Migrating to the EU

I use mailbox for the past few years and I think it's the best option out there. But they have one major issue, which is that anyone can impersonate your domain:

https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-cus...

I wish they had retained one awesome Thunderbird desktop feature on mobile as well - being able to set the "from" address on the go while composing the email, without having to add an identity/sender-mail in advance. Alas, it seems that hasn't been the case.

I know it is late, but for anyone reading this now, as I am:

Mailbox.org is completely ignoring DMARC since months... And their handling of the issue IMHO is incompetent at best.

See this thread (in German) https://userforum.mailbox.org/topic/10676-mailbox-org-akzept...

Have been using mailbox.org with a custom domain (including catch-all wildcard) for the last 5 years or so, so it's definitely possible and as far I remember quite straightforward.

I also use mailbox.org and use my own domain for email. Not sure what issue the author ran into.

My understanding is that the number of such sender aliases is limited, at most 50 or 250, depending on the plan. There are ways to use a custom domain for sending where you end up using a larger number of localparts fairly quickly, and it would be a hassle to have to manage them, instead of just typing whatever sender you want (or on replies, having the email client automatically use the address from the original email, without having to worry whether it’s still in the set of registered aliases).

Yea been using mailbox.org for couple months and i can send from any address of my own domain...this is bad article. He probably doesn't know how to.

Can confirm, I use mailbox.org with my own domain and can send from any *@mydomain

Hmmm this looks like a really nice option! Any issues with deliverability?

Works for me as well.

...also migrating AWAY from Fastmail (Australian) and TO an European provider sounds like a very bad idea - I'd kind of want both the US and the EU legally away from my coms at all costs (!)

Used them in my last project for around 5 years. They were boring in a good way and inexpensive.

I use them too. Highly recommend. Have never had an issue with them.

Too bad they don’t support mtls client certificates or something that would allow me to limit the connection to just their servers.

I recently used Bunny for a small project. Pretty good experience. And they're rolling out new functionality at a good pace.

Hetzner and Bunny are solid choices for EU projects.

Could you summarize the easy and hard aspects? Have you had any unexpected benefits or downsides?

Including EU sponsored programming languages and OSes?

This is something I think it is a blind spot we have and not big answer, because even if we take into account FOSS, ISO and ECMA languages, the biggest sponsors for those toolchains are US companies.

It will take decades to go back to the cold war days, of hardware, programming languages and OSes with European origin.

What are some of the biggest EU alternatives for US big tech?

When I Google this I find a lot of options, but not sure which are actually mature tech companies vs start-up hopefuls

/r/BuyFromEU is a continuous enumeration of individuals posting from what US services to EU services they moved. I agree that these posts get uninteresting once you have seen a few. I would be more interested in I have used European service X for 6 months, these are the up/downsides I found, since they actually help people picking alternatives.

I've moved to pCloud for photos and I've found it to be a good alternative. One frustrating thing is that if you are cycling through your photos on the default pcloud app, they are usually slow to render which can be frustrating. Playing music on the app is also a little frustrating. It works, but it it's not an amazing UX. Other than that I am completely content with pCloud though, and I would recommend it.

One other thing to be made aware of is that the macOS ecosystem seems to be a little hostile towards pCloud and it seems to be fighting a never ending battle in order to the get the remote drive functioning reliably there. It works, but it can be a little annoying at times.

For Photos, consider Ente (e2ee).

Instead of Startpage, try DDG (DuckDuckGo) - been using it now for several years instead of Google as I found no difference in search quality.

I've more or less made a similar migration towards non-US alternatives for most of my services. In my case, I switched from GitHub to Worktree (https://worktree.ca/).

I'm still waiting and hoping that open street map becomes a viable alternative to google maps- it would be great to get a firefox of mapping (maybe not the best analogy, but....)

I definitely know that an open mapping solution could gain traction and be supported by bigger companies that would use it. It seems like a good candidate for the kind of collective OSS work that supports other projects- that there are enough big-enough companies out there that want an open non-google reliant mapping solution that are willing to pool resources.

I know that with mapbox and others that active work is being done, but it just doesn't quite seem like it's there yet.

I've recently moved my storage to Jottacloud (Norway), highly recommend - they do - gdrive style storage - dropbox style synced folders - photo app/backups - PC folder backups with apps for mac/win and a cli for linux

> Next, I’m thinking of moving away from Google Photos. I’m considering pCloud for that.

Maybe try Immich?

