the product while losing half the features.
The last one makes you wonder why they had to put it into a slogan. Isn't it the baseline expectation? It's somewhere on the level of "Don't steal your colleague's belongings" as far as slogans go.
But it's the second one that is absolutely the best, and by that, I mean the worst. Orwell would've had a lot to say about it. The thing is, it has absolutely no meaning in the English language. What's next? Say hi to agility? Don't offend capital gains? Console excellence?
Of course, it doesn't really matter. The whole thing has a mafia vibe, as Google's slogans and culture are drifting towards loyalty rather than standing up for what's right.
--------
If you want to have more fun, look at Google's Community Guidelines[1]
Compare to The Mafia Code:
* Be loyal to members of the organization. Do not interfere with each other's interest. Do not be an informer.
--[Google: Treat our data with care. Don't disseminate NTK information.]
* Be rational. Be a member of the team. Don't engage in battle if you can't win.
--[Google: follow Three Values, in particular: Respect the opportunity.]
* Be a man of honor. Respect womanhood and your elders. Don't rock the boat.
--[Google: Do your part to keep Google a safe, productive, and inclusive environment for everyone.]
* Be a stand-up guy. Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut.
--[Google: Discussions that make other Googlers feel like they don't belong have no place here.]
* Have class. Be independent. Know your way around the world.
--[Google: You are responsible for your words and your reach.]
[1]https://about.google/community-guidelines/
> Respect the opportunity
Honestly, this reads like a Rule of Acquisition. I think Google may be run by Ferengi at this point.
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> Compare to The Mafia Code:
Including that doesn't help your argument much. And apart from "do not be an informer" and "don't rock the boat" the mafia code is pretty much unarguably good advice. Employees should be following it.
We'd all be better off if everyone was rational, honourable, independent and classy.
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Respect the opportunity is double speak for 'we only bother if we can get to a position where we can use monopoly pricing and tactics'. It goes against 'respect the user'. Orwell is the right thing to invoke, Google thinks they are our big brother.
TIL the Mafia has a pretty decent, humane code of conduct.
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A good slogan should have an inverse that is also a plausible slogan. E.g. "move fast and break things."
Neither Google's new nor its old slogans are good according to this criterion.
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I don't know, that clarifies a lot to me.
From the perspective of an AI moderation system, all you have to do to be perfectly internally consistent is to ban all accounts that raise any flags.
Friend Computer sees no Conflict if one is no longer a Citizen, because being in Conflict with the Computer is Treason.
> The first one is obviously a joke, because nothing says "respect the user" like canceling a beloved service with millions of users, or "updating" the product while losing half the features.
But most of all, the user is still the product.
Unless by user they mean "the advertiser".
I can't seem to find many of your examples in the community guidelines
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This is hilarious. So obvious that it was written by a non programmer. Since the "respect the" part repeats 3 times.
Also no programmer had anything to say how bad it is. In a software company...
Don't Be Evil is so stupid. It's like Disneyworld having the slogan "we won't kill your kids".
I disagree. "Evil" is a subtle point.
For example, Google got a lot of flack for literally tracking its users' every move whether or not they consent to do so[1].
Is it "respectful"? Is that "the right thing"? You can justify everything by the value that Google provides.
But it's, you know... kind of evil.
Sadly, this not something one could refer to anymore in a meeting discussing this issue.
[1]https://apnews.com/article/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb
It was a funny cute thing when they came up with it cause they were a landmark company built on the web, breaking new grounds in terms of how businesses will be run in the future, sticking it to the establishment, etc etc etc
Now they are the establishment. Their power and influence is on par with the US government, so it's an expectation that they should actually not be evil. But they fail at that in the most basic ways and they're not held accountable for it because "they're a private company, they can do what they want!"
Except when a theme park ride malfunctions, maims and kills most of a family in a gruesome fashion. Of course then you cannot sue because you've agreed/signed an arbitration clause in the terms of service.
I moved away from google a few years ago after putting it off for years because it sounded like effort. It turned out to be rather straightforward.
I still have my google accounts, I just don’t use them (except YouTube unfortunately). My gmail still forwards to my new address, but I mostly just get emails where people got their own addresses wrong nowadays.
What I did was: I registered a domain name from a company that i don’t use for anything else besides domain names (incidentally a local registrar who I trust and can call on the phone). I then set up a new email address (I use fastmail) using that domain name. Then I forwarded all my old emails to this new address.
