One thing I'd recommend is getting your own domain for email (looks like mailbox.org allows custom domains with some plans). You never know what will happen to your email provider in the future, so having the freedom to move your domain to a different provider is valuable.
I 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 privacy-wise.
I remember briefly looking into Proton but the search was awful.
Another thing is that they appear to have some spam scanning on outbound emails and when they detect something suspicious they simply drop the email silently, and nobody will ever know about it.
I 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.
I moved myself and my wife's business away from Google, but that hasn't been without it's issues. Even though we're using a globally recognised mail provider and have DKIM, SPF etc all set up perfectly, we get bounced or delayed by certain mail admins. There are also occasional delays and issues. One thing I'll say about Gmail is that it's extremely reliable.
Anyone considering a move should also look at NameCrane/CraneMail by the crew behind BuyVM. Solid service, incredibly reasonable prices, great community/discord. They are always looking to improve, extremely proactive and reactive to customer feedback and issues. No builtin PGP, but I believe that is out of their control as they use SmarterMail on the backend.
Same question as above, do they have masked emails feature? Also, if you go the demo email they have, settings-connectivity, you can literally see all other people’s IP who are logged in there, concerning.
(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 shortcuts that work
(5) Instead of inbox 0, I practice inbox 50k and it handles it fine.
(6) I just had a decade-anniversary there and I've never regretted it.
I think I'm over 20 years using Fastmail now? It just works. I've never had a single ounce of trouble with them. Their support is great. There are few products in life that I would recommend without question, and Fastmail is one of those. If only every company was this good.
I 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't really have any plans to move away from mailbox.org, though I just saw the post about Thunderbird offering an email service in the future. That might actually prompt me to move as I'd like to support the makers of a FOSS email client I've been happily using for years.
For those looking to break free and are considering self-hosting, I can strongly recommend Stalwart. I'm surprised how almost no one seems to have heard of it, but it's amazing (and supports JMAP!)
> The problem with email is that everything is transmitted in plain text.
That's not a Gmail problem, and no reason to migrate. Some use cases just don't fit email, and for those, we have other, more fitting platforms.
> So, I went with mailbox.org that still offers integrated PGP encryption, and if you want, you can always use external PGP too (which I was already doing with Gmail).
Ended up dropping migadu. Lots of things I liked like the configuration but it was fairly expensive for what you got. After 3 years of paying, I once went over my outbound quota and couldn't send email for the day.
Anyone 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.
> 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).
That's why I find their mandatory requirement of exposing their hosted emails only to their clients is such a bizarre take (if not pure bs).
I mean for god's sake just let me use IMAP/POP3.
You give me encryption at rest, safety and privacy in transit, and do not sell my data. You also offer to let me put up my GPG key on your admin portal so that I can easily read e2ee mails in your webmail.
Thank you, all that is very nice. Now get out of my way and do not try/pretend to be Signal and email at the same time.
I 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 $10/mo for the VPS and 1TB of storage.
Android I think I'll be stuck on - I have a Pixel 8 Pro that technically supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there. Next time I need a new phone I'll take a serious look at Fairphone but I think the Pixel 8 Pro should last a few more years.
My FitBit Versa is really old and starting to die - I ordered one of the new Pebble watches and am patiently waiting for it to ship!
YouTube I'm stuck on because that's where the content is. I have yet to find a suitable replacement for Google Maps - OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.
I degoogled and deappled and ended up with a Sonim flip phone. It’s like, Android 11 without Google services but I don’t mind the lack of security because there’s basically no personal data on it.
I’m amazed at the feature parity of immich, it works great. Jellyfin for media and Pydio for Dropbox/drive functionality, email via infomaniak 12$ a year.
I like mapy.com as a Google Maps replacement. It's essentially a very good OSM renderer, with a great website and app, including offline access, routing, and real-time traffic. Also very good bike/hike routing, if that's your jam.
But there's no substitute for GMap's POI database.
Using proton as well, but if you're stuck on the free tier you can't use any 3rd party email clients.