I can't recommend Immich enough if you want to move off Google Photos.

> avoid giving money

You're paying for any of these?

To you people who moved email to a different provider… how did you do that, practically? Email signature, reply from another address and hope your contacts pick it up, or something else? How well did it work?

I have been a user of gmail since you needed an invitation to register, and even though I have felt for years the pressure to de-google myself, I find it a daunting task due to the amount of people/services that think my email account is gmail, and forever will be.

Hasn't TomTom completely pivoted to OpenStreetMap? From direct contact, I know that they are very active in OSM communities now.

Yeah I was thinking of getting infomaniak for my mail. I don't really care for the encryption thing of proton (all email comes in in plain text anyway!) and I want to just be able to do plain imap without bridges.

But their stuff just feels a bit weird somehow. I didn't really want to commit yet. I'm glad to hear you had good experiences.

This is why I'm sticking to Spotify.

Maybe corporations can start to market this: we are not an American company.

If you're going through all that effort why not migrate to open-source/self-hosted?

Google has two products without competition: YouTube and Google Maps.

Don't waste your time trying different map services.

Everything else is super easy to switch to better alternatives, especially search, e-mail and browser.

> Google Search → Startpage (Vivaldi default)

Startpage is owned by an American advertising company https://system1.com

Pcloud is a security nightmare. If you really have to use it, add your own crypto layer on top of it.

Gocryptfs works well for that.

For email I have been quite pleased with RunBox (Norway)

This doesn't make a lot of sense:

"They’re rare, but I’ve consciously decided to stay away from some Canadian alternatives. The main customers of most Canadian tech companies are in the US, and I feel they would happily move there if needed."

So in an effort to veer from the US based on idealogical positions you wouldn't support your own countrymen because you think in some future state that said copmany might hypothetically move to the US?

Canadians unable to support Canadians is what everyone around the world should read from this comment. Tall Poppy Syndrome in its purest.

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>How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review?

This is a hilarious 'just asking questions' concern that doesn't address the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianism while moving against the world order it primarily helped build post WWII while threatening other liberal democracies like Canada and Denmark with invasions.

It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.

> How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review?

(IANAL.) This was reviewed by the courts themselves:

> The CJEU confirmed that the Belgian, French and Swedish prosecutors were sufficiently independent from the executive to be able to issue EAWs. […]

> […] Public prosecutors will qualify as an issuing judicial authority where two conditions are met: […]

> 2. Second, public prosecutors must be in a position to act in an independent way, specifically with respect to the executive. The CJEU requires that the independence of public prosecutors be organised by a statutory framework and organisational rules that prevent the risk of prosecutors being subject to individual instructions by the executive (as was the case with the German prosecutor). Moreover, the framework must enable prosecutors to assess the necessity and proportionality of issuing an EAW. In the French prosecutor judgment, the CJEU specifically indicated that:

* https://www.fairtrials.org/articles/legal-analysis/can-belgi...

The question that the OP asks is fair enough, but there's a lot of subtly and 'low-level' details on how things operate compared to the high-level question that is being asked. Also depends on where the OP lives and what he's used to: common law (UK/US/CA/etc) and civil law procedures and laws are (AIUI) quite different.

Valid question, which must be put in the context of US-based providers willingly satisfying US out-of-jurisdiction search requests for EU data without even letting the EU know about it. (And when the providers are not willing, they can be forced by U.S. Cloud Act)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...

Sweden is a country like this. It is just the way it is here. It can be abused, sure. But all things considered, I much rather have my things hosted here than in the US.

> How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review?

Just to be clear, according to the DOJ, law enforcement officials in the US can search your home without a warrant if they suspect that you are a "Alien Enemy" [1].

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25915967-doj-march-1...

You are technically correct but seem to be applying common law standards to civil law countries.

Unlike common law judiciary, civil law judiciary in and of itself has investigatory powers and judges don’t just hear arguments but can order their own investigations and are significantly more independent than in common law.

This can cut both ways, yes in theory the judge can accept evidence the prosecution obtained illegally, but the judges can also call the prosecutions bluff and call their own witnesses or order an independent expert to provide their own opinion, even if defense is unable to.

At least there is still the rule of law and democracy in the EU

US legal protections do not apply to EU citizens keeping their data in the US, do they?

So what's the point of this comparison, since if I host my data in the US they don't need a warrant at all?

No system is perfect. It's more a theoretical risk for now, if you're not running a shady business.

