
Moving Away from Gmail - rolisz
https://rolisz.ro/2020/04/11/moving-away-from-gmail/
======
steelframe
I used to run my own mail server, and that very nearly cost me a career-
changing job at Microsoft. My reply to a hiring manager for a team I really
wanted to work on went into Microsoft's bit bucket because (I'm guessing)
their spam detectors didn't like my own domain and my own instance of Exim
sending out my emails. When a recruiter (thankfully) followed up and scheduled
me for on-site interviews, that manager mentioned that he never got a reply
when he emailed me. That was the point where I realized that email had gone
the way of fiefdoms, and if I wanted really important emails to make it
through, I'd need to choose which castle I wanted to handle my email.

~~~
tzs
Wait...your mail was a _reply_ to a mail they sent to you, and it went to the
bit bucket? Their spam handling is not sophisticated enough to special case
replies to mails that they have sent?

~~~
luckylion
Google does this as well - neither a history of emailing back and forth nor a
same-day reply will keep incoming email safe from being classified as spam if
it's being sent by an ordinary mail server.

Hell, Google even manages to classify emails as spam that are sent from one
address on a GSuite account to another address on the same account.

~~~
eitland
I think it is time we realize that Google in its current form is broken in
many ways.

This is just one example. Others include:

\- insisting on captchas,and not just one, even when I'm logged in with my >10
year old, paid for account with two-factor enabled

\- not being able to detect flag attacks against legitimate accounts (as seen
on the front page today)

\- killing reader, trying to force everyone to use a single identify, then at
the same time name their otherwise brilliant social network the same thing as
the hated identity solition

\- then killing said social network

\- not being able to even keep the quality on their flagship user facing
product (for us who knew it 10 and 15 years ago what we see today is a
mockery.)

I hope someone here can submit applications for next batch of YC:

\- like Google search in 2008. I'll happily turn off your adblocker for you
and be glad to see simple, relevant text ads. Or pay up to USD5 monthly if
thats better (more if necessary and if the quality is good enough, although at
some point I'd probably need to expense it.)

\- like Google+ but not owned by Google

\- like Google Reader but not owned by Google

And, probably also (unrelated to Google):

\- like stackoverflow but focused on answering questions, not playing
political and nitpicking games

\- like WhatsApp before they were acquired (and with a strong guarantee that
this new company will stay independent)

~~~
sakisv
Some possible alternatives you could try:

For search engine I'd suggest duckduckgo, it's far from perfect but I don't
see any other viable alternative, if anyone knows anything please let us know.

For messaging I would suggest Signal. The problem there is that most people
don't know of it and they won't ditch whatsapp to go on something that their
friends won't be on.

That's the same problem that a new social network is going to face. I think
it's safe to say that if even Google with all their capital couldn't make it
work, then it's going to be extremely difficult to find investors to bet on a
random guy's idea. Facebook with all the shit it has been and done has almost
2bn users, how are we going to convince even 5% of them to abandon it for
something new without anyone they know there?

~~~
eitland
Thanks! I mostly agree.

I already use duckduckgo. It is not as good as Google used to be but a lot
less annoying - and Google is not as good as it used to be either, so I
consider duckduckgo best now. Also trying with Google after duckduckgo is
faster than the other way around.

I already Signal but although more and more people join, nobody uses it for
day-to-day texts and family updates.

Everyone I know uses Telegram and even after following all discussions here
I'm fine with that.

> That's the same problem that a new social network is going to face. I think
> it's safe to say that if even Google with all their capital couldn't make it
> work, then it's going to be extremely difficult to find investors to bet on
> a random guy's idea.

Partly agree. But I think an Instagram or WhatsApp style bootstrapping of a
new social network is still possible and no one has stepped up to take the
plave of Google+.

Remember, it was Google that ran it. I suspect it was utterly mismanaged.

A number of things can work very well even if Google can't make it work.

~~~
degski
> Also trying with Google after duckduckgo is faster than the other way
> around.

And with the '!g'-bang you can still have privacy and use google.

~~~
Legogris
How would this yield better privacy than searching directly from Google?

------
masnick
I switched from Gmail to Fastmail back in 2013 [1] and haven't looked back.

Fastmail has continued to make significant improvements, while keeping the
interface lean and functional.

It seems to me like $3/month is worth it for a service as critical as email.

[1]:
[https://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/](https://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/)
and discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069944](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069944)

~~~
jw14
I agree $3/month is reasonable for email, but since the encryption backdoor
laws passed in Australia in Dec 2018, I've been avoiding Australian software.

~~~
octotoad
While the legislation introduced by the Australian government is certainly
worrying and should never had been enacted, I've always operated under the
assumption that if any government agency around the world really wants to get
to my encrypted data or traffic, they'll likely be able to use/abuse some sort
of loophole in their current processes and laws anyway.