If someone emailed my old address, I would always reply from my new one, which slowly updated peoples address books. If I got newsletters, I would either unsubscribe and resubscribe from my new one or just unsubscribe. I did that very slowly and it took a year or so before I stopped getting any forwarded, but there’s no rush. Don’t think “oh I have to update everything at once”. Similarly, I updated services that I still use that used the old email to log in on a case by case basis as I used them.
You can ditch google and it’s not as hard as it sounds!
Thanks for sharing your "phased transition" strategy.
Things aren't all-or-nothing, and taking this sort of approach can definitely help with making such a non-trivial change.
This is why I use one of the new, privacy-focused email providers instead. It feels like the sweet spot between starting my own server (headache, dropped messages) and being one of a billion Gmail/Outlook users (no-one cares if I don't get email)
The best thing is using your own domain, then you can change your providers whenever you need to.
I started switching to ProtonMail for this exact reason. It’s not that I’m doing anything that would draw a purposeful or legitimate ban, but they’re so damn capricious that I fear getting my account locked because of a bug and not being able to undo it.
I switched to a combination of ProtonMail AND using a private domain in my email address AND regularly syncing entire mailbox with my desktop client (Thunderbird). This way, if ProtonMail gives me grief, I just set up a new email account with a different provider, point domain entries to it, import my mailbox in there, and can continue as if nothing happened.
Next don’t-be-evil step: Having a Protonmail account proves that you have something to hide! Ban!
I've been considering getting a new email address on a personal domain so it can be more portable and I can change providers.
Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS? Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
Do not host your own email unless you really, really want to do that for learning purposes or something similar.
You can use fastmail, or if you don't want to lose Gmail's UI you can use GSuite which lets you use a personal domain name.
Plenty of people use fastmail and seemed to be happy. If you're OK with its price, I think that's a sweet spot.
It's absolutely possible to host your own e-mail server on VPS. You'll receive mail without issues. But sending mail might cause issues, so unless you're OK with some delivery problems and spending some time to investigate, I don't suggest going that route.
Hosting your email on NAS is problematic. You need to have static IP address with PTR record and most home providers won't offer those services for reasonable price.
I am happy with Fastmail!
With the complete lack of accountability, support, or recourse the giants seem to have, it has never been more important to not put all one's eggs in one basket.
I have done exactly this with Fastmail and my own domain, and the experience was wonderful, as in "why didn't I do this years ago".
Fastmail is Australia based, wouldn't that pose a risk with regards to backdoors?
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Seconded
I've self-hosted with a hand-rolled postfix+dovecot, and later with Mailcow's dockerised mailserver (FOSS, good management and webmail UI, strongly recommend).
More recently though I moved my personal domain to Microsoft Exchange Online - it's a lot less flexible than Mailcow (per-head licensing, but there's + addressing and catch-alls now) but I don't have any of the deliverability/gmail-spam-folder issues I used to have.
Exchange P1 Online [2] is roughly the same for my single-user as my old DO droplet cost per month
(edit: side-bonus you get an Azure AD tenant for your domain which is handy for SSO/IdP things)
[1]: https://mailcow.email/
[2]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/exchange/compa...
Yes, I looked around now for a provider supporting custom domains so I don't need to change address just because I change provider and came up with a few popular ones: Fastmail, Protonmail, Runbox. Note that Protonmail is "special" about their IMAP/POP3 support, only supporting select clients and then via a particular helper application.
It's not only this issue with Google being like a wall when things happen, but also that I dislike their semi-AI based interface. While I like their good spam filter, there's a lot of other stuff going on there, and that without any inbox rules that I have set up.
> Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS?
I'm happy with Namecheap as my registrar and Mailbox.org for mail services, and have been for years (my Gmail account still exists and forwards the rare message it receives to the other one).
Mailbox.org offers ordinary IMAP and SMTP access + DKIM signing for your domain. Hosted in Germany. Prices vary, I pay about €2/month for several GB I think.
Their webmail interface is bad, but then again, I've never seen one that isn't. And I've never used it after logging in for the first time anyway.
> Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
It's possible, but I wouldn't recommend it for something as critical as email. It's not that the actual hosting is hard, it's that more and more of the big providers are refusing to handle email messages from certain networks.
I am very happy with this https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-checks/
It is a docker based email server setup very well done.
I use Fastmail with a personal domain name.
I use Zoho with my own domains. Haven't had any issues so far.
Recommend Zoho as well. Their web client is insanely fast and filled with all sorts of power user features. The gmail client doesn't even compare with how slow it is.