> What Is An Administrative Warrant?

> An administrative warrant is a legal document issued by a government agency, rather than a court, that authorizes the agency to take specific actions such as conducting inspections, searches, or seizing property. Unlike judicial warrants, administrative warrants are frequently issued on less than probable cause of a crime.

> Administrative warrants are typically used for regulatory or civil enforcement purposes and allow agencies to enforce rules and regulations within their jurisdiction, such as health inspections, building code enforcement, or immigration-related actions.

> The problem with administrative warrants is that they make the agency both the prosecutor and the judge in the very same matter. The entire point of having agencies go to court for a warrant is because courts are an independent branch with an independent mission. Rather than solely focusing on identifying and prosecuting violations of law, courts seek to check agency errors and overreach. When the very same agency that wants to execute a warrant is the one deciding whether it issues, those checks disappear, and Americans’ security pays the price.

https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/admin...

Without disagreeing at all, can you think of a major jurisdiction that's better? US I basically assume everything is searchable without a warrant, if not leaked on a ex-DOGE intern USB stick.

Who else is there with a major infra ecosystem? Russia? China? UK? Not sure these are better than EU. Japan seems quite inward looking.

This account is sockpuppeting. They are not participating on this site in good faith.

It’s why I don’t trust anyone. Sure, EU has better policies and regulations than the wild west (US/Canada), but they still can and will do monkey business when needed, and they are more twisted about it than the US. The best strategy is to host your own and encrypt all, if it’s too much effort for some services try to use one from a country that has no interest in you (outside the west for example).

I'd say don't let perfect be the enemy of good/better. Moving from US to EU is a move for the better. But EU isn't perfect, and there might be even better options available, but unless you have them, I'd recommend starting with the move to EU.

Do you seriously think that US requires warrants from US judges to spy on non-citizens abroad? That is 100% false. There is zero protection from the US govt for non-citizens living abroad.

How comfortable are you guys with the fact the US has just partnered with OpenAI to enable mass surveillance?

> you might be in a reasonable EU country and still be hit with an EIO from one of the unreasonable countries.

Are you certain this has happened? I never heard that happen in central Europe. I am pretty certain legislation of other countries is irrelevant, unless it would be an EU regulation - and I am unaware of an EU regulation that could bypass local laws and that has not been made a EU law. Which EU law specifically do you refer to?

Not comfortable. But making choices in the real world is about choosing the best option, not the perfect option.

Generally comfortable.

While the EIO is s controversial instrument (I particularly dislike the excessive power it gives to authorities in issuing countries and the inability to question the warrant), it at least is something that happens as part of a judicial process.

I'm certainly more comfortable with it than being subject to the whims of the US government and its 3 letter agencies.

That said, yeah, EIO in the shape it exists is bad.

How much is this a practical rather than theoretical problem?

One of the problems with being on the US Internet is that we get lots of coverage of US police overreach and much less coverage of EU police overreach. That could have one of three causes:

- actual incidence is low

- it's not being reported

- it is being reported, but doesn't generate discourse

(And the counter option: sometimes when you do hear about it, it's been laundered through weird US right-wing politics, like almost anything anyone says about Sweden)

As long as you stay away from questionable behaviour, there is very little chance to encounter the police in the EU or having problems with your privacy. USA is different in that regard. Your existence can be a problem. Or monetary interests will risk your privacy to whoever wants to make money with you.

EU is not perfect, but saver than the USA in those matters (if you want to only invest a reasonable amount of effort and money), which is kinda the point here, isn't it?

This isn't a downside against EU services when compared to the US, so what are you actually suggesting? Don't just vaguely hint at stuff. Should we be moving to Singaporean services? Oh shit, similar concerns there. Okay, where do you suggest we move? If you don't have any suggestions then there's little substance behind what you're saying.

Sounds terrible. Guess we should all just accept the worst of the worst and shut up?

Maybe the motivation is more to stop giving American big tech MAGA fascists money rather than any kind of gain in privacy/security against state level law enforcement.

Whataboutyism much?

> Some EU courts will not exclude illegally obtained evidence either, so challenging the warrant later on will be pointless.

Generally speaking, I trust EU countries criminal systems more then USA one. USA one is too procedure oriented - like for example with this rule.

Unlike in USA, in general European cops and prosecutors can be punished when they do illegal stuff. That provides better protection then the pretend fairness rule you just cited.

Ecosia is just Google/Bing depending on location.