>YouTube
Using Google takeout for Youtube will give you a .csv of your subscriptions and playlists (just be sure to un-check getting a download of your videos). From there you can get the rss feeds and use RSSguard as a subscription viewer/media player, this site was a big help in figuring things out https://charlesthomas.dev/blog/converting-my-youtube-subscri....
You should set up a local machine for Immich. I’ve got it running locally, with the photos on spinning rust and thumbs and db on NVME. It’s mind blowing how fast it is. Scroll to three years ago, lift the mouse button, and every thumb loads in a quarter second. Data intensive stuff is when you notice that the server is in the next room. It’ll pay for itself in a couple years. Treat yourself. :)
On android I degoogled almost everything by using Fossify apps. Only gmail and maps remain for obvious reasons. My photos are now synced with Syncthing through my wireguard vpn. Calendar/Notes have local backups that are also synced. The simple camera I use (fossify too) works with physical directories instead of meta directories that I hate.
Most of it because my clients use it. But drive and maps out of convenience. Don't know if there even exist something with a similar feature set as maps.
I probably could move my stuff to proto drive but the docs and sheets integration is vital for me.
It has so much integrated information, without being annoying (e.g. store listings); also is the only free product I know with built-in tilt-shift perspectives (from each major of eight cardinal directions).
> I can’t stomach even a trivial sum of money going to Yandex/Russia
This is the first I'm hearing of this, I love Kagi. Looks like Yandex represents about 2% of their costs. I assume the hangup here is that by Kagi giving money to Yandex, the Russian government gets some of that money, and that money is being used to fuel war machines?
By that logic any company that ends up giving money to a country that is participating in active wars is not okay. If you draw the line at Yandex, do you also draw it at Apple/Google/Microsoft or any other US-based company that pays taxes to the US government which has a long and *active* history of killing innocent people? Or products coming from China who is actively exterminating ethnic groups?
At some point it becomes easier to just stop using technology altogether because once you look deep enough at anything you will find ethical issues. Do you know where the precious metals in your phone, laptop, or TV came from? Where is the energy you use to power these devices coming from? What happens to those devices when they reach end of life and you don't use them anymore? By using technology in any capacity you are affecting poorer countries that bear the brunt of mining, e-waste, and climate change.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is - it's important to be cognizant of these things and reduce harm that you're doing wherever possible, but you can never be fully 100% ethical and still be a consumer of goods and services unless you do so at great inconvenience to yourself.
Great effort! For photos I can highly recommend Ente. Fully E2E encrypted. Works on all systems, syncs reliably, has great on-device AI stuff to build a vector database of your images, has very good UI/UX and is reasonably priced. Once I had all my 20k+ photos uploaded into Ente, I was finally able to delete all my photos from iCloud and cancel my iCloud subscription.
How do you deal with emails bouncing or going to spam? I have been looking to move away from Gmail but last I read it was the only reliable option out there.
The problem with changing email provider due to privacy concerns, is that most of your emails will still end up inside Google's or Microsoft's servers.
I considered self-hosting my own email, as I already have a domain name. But this has always put me off. The reason I would still consider self-hosting is to have readily available email address for side projects, like if I want to receive email notifications from services.
But for privacy, you unfortunately don't gain much, as most of the people/entities you're exchanging emails with are using Google or Microsoft emails.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 98.7 ms ] threadThe report is also very good and that should be a service every other mail service could provide to people who want to move away from G'rab'mail.
Another curiosity is that you use the same password I use for everything: xxx
Simple to remember and nobody will ever figure that out! Wink! :)
Maybe I need to buy a domain that sounds like a generic email host.
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 privacy-wise.
I remember briefly looking into Proton but the search was awful.
https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-cus...
https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/e-mail-article/customizing...
I keep telling them that Google spies on you, but they don’t care because it is free and it works.
How reliable are these providers and what are the chances these providers emails would bounce or go to spam when sending an email?
(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 shortcuts that work
(5) Instead of inbox 0, I practice inbox 50k and it handles it fine.
(6) I just had a decade-anniversary there and I've never regretted it.
