I thought protonmail was the go-to for de-googling.
Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org
41–50 of 406 posts
Re: Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org
#42I 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'…
It doesn't sound like they do on-disk encryption like ProtonMail. Is that right?
You mean e2e? on-disk encryption (ie. "encryption at rest") is basically used by everyone, including gmail and outlook.
Re: Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org
#43I 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 pri…
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.
Re: Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org
#44Anyone 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.
Re: Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
Which is why you should buy your own domain so you can easily move to another provider. And backup your emails of course.
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.
Re: Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org
#46> 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).
Re: Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org
#47I'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…
Came here to say this. I've been with Fastmail a similar length of time and it just keeps getting better.
Re: Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org
#48I 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.
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 publi…
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.
Re: Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org
#49I 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.
Re: Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org
#50Gotta put in a plug for Migadu: https://www.migadu.com/pricing/ Happy customer over a couple of years.
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 :(