Qwant is the way to go

Thanks, uruky sounds quite promising, giving it a try

For anyone who wants some eco-optimism, Ecosia has a youtube channel where they film their reforestation efforts.

Thanks, just a note that by "CRM" people typically think of Sales (Salesforce, Hubspot etc), not Support (zendesks and freshdesks).

I like that German company offers Blitz service. Tempted to order something from the UK.

AISLER are AMAZING at printing boards, but sadly are very very expensive for assembly.

Love them though.

Scaleway for cloud: great UI, CLI, Terraform. Like you’ve never left Azure.

Ok, so this shows how bad I am at marketing. I forgot to mention my own service, if you are building electronics: PartsBox, https://partsbox.com/ (insert facepalm emoji here)

I never understood why bother with these.

You get a dealbreaker keyboard because of the lack of an alt key and you don’t even save much money for the effort of working around the Chromebook restrictions. A laptop originally sold with Windows is so much more straightforward to work with.

I’d just grab something like an HP EliteBook 840 G10 on eBay. Around $300, upgradable RAM and SSD, and reasonably recent. Relatively modern/attractive aluminum build.

Or I’m sure there’s some other 2-in-1 not-Chromebook convertible model you can grab if you need the touch screen.

You can also get a refurbished thinkpad with Ryzen and 16gb of ram for 400€ or so on european Ebay.

You seem to know what you're talking about. I used a cheapie Taiwanese Intel netbook for years, on Linux, with great success. When it came to replace it, there was nothing left in that niche (i.e. small and cheap) except ARM Chromebooks with (apparently) locked bootloaders. So I reluctantly bought a heavy and expensive Intel laptop.

Was I wrong to assume that the average big-box-store Chromebook cannot be jailbroken, or has only driverless hardware, or are things changing here? If the latter, surely this opens a boulevard for Linux? Any insight much appreciated.

Buy and support vendors that ship proper Linux laptops. I know of Star labs and Nova Custom in the EU, both use coreboot as well.

So where do you want to host your email?

Name a country and it probably has its own problems: some combination of instability, corruption, authoritarian governments, collaboration with the US and EU governments that you want to escape…

ProtonMail is in Switzerland, so it’s perhaps the best mainstream bet. But the Swiss are absolutely not immune to US and EU pressure.

Runbox are a good option - company and servers in Norway: https://runbox.com/

Been around since 2000. They're also working on JMAP support and are the top financial contributor to the Stalwart mail server (https://opencollective.com/stalwart) so I think they'll have a more compelling offering soon.

Also worth keeping an eye on Thunderbird pro which will also use Stalwart: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/

I'm using Zoho (Indian company, hosted in Europe). Maybe not perfect from a geopolitical pov, but it will do for now.

Singapore, Japan have reliable ISPs.

Proton is in Switzerland, which is not part of EU

For email and calendaring, Fastmail, although Her Majesty’s Australian government has strong overreach instincts.

> how about the OPPOSITE problem: _anyone knows of any non-EU AND non-US email providers_?

Yes, your own server at home. All countries have fundamentally the same problems, so you will have everywhere the same tradeoffs as a customer. So it really depends on what your specific circumstances and requirements are. If laws are your problem, then stay away from countries where you break them; otherwise, just don't go where they will sell your data for any random penny.

> or a very overregulating one like the EU juristictions...

WTF is this kind of demand? Those regulations do not concern you as a user, but can be very beneficial for you, don't you understand this?

Fastmail is australian

lol, you want trustworthy stability without “too many” regulations. Good luck with that.

I’m not sure you know what instability means if you think the US is unstable. If anything, the fact that the dumbest person on the planet is in charge of the United States and the country still functions as well as it does proves a lot about the stability of the USA. The country runs on geopolitical easy mode.

Maybe there’s a libertarian fantasy novel where you can host your services.

devault made sourcehut which I think is hosted in the netherlands

https://sr.ht

I tried it once, it's very opinionated and may not be suitable for what a lot of people think of when they're coming from something like Github. The required old-school patch-by-mail thing is a blocker for a lot of people.

I am boggled by the number of people who see "I really don't want to X" and then reply with "Here's how to easily do X!"

https://tangled.org :) We're hosted in the EU.

I self-host Forgejo on a Docker container. Thinking about it, this is actually the right way to go.

If you got public projects, then something like Codeberg is in fact the place to go. If you got private projects, why push to someone's cloud-hosted git service at all? Push to your own service like Forgejo and sync backups to a local hard-drive or even online using rclone.

