Comment by kevinob11
15 hours ago
I want to try another provider, but my family (partner, kids, grandparents) stores pictures in Google Photos, shares docs from google drive, etc. It is all the extra stuff I get with Google that feels daunting to me, I'd love to switch for email and calendar.
You can just have a gmail account you don't use, and in fact even if you have your own domain, if you're willing to pay for Google separately, you can have a Google Workspace account for your custom domain and your e-mail for that domain at Fastmail and just not point any MX records at Google. It works fine - it's what I do as an artifact of having used them for e-mail and moved but not having bothered to untangle my other stuff (yet; but it's been years).
The only thing that's a bit of a hassle is the calendar. It also mostly works, since you can add your Fastmail calendar to Google Calendar, but Google is slow to sync.
I dont think you need a gmail account for that. just a google account without gmail would work.
And you can move your email but leave an unused account in existence if something really really needs a G login. Not great, but doable and some time later you might find out it isn't needed after all.
Have that problem here. I just mirror all that stuff offline. Someone has to do it.
I have no cloud document, email or photo storage at all. Just an IMAP box.