I had trouble syncing contacts and calendars on my iPhone. Has this been fixed? I also couldn't set up notifications for calendar items.
Have been using them for 5 (?) years now and I can't complain as well.
I just recently setup Zoho and seem to be working fine so far. Their web mail interface is decent but I don’t use it much.
Hosting your own email is pretty easy to get started, but without continuous work you will have problems getting good deliverability, and balancing blocking almost all spam without filtering out wanted email is tricky too
mailbox.org from me as well. I compared them with fastmail and they don't upsell on the personal domain and let you pay as you use storage.
Both have unpleasant web accessibility experience, but it is not consideration for many.
Take a look at migadu.com
I second this. Migadu has great support and affordable prices. I also like the fact that you can link any number of domains to your account without extra costs.
I switched from gsuite to protonmail, but I kinda wish I had checked out fastmail
> It was a different Google back then.
No it has always been the same company, and we tried to tell you.
> Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google
For me it's google photos. While there are lot of great gmail alternatives these days there's still nothing like google photos unfortunately, is there?
I have my own Nextcloud instance, and the iOS Nextcloud app automatically saves new pics from my phone to the server. But that means that you have to manage your own server, so it's not everyone's cup of tea.[1]
If you are looking for a managed solution, I suggest one of those that you pay for (iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive) since usually, paid services have at least some form of customer service and something like OP's story is less likely to happen.
[1] Also, the cloud provider where I rent the server might decide to block my account for whatever reason. To minimise the risk, I'm planning to store daily server backups on a different cloud provider.
Unfortunatly icloud does not work well unless you are all in on their ecosystem.
I dont have a mac at the moment but have a iphone. Their windows application is very bad, unreliable sync and their web interface is missing a lot of functionality. No linux integration at all, but that is expected.
Onedrive works well for file sync but almost have no photo library + editing functionality.
iCloud.
As someone in a similar spot with a GMail account I've been using since they were invite-only, I've started using Google Takeout to back up an archive of all my data from Google's services a few times a year.
It's not perfect, and I'm thinking more and more about moving to a paid service, but this at least gives me some peace of mind that if one day I run afoul of Google's AI bouncers, I won't lose a decade of info overnight.
After thinking about it a bit, I don't see things that way. Gmail is not the problem as far as I'm concerned. Nor Chrome, etc. The problem from my pov is that the only alternative to Apple phones are Androids, and Android is biased towards the whole Google ecosystem. That's where the monopolistic feeling comes from for me, and if I was in charge of antitrust efforts, Android is what I would want to force them to spin off. Not sure with or without Google Maps, because that's the other thing that I really need and don't feel like there is a substitute.
I've been making the switch (slowly) over the past year. Had a gmail from the early days, when it was invite only. Now moving to a combo of protonmail + custom domain, and I couldn't be happier.
Make sure you don’t use any of the other services: don’t post to YouTube from that account, don’t share Google Docs, files etc.
What I’ve been slowly doing over the years is proxying all accounts behind addresses at my domain (that then forward to my gmail, natch).
So at least I could redirect my accounts to a new address if worst happens.
I’ve been trying to switch off gmail for a while but spam filtering is really hard for me.
Pay $25/mo for GSuite enterprise if your email matters to you.
Those can get shut down in exactly the same manner.
Not exactly. Their user agreement gives you a number of outs, and ways to get a live human.
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Using email at a domain that you own (and thus makes you provider independent) is table stakes for adulting online.
What's the best way to back up your data? Google Takeout? Is that easily ingestible into other email programs?
If you intend to keep using Google products, then more or less yeah, periodically. A better way is to start using Fastmail (for example) and have them import everything. Then stop using gmail.
I've used this project, but it's been a while: https://github.com/joeyates/imap-backup . It's a CLI app, though, so it's maybe not the best solution for non-technical end-users.
Some email providers have IMAP import, where you just give them the password and they'll do it for you. Not the best solution in terms of security but might be ok if you're getting rid of your account anyway.
As someone who recently did this, you can link a Fastmail account to your existing Gmail account, and it will load in any email data you have into Fastmail. I think from there you can delete your google account provided you have Fastmail all setup properly. It took maybe 2 minutes and was part of the guided setup Fastmail did for me.
It's better to use Takeout than IMAP export if you're one of the people who, for whatever reason, have Google rewriting URLs in your IMAP messages (having Advanced Protection enabled is one such trigger, I learned).
It gives you all of your mail in mbox format, which is a common format.
Google was never nice. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460094