Regarding Forgejo [0] there are a number of other open providers listed on the delightful forgejo [1] curated list. In addition there is a Professional services repository [2] where services are listed in the issue tracker.

[0] https://forgejo.org

[1] https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-forgejo/#public-...

[2] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/professional-services/issues

Git is extremely easy to "self host". What makes things complicated are the web interfaces around code hosting, and all their supposedly important features. These days, Prs, issues, forums, wikis and all that seem to be synonymous with "git", which is pretty weird.

Here's a step-by step guide:

Change directory to your local git repository that you want to share with friends and colleagues and do a bare clone git clone --bare . /tmp/repo.git You just created a copy of the .git folder without all the checked out files.

Upload /tmp/repo.git to your linux server over ssh. Don't have one? Just order a tiny cloud server from Hetzner or another European provider. You can place your git repository anywhere, but the best way is to put it in a separate folder, e.g. /var/git. The command would look like with scp -r /tmp/repo.git me@server:/var/git/.

To share the repository with others, create a group, e.g. groupadd --users me git You will be able to add more users to the group with groupmod.

Your git repository is now writable only by me. To make it writable by the git group, you have to change the group on all files in the repository to git with chgrp -R git /var/repo.git and enable the group write bit on them with chmod -R g+w /var/repo.git.

This fixes the shared access for existing files. For new files, we have to make sure the group write bit is always on by changing UMASK from 022 to 002 in /etc/login.defs.

There is one more trick. For now on, all new files and folders in /var/git will be created with the user's primary group. We could change users to have git as the primary group.

But we can also force all new files and folders to be created with the parent folder's group and not user primary group. For that, set the group sticky bit on all folders in /var/git with find /var/git -type d -exec chmod g+s \{\} +

You are done.

Want to host your git repository online? Install caddy and point to /var/git with something like

    example.com {
      root * /var/git
      file_server
    }

Your git repository will be instantly accessible via https://example.com/repo.git.

One of the other comments mentions https://codefloe.com. I haven't tested and haven't yet checked their background, but they seem to allow private repositories.

I think Sourcehut is EU based now.

Take a look at https://www.lcube-webhosting.de/en/svn-hosting-repositoryonl..., starts at 2.90 Euro. No personal experience, but the fact that they are still including SVN support tells you how long-established they are.

Google reviews: https://www.google.com/search?q=lcube&ludocid=91685905651961...

For just the basics, self-hosting of git can be pretty easy. I use gitolite on a VPS.

https://gitolite.com/gitolite/

Yes, check out https://www.gitlabhost.com/ It is based in the Netherlands

Gitea is one of the easiest projects to to self-host. And to do regular upgrades, you only need to update one file. It has been a joy to self-host for many years now.

Uhm, is it? I have some small repos there, which are private and for my company (ie the website). I didn't encounter any warnings?

Edit, it says indeed (right in your face on the front page):

Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects, such as Git hosting.

I just click... click opened a repo and set it as remote and boom. Never thought anything of it... Perhaps I'm... Tolerated for the time being?

gitlab ce is easy to host.

In Germany, netcup (https://www.netcup.com/) is also quite popular among customers who are

- small or midsize companies, or

- "hacker-minded people" (I know quite some "hacker-minded people" who rent a server or vServer at netcup),

since they offer quite a bit of value for the money. In opposite to Hetzner, netcup is more of an inside tip.

If your threat model is the NSA, moving to non-US providers actually lowers the barrier as they no longer have to deal with the US constitution and US citizen data. If your threat model is law enforcement (or border/customs, et al), moving to EU really doesn't cause much in the way of speed bumps.

In my opinion though, the real threat model is not the actual government, its the US corporations. The NSA wont sell your information to any bad actor with a credit card and, realistically, doesn't care about you. But there is much that can be stolen or exploited for financially-motivated bad-actors from non-extradition countries or others with differing interests than your own.

Yeah, sure, but this idea that the government is the threat you're defending against is very American. I'm not saying I trust my government with a lot of my personal data, but they're not the most important threat I'm defending against when I look after my privacy online.

Defeatism; alternatives don't have to be perfect to be useful. In other words, it's a journey, not a destination.

If you buy directly from Mullvad, they delete the transaction details after two weeks. Sure, your payment procesor knows you’ve bought from Mullvad, but in this case so does Amazon, no?