~~~
pferde
Not if you are the only one holding the encryption keys to your content.

~~~
tehlike
Email cannot really be secure, the recipient also has the copy, so holding
encryption keys is meh?

~~~
anoncake
They can secure their email as well?

------
ocdtrekkie
I am very surprised a "one man show" was the author's final choice here: What
if the one man gets hit by a bus? FastMail is probably worth the increased
cost to avoid that concern alone.

But in general, I am excited to see anyone moving to their own email domain,
decentralized is how email was always supposed to be.

EDIT: A huge terms issue with PurelyMail is "The Company may, at its sole
discretion, terminate service without cause or notice." FastMail can terminate
for violations of the terms or non-payment, PurelyMail could terminate you
because Scott just doesn't like you anymore.

~~~
Felz
Hi! I am the "Scott" from Purelymail in question. In the hopefully unlikely
event I'm hit by a bus, I do have friends who could step in to keep it running
for a while. One of my infrastructural goals is also to have it run itself
without manual intervention, where feasible. It's not 100% there yet, though.
(Hence the beta.)

As to the terms of service, as far as I know the clause you quoted is fairly
standard cover-your-ass. I've probably seen it in a few other service terms.
Presumably, Fastmail words it as they do because they've covered all the
reasons they might want to do so in their terms already, and have decades of
legal experience.

~~~
alex_studer
Hey Scott, Purelymail looks like a really nice service! Out of curiosity: how
are you handling deliverability/avoiding spam filters? From my experience,
hosting my personal email, any messages I send almost always go to spam
(unless it's a direct reply to an email I've received). (I've set up SPF,
DKIM, DMARC, a PTR record, etc) Is it just a matter of building up enough
email volume?

~~~
Felz
I wrote a blog post on this a while back:

[https://news.purelymail.com/posts/blog/2019-06-21-deliverabi...](https://news.purelymail.com/posts/blog/2019-06-21-deliverability-
for-the-rest-of-us.html)

Unfortunately there aren't any easy answers. You'll have to be persistent.

------
nicoburns
> Another reason because of which I'm leaving GMail is because it's kinda
> slow. A full load with an empty cache takes about 20 seconds on my desktop
> (good specs, wired Internet connection). Loading a folder with 184 emails
> takes 2.5 seconds.

I don't understand how Gmail managed to get to this point. One of the original
selling points of Gmail was the snappy interface. And it's regressed
massively. And it's not like the interface is complicated.

~~~
tbodt
It's that slow because there's just so much JavaScript going on.

~~~
nicoburns
Indeed, but that's an engineering failure. I even think that Gmail makes sense
an SPA. It _should_ be JavaScript. They've just overcomplicated their
implementation.

------
rakoo
Unaffiliated, I found migadu
([https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html](https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html))
to be extremely easy to set up and having a nice ui to work with. Gives you
only the basics but that's all you need.

As they say, storage space is not an issue in the 21st century, so the only
differentiator between plans is the only thing that matters: the number of
outgoing emails. You can have as many domains, as many aliases and as many
addresses as you want, that's not a technical problem so there's no reason it
should be a financial distinction.

~~~
wheresvic3
I used migadu for a couple of years and they were great initially but over the
past 4-5 months, I've experienced really degraded service when accessing email
and setting tags, deleting etc.

