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Ask HN: How to move away from Google

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Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#171

Post by currysausage »

stavros wrote: post #131
currysausage wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the upside, Fastmail is the one e-mail service that I have tested that is actually more comfortable to use than Gmail. How they manage to incorporate practically every feature I could dream of while offering a totally neat, snappy, intuitive interface across platforms is just impressive. (Testing right now and planning to move there from Gmail.) Proton looks really neat too, I just don’t like the thought of not ha…

I switched from Gmail to Fastmail years ago (it only takes a few minutes of you own your domain) and whenever I have to use Gmail (for work) it seems slow and bloated. Fastmail is very quick to load and user-friendly, I don't miss Gmail at all.

Indeed, I have wanted to switch away from Gmail for a long time, especially because of the stories of randomly terminated accounts, but the straw that broke the camel's back was that Gmail somehow managed to break the compose window: when I select/replace/delete text using the keyboard or do undo/redo, sometimes there are weird glitches that creep me out.

I don't care that they haven't added meaningful new features in a long time, I don't care that they rearrange the UI every now and then, but breaking core functionality for no tangible reason is just unacceptable.

I switched to Gmail in 2008 because they cared about auto-saving drafts while other webmail just lost drafts when the session had expired and I clicked "send". Nowadays, I guess they mostly care about Material Design and streering me towards their latest clusterf**k of a chat/conference app.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#172

Post by dividedbyzero »

smcn wrote: post #164
dividedbyzero wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried them in 2019, they did (and do, I guess) check all my boxes but it seemed they were moving fast and breaking stuff and IMAP/SMTP in Apple Mail was one of the broken things. Docs were very much out of date, IMAP kept erroring out every few attempts and SMTP never worked at all (their support people couldn't help either IIRC). IMAP/SMTP is a basic requirement for a not-E2E-email provider so that didn't instill…

I've been using IMAP with mbsync and gnus for probably over a year now and I've not had a single issue with it. I'm not the most prolific emailer, mind you.

I've created a trial account and they really have tidied up that part of the experience, they offer a downloadable profile for macOS that will set up Apple Mail, that's really neat and something I haven't seen with other providers yet. Will give them an in-depth check, this looks promising.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#173

Post by kashyapc »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #112
salzig wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about https://mailbox.org/ ? I

I tried them in 2019, they did (and do, I guess) check all my boxes but it seemed they were moving fast and breaking stuff and IMAP/SMTP in Apple Mail was one of the broken things. Docs were very much out of date, IMAP kept erroring out every few attempts and SMTP never worked at all (their support people couldn't help either IIRC). IMAP/SMTP is a basic requirement for a not-E2E-email provider so that didn't instill…

FWIW, I'm a happy customer of https://mailbox.org for more than a year now. I know several other users who are also happy with them.

It's a no-frills, secure setup for a decent price. I definitely recommend mailbox.org.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#174

Post by msh »

Maybe a bit contrarian but the best move might not be to move away for google unless the main driver is data privacy.

If you just don't want to risk being locked out its more important to keep access to your data these would be the steps:

- Get your own domain for email. If google locks you out you can just point it to somewhere else.

- Set google takeout to make monthly backups (automatically) of your email, photos and so on to google drive.

- Install desktop google drive on your computer. Set it to fully mirror all your files locally/offline. Then if google locks you out you will still have access to your files and photo/email backups. Bonus points for having a desktop mail app that keeps your email locally.

The lockout problem is not unique to google, can happen with most providers.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#175

Post by martin_a »

> I want to eventually move away, especially gmail and drive.

Run it yourself!

Get yourself a solid hosting company with shared webhosting. For Germany, hetzner or all-inkl would be my choice.

A hetzner "Level 1" shared webhosting for 1,90 €/month will come with an included TLD of your choice. Use that to host your own mailboxes. 10 GB webspace should be good for that, too.

Then install a NextCloud instance on that webhost. Add a hetzner "Storage Box", 3,45 €/month will give you 1 TB of space which can be mounted into the NextCloud through a free plugin.

That way you have mail and your own cloud for 5,50 €/month for as long as you pay the bill...

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#176

Post by martin_a »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #167

I see a lot of recommendations for self hosted alternatives, either at home or a VPS/Rented server. While the HN crowd is probably better suited than most people, running a server connected to the internet is no small taks, and people should seriously consider other alternatives before doing so. For some of the services, your own privacy measures may not matter one bit. Take email for example, you may self host it, o…

> running a server connected to the internet is no small taks

Shared webhosting is still a thing and comes with the best of two worlds. Not expensive and professionals take care of the system under the hood.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#177

Post by keraf »

kyharri wrote: post #115
keraf wrote: post #36

I moved away from Google a few years ago. I'm using the following alternatives: - Email: ProtonMail - Contacts, Calendar, Online storage: NextCloud hosted by Hetzner ( https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share ) - Phone: LineageOS (Android) -- App stores: F-Droid for most apps and Aurora store for the occasional non F-Droid apps (like the ProtonMail client) -- Maps: MagicEarth (not open source but privacy friendl…

Any particular reason to avoid OpenStreetMaps? Vs MagicEarth

MagicEarth is based on OSM and their navigation is great, both for driving and walking (haven't tried cycling). I even got better routes suggested when driving vs Google Maps (I compared with a friend using GMaps, he switched to MagicEarth after that :-) ). The only time it messed up was by suggesting a non-existent walking path down a hill in Kiev, which resulted in me rolling down and slicing my arm open, nothing to serious though. Overall I'm happy enough with it to not spend more time looking for other alternatives. If anyone has a better alternative, I'm always listening.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#178

Post by keraf »

butz wrote: post #73
keraf wrote: post #36

I moved away from Google a few years ago. I'm using the following alternatives: - Email: ProtonMail - Contacts, Calendar, Online storage: NextCloud hosted by Hetzner ( https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share ) - Phone: LineageOS (Android) -- App stores: F-Droid for most apps and Aurora store for the occasional non F-Droid apps (like the ProtonMail client) -- Maps: MagicEarth (not open source but privacy friendl…

If you are using ProtonMail, you might want to check out their Proton Calendar. Still waiting for Proton Drive (beta) apps to see if it might partially replace Google Drive or Dropbox.

I've been looking at their other services but for now I'm happy using NextCloud, which provides more than just calendar and file storage. I also have phone tracking (so I can send my real time location to my relatives when driving and visualize the places I've been) and an RSS aggregator. Additionally, I'm not locking myself into another service provider. I'm still open to the idea of moving to another e-mail provider some day even though I'm happy with ProtonMail's service so far.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#179

Post by kashyapc »

For e-mail, definitely check out https://mailbox.org. I've been a happy user of their service for more than a year now. Clean, secure, and effective. I'm not associated with them, but here is a decent review of it[1].

If you're comfortable with email clients, you can even use mailbox.org as a dumb mail-drop location and fetch everything locally via tools such as `mbsync`. Then you can use a mail client your choice (Thunderbird, Mutt, etc) to read/respond.

[1] https://proprivacy.com/email/review/mailboxorg

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Google

#180

Post by throwaway67743 »

greendude29 wrote: post #68
throwaway67743 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really want to like ddg but it's just awful - not only are the results completely irrelevant but now it's started showing me russian language results, I'm in a country that uses the Latin alphabet.

How strange, I've been using DDG for a few years now and only rarely do I need to go to Google. Do you have examples of searches where Google is definitely superior (just out of curiosity, not challenging the notion)?

Can't recall a particular one at the moment but pretty obvious searches return results that aren't really relevant enough, maybe I just need to change my query language though, but exact matches really should just work
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