Regarding Migadu, after extensive research it seemed to be the best option, but man that 20 outgoing emails limit is just so off-putting and the next tier is so far apart. I would be comfortable paying 50-60 euros per year for 50 outgoing emails, but no, it’s either 20 for 20 euros or 100 for 90 euros

> Agree on mullvad, buy giftcard on amazon.

I've heard this before. Is this just to add another hop in the chain to make it harder for someone to track the user down? Apart from someone needing to order Amazon to pony up the details ("Which credit card was this Amazon item bought with?")

Is there another layer of privacy I'm missing?

GDPR is real, and real good

Haven't used it, but I've been intrigued by git-bug (stores issues in got itself) for years, to use as the issue/pr sync.

Bonus that now the issues aren't vendor locked either

https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/blob/trunk/doc/feature-ma...

Had a self hosted nextcloud instance runnning on my homeserver, but migrated away two years ago to a Hetzner Storage share. All in all I'm quite happy with that.

There are some downsides, though:

  - No support for collabora online, so no way for collaborative editing of office files
  - Data is not encrypted

Hetzner also has classical web hosting offerings, which are cheap as well. I'm using that for email and a website of mine.

just to piggyback off of this, theres also Pikapods (based in malta i think) that have about 100 or so self-hosted apps that can be installed with one-click and then you just pay depending on what you use. im more into self-hosting on my own hardware but its a nice option for people who want to get their feet wet or that dont have the time to manage a VPS themselves

I've just rented one a few days ago!

It's not a full-on Nextcloud instance, mind. For example there is no ffmpeg for generating video thumbnails.

But liking it so far

I had no idea how cheap this was. Thanks.

> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software…

– https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/LICENSE

If you don't want your software used like that, don't choose this licence.

You can't post-hoc decide how people behave.

This is already a crazy take on its own, why would a fork have to describe their relation to the parent project front and center? Both the Readme and the comparison page link to the origin blog post [1] that describes the lineage clearly.

But even if there were some "ethical reason" to do this, I don't think Gitea is the right project to play up as a victim. Their homepage [2] doesn't mention that Gitea itself is a fork either. Their Readme does, but is this so much better?

[1]: https://forgejo.org/2022-12-15-hello-forgejo/ [2]: https://about.gitea.com/

Interested to hear what hardware you have if you’d mind sharing some details.

Don't make the same mistake again, get a domain so that you can keep using the same address when switching between providers. Then set up GMail to forward e-mail to your new address. Then slowly update the E-mail address in your account. You could even set up a label that gets attached to e-mails that arrived through your GMail address. In that way, you can easily see the stuff that still needs to be updated.

Untangling yourself from Google (or Apple, which is similarly hard), doesn't have to be all at once. Break it up in small steps that feel like individual wins.

One more note about using your own domain: avoid provider-specifict features like subdomain addressing (made it more work for me to move off Fastmail).

If you are using a password manager, start by searching for every record with your gmail address. Make a list. Every day, go to the next entry on the list and change your email with that app or service.

Of course, set up gmail to forward messages to your new address and filter them into a folder. Once you have changed all the services you know about, watch for emails coming to the gmail folder, looking for more services that need to be updated. Eventually the only thing arriving in the folder is spam and you can just route it all into the garbage.

There's no point in switching. Most of these people are dealing with a threat that has an extremely low probability of happening. It is not in any practical way going to affect your life and for most of the people here busy switching to EU services they likely don't have any major example of where it has affect them or anyone one degree away from them.

It's mostly an ideal. Like OSS. The practical reality means that such extreme adherence to only EU services doesn't do anything but make your life harder. It's like saying you only use open source, from the CPU to the GPU to your OS and everything else... make it all from open source, how big of a nightmare would that be? The only time it is practical is if you're doing really illegal shit and you need the data protection.

It’s easier than you think when you stop trying to treat it as an all or nothing move and more of a gradual migration. Fastmail makes it really easy to keep the two in sync

Set up the redirect and change the emails of your services one by one whenever you have a minute of time. It took a year for me, and I am free now.

Nowadays, I primarily only use gmail because the mail client is good on Android. But all my accounts have been self-hosted for years now and gmail just reads them via POP3 (never managed to get it happy with IMAP for some reason) and sends via my own SMTP.

Can anyone recommend actually decent and free Android (and also web) mail clients for self-hosted use? Everything I've tried so far (but to be fair, it was a few years ago when I last checked) just felt clunky compared to gmail, so I've ended up sticking with it as a client far longer than I probably should.