Over the last month, I started getting login timeouts and that was the last
straw. Recently I noticed that they put up an announcement saying that they
are running at very high loads due to the COVID-19 situation. I'm not quite
sure how people working from home affects normal email (I guess people are
emailing a bit more?) but anyways once the announcement went away, I still
kept experiencing issues so I migrated my primary email over to fastmail.

~~~
ekovarski
They were shuffling services around and I think they had a notice in Feb on
their portal to the effect but, yeah, they definitely need to start using a
status page and twitter for updates; most customers just want a heads up and
be informed of what is happening.

Service is reliable, considering the cost, but communication isn't their forte
esp for an email company. :)

------
vrutberg
I have been on a similar journey to distance myself from Google and my Google
account for a little more than a year now. It's taken longer than I thought to
get to where I am now, and now I'm skeptical that I'll ever be completely
Google free. My steps so far have been:

1\. January 2019: Bought a domain name and registered for FastMail.

2\. Progressively over the following months: Every time I got an email sent to
my Gmail address, I'd either unregister for that service or change it to my
new FastMail powered email address.

3\. Early summer 2019: Logged out from my Google Account in Firefox, and
created a Firefox Container where I am logged into my Google account in case I
would need it

4\. Deleted Google Maps app from my phone

5\. Logged out from my Google account on the Gmail app on my phone

A few tips I can share:

* If you have this email address registered at FastMail: foo@bar.com, emails sent to x@foo.bar.com (where x can be anything) will be forwarded do foo@bar.com. I found this very useful when using it to sign up for various services.

* You can register as many aliases as you want in FastMail. For example I have my personal email address be firstname@domain.com. I also have inbox@domain.com registered as an alias, so if I sign up for some online service I can use service@inbox.domain.com as my email address.

The things that I've found hardest to migrate are:

* iMessage. I've used my Gmail address as the primary iMessage handle, so that's what people have been sending messages to. Not sure what'll happen if I remove it from my Apple ID.

* GitHub. I've used my Gmail address as my email address in Git for years. Removing the Gmail address from my profile in GitHub removes the connection between those commits and my profile. For now I have it as a secondary email address (or whatever it's called on GitHub) for this sake.

* YouTube. I want my viewing history, channel subscriptions, etc. Maybe I should create a new Google Account just for YouTube?

------
thanksforfish
> A full load with an empty cache takes about 20 seconds on my desktop

Looking at the typical Amazon concern that "longer load times cost millions in
sales" that you hear, it's crazy to think that gmail doesn't measure the
uncached load time (or they do and are happy with 20 seconds).

Anecdata: I mostly use my phone for email, so most of the time I load the
gmail web interface the cache is cold and it takes this long. It bothers me
the one a month I load it.

~~~
thekyle
I imagine the logic is that people usually keep Gmail open in a tab which
might be reloaded once per day. So people aren't likely to switch email
providers because of 20 seconds a day.

That said, I've found Gmail to be pretty sluggish even after loading, so I use
it via email clients with my other accounts.

~~~
kenhwang
My Gmail tab that I leave pinned regularly loses connection and stops
updating. It seems more and more these days Google things just break when you
don't use Chrome. Using Gmail with Firefox hasn't felt fast in a long while.

------
meagher
The sad thing like others have mentioned is that most people don’t own their
own email address. Their address is tied to the client.

Controlling the address is key to switching services and not being shut off
for ToS violations.

I wrote about it more here [https://meagher.co/own-your-
email/](https://meagher.co/own-your-email/)

~~~
svnpenn
You ditched Gmail for... Gsuite. Is this a joke?

~~~
meagher
The post is about “owning” your email address so you can move, not moving to a
new provider.

~~~
delsarto
As the recent changes to .org show, though, after a while the domain owns you
rather than the other way around!

I am trying to move away from gsuite. The thing with forwarding from there is
that it goes through spam there first, meaning you really have to check it (my
accountant screwed up their spf records recently, leading to a lot of
confusion). Using the account directly sucks, you have constant switching and
gsuite accounts can't do things like family sharing.

Forwarding services, even implementing srs still can't rewrite dkim, so you
get weird reply to addresses than again often trigger things ending up in
spam.

I think the best solution while keeping everything together in the Google
ecosystem (drive, docs, calendar, etc.) is probably an external provider you
do pop from to your standard Google account, then offlineimap style backup
Gmail somewhere else. Then you still have arbitrary delays in fetching!

Basically, everything is terrible.

~~~
ValentineC
> _The thing with forwarding from there is that it goes through spam there
> first, meaning you really have to check it (my accountant screwed up their
> spf records recently, leading to a lot of confusion)._

If you're on paid G Suite, you can tweak the Default routing setting [1] in
Google Admin to forward all emails to a different domain.

I believe this bypasses Gmail's spam filter (Google might reject some mail
during SMTP — I've never had a problem with mail delivery to Google though,
unlike to Hotmail).

[1]
[https://support.google.com/a/answer/2368153?hl=en](https://support.google.com/a/answer/2368153?hl=en)

------
vzaliva
email is such a critical part of my digital life that is stability and
convenience are the critical factors which can overweight some shortcomings in
features and UI.

So the additional arguments for staying with Gmail are: 1\. Stability. Google
as a company is not going anywhere. Can you say the same about smaller
companies? 2\. Backend infrastructure. Google has some serious backend managed
very professionally. I am pretty comfortable with my email data being safe
with them. 3\. Security. My guess is that the Google security team has more
people than the whole development team of Purelymail or even Fastmail. They
know how to resist attacks from state actors, massive DDOS, etc. 4\. Spam
filters. Having 1 billion active users Gmail has a unique ability to detect
spam. Smaller providers, no matter how good are their antispam algorithms are,
just do not have access to such amount of data.

That said, I share some of your concerns about Gmail and thinking about moving
to ProtonMail.

