I have this bad feeling daily that for whatever reason I loose access to my gmail. Don’t think of anything shady but simply I just loose it. There is a very small chance to it but still. You can read the stories that people uploaded their family photos to google drive and the algorithm marks their kids photos CP and they loose their account. Or maybe your email is used to spam or anything similar. There is no way to talk to google support, it is an endless loop of help pages. I just can’t live with this. I know billions of people do, but I cannot. My email address is registered to hundreds of websites including government and banking sites. You could literally destroy me financially or other ways by just gaining login to my gmail. Google could cause me HUGE problems by locking me out. I decided to start transitioning to an email with my own domain. I have the doimain, I have the email client setup. So what do you do with your existing stuff? Most websites dont even let you change the email. I have to take appointment in government offices to change my email. It seems like a giant task.
Have anyone took this leap?
*Lose
You could literally destroy me financially or other ways by just gaining login to my gmail.
Sounds like you need to start using MFA.
I’m thinking about this every once in a while. What about using a custom domain and a relay service like FireFox Relay or Addy.io? That would give you the option to move your actual email around easily, even after you lose access to it.
I just did this. I have an android phone so I will have a hard time getting rid of google account but I have used clodflare to create a custom email and have setup forwarding/sending vianalias inside gmail. I made a separatr address for website registrations and personal mail. I will slowly start the transitioning of all my accounts.
I transitioned e-mail address twice. What has worked for me is doing it slowly. Keep the old address around: from time to time you’ll get emails from services you did not even remember being subscribed to. Also, if you don’t use a password manager, now it’s the perfect time to start. I suggest Bitwaden
Thanks. I do use bitwarden as well I selfhost a bunch of stuff like nextcloud. I’m actually weirded out on myself that I’m still depending from google
You have to accept that privacy costs money because your data isn’t being sold. For $5+ a month you can use proton Mail or tutanota. For ~$2 a month you can use Zoho mail or Titan mail.
Whatever you choose, it will be worth it.
Speaking from experience, I’d recommend not choosing protonmail because it is very difficult to cleanly stop paying and leave - forwarding mail to another address is a paid feature. It’s also not very standards compliant (no IMAP/SMTP support without running a buggy bridge). Their security features are mostly useless and better security can be achieved on standards-compliant services if you try.
Buying one or more domains and using those with protonmail gives you 100% portability. Just redirect your domains to a different mail server if you decide to make a switch.
If you set up a domain with Protonmail, you can have unlimited email addresses for that domain, although they all go to the same inbox that way. I like to use a website’s name as the user when I sign up with a website, so it’s like [email protected]. If I start getting emails to that address from somebody other than Office Depot, I know those rat-bastards sold me out.
With Proton Pass it will even generate those fake emails for you. No need to tweak any settings.
Start by changing your most important services to your new email, and set your gmail to forward everything to your new email. From then, sign up to new sites with your new email and change emails of old accounts if you have time, it’s not a huge rush.
As long as you set up the email forwarding, you’ve done most of the important work right there.
You can also auto-label anything in your new account based on From: in the header to indicate that it got forwarded from the old account. This way you will know what you still need to switch over.
Yeah I have them auto go into an “old email” folder rather than clutter my inbox especially if it’s forwarding crap newsletters/spam etc. I was very liberal with my old email…
You can also set Gmail to send from your other account. So you get Gmail as an email client.
🤦♂️
That’s the whole thing you want to avoid lol
But it’s step 1 to moving off. Often just having the one place is what holds people back. I’ve migrated several people from Gmail by just starting with that as an easy transition… just giving out a different email with everything else staying the same.
Most websites don’t let you change the email? Just create a new account then.
You have to make some sacrifices to get away from having your entire identity online tied to Google. Be willing to have some downsides to get upsides.
I’m still transitioning to gmail from my hotmail accounts…
I know some still working on this with their AOL accounts…
Just change the email address for all your accounts where it’s possible to change it. In your GMail settings forward all incoming emails to your new email adress.
Currently in transition. I have about 300ish accounts to change the email handles but i set myself a goal of at least 10 a day, more if I feel like it. Its a journey not a race take your time. In the mean time though you should be backing up anything important off of your account if you havent already like contacts, photos, files and messages. That should help with your nerves, at least it did with me.
Some e-mail providers (like Proton for example) allow you to import your e-mails and contacts from gmail - that’s a start. You probably have all your passwords saved in browser/manager so you will know where to go to update them - unfortunately I don’t think there’s an automated way to do it, but it probably seems like more hassle than it actually is. I’d also search your mailbox for keywords like “welcome” or “account” to see if there are any other services you forgot you signed up for and haven’t saved the password in browser/manager.
After all is migrated and updated, you would probably want to delete your google account but I wouldn’t do that right away, just to give yourself some extra time in case you forgot about something. Log out of all google services and stop using them. Set a reminder for 1 year from now to delete the account.
did it years ago. created several new email addresses for different purposes with one main new personal one. I set up a forwarding to that main address from Google while I transitioned online accounts to the new email addresses. now I use Google only for YouTube and my phone but the Google mailbox is pretty much defunct, occasionally I get an email but that is still being forwarded to my new main one
what email client do you use? I bought a domain with the exact same goal in mind, but I’m kinda new to self hosting / homelabs stuff and everywhere I look makes self hosting email seem extremely complicated
I use my own domain email but then I use POP3 into Gmail so I can use their interface. I haven’t found an interface or software I like more yet.
Self hosting an email server paints a giant target on your back for hackers. It’s a huge pain in the ass to keep it secure.
Less of a leap and more of a careful crawl. Use nee email for new services, and deactivate old accounts if possible. I have yet to selfhost email, but for hosted options proton and tutanota are better than gmail for easily. The issue with selfhosting email is that it is easy to get blacklisted iirc.
make periodic backups of your gmail account content on your own computer(s) and setup auto responder on gmail to use a new email address; easy peasy
I moved from gmail. Best thing to do is use an email aliasing service like anonaddy, all my aliases forward to a Tutanota email, but if Tutanota decides to do something drastic, I’m able to change where each email address points to.
I do the same. If I want to move mail provider in the future, it’s just a case of updating the aliases to point to that new mailbox.