Took me a year of slow migration so that my essential emails and connected services don't go over Gmail. Email is the hardest to move because of its central nature as an online identity.

I let my old 4 letter .com domain expire around 2000ish and got suckered into the whole gmail etc thing after sitting on university and hotmail for a while

In 2019 I decided enough was enough and registered a new domain and started moving my accounts over as new ones came up, or I updated addressing

I have very little left on gmail now other than spam from old services I no longer use. Top one in the inbox at the moment is Facebook telling my I have "530 notifications about X". Its sad how desperate they are.

I did it with tons of accounts and services linked. It's not anywhere as daunting as you'd think (and I thought). Although it seems you don't want to move away from it so I'm not sure what point your comment serves to make.

i thought the same but ive actually moved twice now. first to protonmail whenever that came out, then again a few years ago to posteo. it actually didnt feel like that much work in the end. i set up forwarding and switched over a few accounts every week. i still kept my gmail account around for years just in case but there will be a point where you just know you have all the important things switched over

> but isn't the EU simply horrible when it comes to privacy of your data from a nosy government?

It's a case of "better is not perfect".

Yes, the EU & it's member states allow the police quite a bit of access to data and servers. However, there are still decently functional checks and balances. Unlike China, unlike Russia, unlike the US, where there is a carte-blanche already employed by authoritarian governments.

What the line really seems to refer to is General data protection. While "the state spies on you" is one attack vector, and one certainly becoming dangerous for oppressed minority groups in the US, it's not the only one.

For most people, really, all people because the authoritarian systems rely heavily on data from breaches, the chief risk to one's wellbeing are said data breaches. Of companies recklessly collecting all data they can get their hands on and retaining it forever.

There, the EU does have notably better laws. Where data collection and retention are restricted, and user-requested deletion is a legal right. (Enforcement of this is still a mess.)

In what sense are governments in the EU more nosy than the one in the US or China?

> but isn't the EU simply horrible when it comes to privacy of your data from a nosy government?

Depends on the country, as much as it would xState in the US.

I think OP means user-friendly in the relationship user-company, not user-government.

It's way better than the US.

One neat bit with Codeberg however is because they're using (actually developing) Forgejo (a Gitea fork which itself is a Gogs fork) you can easily clone the entire thing locally or on your own VPS to have as a backup.

Forgejo is even trivial to set up as it is a single self-contained binary you can throw somewhere and it'd work.

Does their Zimbra implementation support 2FA ?

It's a geopolitical reality. Not liking the 'us against them' mentality is fair enough, I agree with that, but we can't be blind to what's happening around us.

Also, I do think that there's benefit to opting for EU products, as they are generally more 'consumer-rights' friendly than the US alternatives.

Most of the articles I read about this is about showing that going all-European is possible at all. If that feels like it’s an us vs. them thing, I’m not sure how I could change your mind.

I tried Uberspace for email and what bothered me that you can only set up one email domain per Asteroid. So if you have multiple domains, it gets expensive quickly... (depending on how many users per domain you have). But other than that, great company with a great ethical stance (and as far as I can tell, great technical infrastructure). I will definitely be going back to them if I need a simple VPS.

The author mentions using them as well, but I personally would have a really hard time trusting any service run by any individual and be it just in case something happens to them.

Also docs collaboration, and now video calling as well. And they've just bought Standard Notes, so that'll be next. It's definitely chugging along fast.

proton.me? That is in Switzerland, not the EU.

I think he means that he can have a catch-all, but to reply from that address, there needs to be an alias created on the account

I find it odd that EU is judged by efforts that have time and time again _failed_, when I'd see that as a perfect example of a system actually working, because people do have the power to stop hostile legislation, whereas I see no such thing at all in the US.

Yup, I don't get someone who would look at the US and say that their government overreach is particularly bad compared to the rest of the "first world". For example, the UK is arresting people for getting too spicy in school Facebook groups[1]. It just feels like "grass is greener" mentality because folks on here are most familiar with US political issues.

[1] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/police-arrest-...

While it's in your bio, I feel like you should have made it more obvious that this is your company

Just for completeness, both PagerDuty and incident.io offer EU hosting.