~~~
nullc
Considering the importance of email that you mention: What is your plan if
google suddenly bans your account?

Google might not go anywhere but your access to it might. And when their
automation directs them to ban an account, there is essentially no recourse--
they won't even respond to you.

~~~
vzaliva
any provider can ban your account. my recourse is to switch my domain. I do
not use @gmail.com address - I use my own domain with google mail.

~~~
remram
I considered doing that, but decided against it because domain names are
rented and not permanently yours. If I ever stop paying, make a mistake, or
pass away, anyone can grab it and password-recover their way in all my
accounts... I'm not sure if it's a good trade-off...

~~~
ValentineC
> _If I ever stop paying, make a mistake, or pass away, anyone can grab it and
> password-recover their way in all my accounts... I 'm not sure if it's a
> good trade-off..._

If you have the cash available to do so, the best practice is to renew your
domain for 10 years, and then add an extra year every year.

I'm surprised there aren't nonprofits that an individual can entrust a lump
sum payment to, to keep our domains renewed for tens or hundreds of years.

------
hysan
One problem that I wish all of these “Move Away from Gmail” articles would
address is how to update all of the websites you’ve already created accounts
on to your new email address. I’ve had my own email address for several years,
but I still keep the old gmail one around because I’ve found that _many_
websites do not allow you to change your email address. This makes it
problematic if you have a decades worth of accounts tied to gmail.

~~~
benhurmarcel
I just progressively went through all my accounts in my password manager, and
changed the email. I used my Gmail account to register to everything for more
than a decade, but since I also kept a complete list of all my accounts, it
wasn't an issue to change it one by one.

I still have my Gmail account, it just sits empty (in case). There's no need
to delete it.

------
wycy
Question for people who have emails at their own domain: what do you pick as
your email address? Do you typically use first@firstlast.com?
firstlast@firstlast.com? first@last.com? me@firstlast.com? Do you typically
use multiple accounts?

~~~
codethief
It took me a while to figure this out but I've now settled with the following:

\- mail@firstlast.tld for personal emails directed at me only and written by a
human being, i.e. emails that warrant my personal response

\- <SomeServiceIsignedUpfor>@firstlast.tld for automated emails from services
like Amazon, Facebook, eBay, HN, …. These are usually computer-generated
emails that don't warrant a response, so they are merely notifications.

The neat thing about this approach is that:

a) the list of email aliases contains all the services I've signed up for,
ever

b) I can easily stop a service from sending me emails by simply deleting the
alias. In particular, if an email address leaks to spammers, I simply delete
it.

c) I can distinguish between personal and non-personal email and can
prioritize accordingly. I look at my personal emails more often than at my
non-personal ones.

~~~
knr2345
Do you have a method for quickly creating new aliases on the fly?

My setup is nearly the same. I use two domains such as firstlast.tld and
genericwords.tld.

Genericwords.tld has umbrella aliases for social, apps, subscriptions, orders,
etc. I have rules setup up per umbrella alias to delete after 30 days, or
always mark as read, or never mark as read.

I originally had service/site specific aliases in mind for easy deletion, but
for my setup this creates a layer of friction that makes it quite cumbersome.

I considered umbrella+servicename aliases but those are not always guaranteed
to be accepted.

~~~
KitDuncan
Just use a catchall and you have to do nothing.

~~~
scintill76
You also get more spam, sent to sales@domain, john@domain, alex@domain...

~~~
KitDuncan
Never once got spam on an email I didn't give out.

------
osamagirl69
Purely mail does look like a very attractive mail host, filling an interesting
niche between the SMTP sever you get from your ISP (or someone like zoneout
from zoneedit, which is $1/month for up to 50 outgoing email per day) and a
full on webmail like fastmail.

Honestly for me the $50/year to fastmail to worry about worrying about my mail
is worth it, and their webmail/mobile clients are great if that is your thing.

Really the main thing here is to move your mail over to a custom domain, and
these guys really make that a lot cheaper. $15/year for the domain and another
$10/year for mail is absolutely worth it to remove your mail provider as a
single point of failure in your email.

PS - if you are looking for a good android mail client, I have had good luck
with K-9. It takes a bit of getting used to when migrating over from the built
in android mail, but if you stick with it and figure out how to configure it
correctly it works great. The main configuration changes I had to make were
putting a shortcut for 'move to archive' and getting android configured to let
it run in the background so notifications work correctly.

~~~
battery_cowboy
I love fastmail, I use them for my email and my DNS servers, it's so easy. I
understand some people want to run their own email, but ever since you have to
set up SPF records and all kinds of other shit, and you still rush Gmail black
holing your emails, I'd rather pay 50 bucks a year.