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't really have any plans to move away from mailbox.org, though I just saw the post about Thunderbird offering an email service in the future. That might actually prompt me to move as I'd like to support the makers of a FOSS email client I've been happily using for years.
That's not a Gmail problem, and no reason to migrate. Some use cases just don't fit email, and for those, we have other, more fitting platforms.
> So, I went with mailbox.org that still offers integrated PGP encryption, and if you want, you can always use external PGP too (which I was already doing with Gmail).
Ok, so now you have two problems.
Happy customer over a couple of years.
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.
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).
I mean for god's sake just let me use IMAP/POP3.
You give me encryption at rest, safety and privacy in transit, and do not sell my data. You also offer to let me put up my GPG key on your admin portal so that I can easily read e2ee mails in your webmail.
Thank you, all that is very nice. Now get out of my way and do not try/pretend to be Signal and email at the same time.
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 $10/mo for the VPS and 1TB of storage.
Android I think I'll be stuck on - I have a Pixel 8 Pro that technically supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there. Next time I need a new phone I'll take a serious look at Fairphone but I think the Pixel 8 Pro should last a few more years.
My FitBit Versa is really old and starting to die - I ordered one of the new Pebble watches and am patiently waiting for it to ship!
YouTube I'm stuck on because that's where the content is. I have yet to find a suitable replacement for Google Maps - OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.
I’m amazed at the feature parity of immich, it works great. Jellyfin for media and Pydio for Dropbox/drive functionality, email via infomaniak 12$ a year.
But there's no substitute for GMap's POI database.
Using proton as well, but if you're stuck on the free tier you can't use any 3rd party email clients.
>YouTube
Using Google takeout for Youtube will give you a .csv of your subscriptions and playlists (just be sure to un-check getting a download of your videos). From there you can get the rss feeds and use RSSguard as a subscription viewer/media player, this site was a big help in figuring things out https://charlesthomas.dev/blog/converting-my-youtube-subscri....
I'm still using docs, sheets, drive and maps.
Most of it because my clients use it. But drive and maps out of convenience. Don't know if there even exist something with a similar feature set as maps.
I probably could move my stuff to proto drive but the docs and sheets integration is vital for me.
I block all Google products (at the router level), and do miss their Maps/Earth products.
The best non-Google mapping I've found http://www.bing.com/maps (no affiliation, just ¢¢)
It has so much integrated information, without being annoying (e.g. store listings); also is the only free product I know with built-in tilt-shift perspectives (from each major of eight cardinal directions).
I was a paying Kagi customer, after fleeing Google, but I can’t stomach even a trivial sum of money going to Yandex/Russia.
I miss Kagi.
This is the first I'm hearing of this, I love Kagi. Looks like Yandex represents about 2% of their costs. I assume the hangup here is that by Kagi giving money to Yandex, the Russian government gets some of that money, and that money is being used to fuel war machines?
By that logic any company that ends up giving money to a country that is participating in active wars is not okay. If you draw the line at Yandex, do you also draw it at Apple/Google/Microsoft or any other US-based company that pays taxes to the US government which has a long and *active* history of killing innocent people? Or products coming from China who is actively exterminating ethnic groups?
At some point it becomes easier to just stop using technology altogether because once you look deep enough at anything you will find ethical issues. Do you know where the precious metals in your phone, laptop, or TV came from? Where is the energy you use to power these devices coming from? What happens to those devices when they reach end of life and you don't use them anymore? By using technology in any capacity you are affecting poorer countries that bear the brunt of mining, e-waste, and climate change.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is - it's important to be cognizant of these things and reduce harm that you're doing wherever possible, but you can never be fully 100% ethical and still be a consumer of goods and services unless you do so at great inconvenience to yourself.
And no nobody's perfect but the sanctions are a means of policy pressure. It's not so much about feeling ethical.
I considered self-hosting my own email, as I already have a domain name. But this has always put me off. The reason I would still consider self-hosting is to have readily available email address for side projects, like if I want to receive email notifications from services.
But for privacy, you unfortunately don't gain much, as most of the people/entities you're exchanging emails with are using Google or Microsoft emails.