Start by the fact that in their system you are just a random number that is generated at the moment you arrive in their website. They make very easy to pay without having to use any of your personal data, like Credit Card. Overall I think if a company put so much effort on that side, they simply don't have any data to log, or if they do is pretty anonymous anyway :)

Also based on your reply on a sibling thread, is this a legit question (you expect that there is a way but you're not sure how) or are you just waiting for someone to bite just so you can state your case about proving a negative?

The usual proof is whether law enforcement agencies can force the company to share such data

It's the rule of law that attracts business.

If you have a good path and a bad path that may or may not converge sometime later on your journey, you still should walk the good path.

You're not wrong. But no SaaS is forever. Price rises, bankruptcies, ToS changes, change of CEO etc. Being acquired by a US company is just one of the things that can happen.

For someone like the author, it's not a reason to stay with a US company

And helping European companies be more successful might prevent them from selling out...

Don't worry, EU companies never become that successful

The US president is threatening to shutdown news organizations that report about his war in ways he does not like.

The US government is sanctioning European individuals for doing their jobs, preventing them and their families from accessing any US digital service.

I could go on. But the message is already clear: Relying on US services is gambling with a ticking time bomb.

Yes, same here. I tried some EU providers like Mailbox, Tuta and Uberspace. In the end, even though Fastmail is not EU-based, at least it's based in Australia (and not US) and they have a solid track record as a company to make the right decisions and not chase every hype. So, this is good enough for me. For now.

And don't pay for multiple years at once even if you're sure you'll be keeping the domain for a long time - at any moment the company could be bought by someone else you don't want to be trusting.

Yeah, and ARM is based outside of EU, just across La Manche and Irish Sea.

yeah the blog is about software, not hardware

The people who publicize this kind of stuff are not the sort to ruffle major feathers.

You misunderstand this. Yes, there have been moves by some in the EU to reduce privacy, but they face resistance and have actually been repelled often. The ChatControl debacle you mention is one such instance. And on the other hand, sometimes there is actual progress, like with GDPR.

But more importantly, at least there are privacy laws in the EU that do something. In the US, there are virtually none, so of course you won't hear about their erosion.

I trust the EU ten times more than the US in this regard.

Promise?

It's still the same population that voted for Trump twice. It's the same constitution, the same supreme court, the same parties, the same oligarchie and the same god-king like office of the US president.

Nothing will change with respect to trust after the midterms.

I've used https://migadu.com/ before. Not EU, but EEA (Switzerland).

ProtonMail? Not strictly speaking EU, but atleast EEA

It also comes with a whole suite of software that you don't have to find EU alternatives for like Calendar, Drive, Password manager, etc

https://tuta.com/ and Protonmail

https://mailbox.org/

German e-mail service

I'm using Startmail, based in NL: https://www.startmail.com

I love fastmail, but I really wish they had servers close to me.

The high ping kills the throughput on davfs and makes their website hosting a pain to update :(

https://mailcow.email/vps/

Not sure why I got downvoted for saying none of the dozen alternatives people have suggested are anything close to Fastmail. I guess none of you have even tried Fastmail. I am a big fan of its UI, and they have recently released and official Linux client.

That ship had sailed long ago.

Linus Torvalds is Finnish.

Guido Van Rossum is Dutch.

Anders Hejlsberg is Danish.

Bjarne Stroustroup is Danish (I think?).

Rasmus Lersdorf is Danish.

Bram Molenaar was Dutch.

Edgar Dijkstra was Dutch.

Niklaus Wirth was Swiss.

Andrei Alexandrescu is Romanian.

I can probably think of many others.

The US is good at inventing things but it's amazing at marketing them and making money and drawing others to do the inventing for them.

> European here. > in Germany....

We're not all Germany over here.

Mate, you need to work on your communication skills. Or just get an LLM to boils things down a bit.

OK Grok, calm down.

I haven’t talked to all Europeans, like Albanians, but I can’t imagine that we all monomaniacally obsess about all the trending culture war talking points. Like you just breathlessly throw out Child Protection Rules at the end of a sentence. Huh?

Is one supposed to go over such a laundry list/dump of talking points one by one? It hardly seems serious.

[dead]

I guess when the alternative is Trump's vision of the future ... - at least I know what I would choose.

You have no idea what you are talking about, really. We don’t "frequently" pass such laws. Nobody is accessing private messages, even if there have been such attempts.

The EU has still the strongest privacy laws world wide, and in contrast to others a strong ethical foundation. It may be slow, it may be torn, it may be overly beaurocratic, but sure enough not authoritarian.

Assuming your assessment is correct, how do you think this will affect the digital sector?