------
akssri
Gandi may also be an option here - a domain registered with them comes with
two free mailboxes, each with a few GBs of space and calendar support.

(Yes, yes, this is the same company that lost the data on their cloud
servers.)

~~~
robjan
They are missing 2FA which is a deal-breaker for many

~~~
benhurmarcel
And they don't support DKIM. That's my main complaint with them so far.

------
sneak
Keeping years and years of old emails on the server is a bad idea whilst
subjected to the third party doctrine, which holds that the government snoops
can access your emails without a warrant due to the fact that you do not have
a reasonable expectation of privacy if you are storing your emails on a hosted
server.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act)

How often do you need the mails from years ago? Archive them to a local
mailbox and include it in your normal backups.

~~~
rovr138
Sure, but backups would still be an issue and there's also a copy on the
sender outbox or recipient's inbox.

------
wwweston
Anyone know of a good alternative for Google Voice? This is the stickiest
service for me; there are lots of email options but it doesn't seem there's
many services that offer a phone alias with call forwarding and a full web
interface for not only voicemail but texting. Rolling my own through Twilio or
something seems like an option but then I'm back to paying per text message or
other event (I don't mind paying for a good service along these lines, but I'm
reluctant to get into a metered situation).

~~~
profsnuggles
The closest I've found is [https://jmp.chat/](https://jmp.chat/)

I'm waiting for voip.ms to enable mms support then I'll probably roll
something with asterisk. Although I saw [https://github.com/zoenb/mx-puppet-
voipms](https://github.com/zoenb/mx-puppet-voipms) the other day.

~~~
ossguy
Yeah, JMP supports picture messaging and short codes, so works for most SMS-
based 2FA. Group texting support will be completed in the next month or two,
which would give JMP feature-parity with Google Voice. And you can run your
own instance if you don't trust the one at
[https://jmp.chat/](https://jmp.chat/)

------
Razengan
I've been using iCloud email for more than a decade, no problems, and much
better privacy. It allows 3 aliases per account (that you can replace) without
exposing your primary address unlike Google's primary+alias suffix, so you can
have up to 4 addresses per account.

I also don't think they require you to give them your phone number.

------
simonjgreen
It really saddens me when I see topics like this and just doing it yourself
doesn't come up as an option.

Running a mail server is not difficult, and I firmly believe that
deliverability is quite solvable. This was basic sysadmin 101 about a decade
ago, one skill of many that's getting lost in the S/I/PaaS ecosystem.

~~~
fuzzy2
Running a (1) mail server is not enough. You need fault tolerance.

And then of course spam filtering, DKIM and whatnot, maybe a nice web
interface, ...

Running an SMTP server is easy. The rest? Not so much.

Rolling your own is great. However, it's not for most people and requires
constant monitoring and maintenance.

~~~
ozim
For personal mail?

I don't need fault tolerance if it is going to be down for 10 hours I don't
care. If I run it I am going to fix it anyway and retry registration process
for whatever I needed mail.

Spam filtering use 10minute mail or something for crap that you don't care.
Give your mail address to people and companies you actually want to deal with.
Better just keep some spam box on free provider where you sign up for crap.

I don't care about web interface I have multiple boxes anyway so I have to use
client app where I can see all stuff at once. (why people think you can have
only ONE "THE ONE" mail address for everything?)

DKIM and stuff does not matter if you send ONE EMAIL A MONTH or two. Mostly
what people do is that they receive stuff (registration mails for crap).

That said, if you send out bulk mail like in 1k a day you really need DKIM,
SPF, DMARC and stuff.

If you run company email server it might be better to do it with email
provider or get marketing to send mass mails with mailchimp or sendgrid.

When you want to run mail server for friends and family you are just being
silly and if there will be 10 hours downtime you would not care about... Guess
what your brother in law wanted to sign up for free month april on
por..ekhm...pluralsight and he is going to be mad at you (and you should not
tell that to your sister).

~~~
ValentineC
> _DKIM and stuff does not matter if you send ONE EMAIL A MONTH or two._

DKIM matters if you want to not have to tell people to check their spam box
whenever you correspond with them via email.

~~~
ozim
Yes if you send 1k mails a day, if you send 1 a day or 1 a week even google
will pass it through no problem.

I send all kinds of test stuff to my own gmail accounts and other providers.
Unless you send really a lot email or unless someone marks you as a spam it is
not an issue.

Blocking spammers is about rate limiting, if you are "nigerian prince" \- one
email a day - is not going to help you finding a person who wants to help you.
Ideally you would like to send emails to everyone at once to find that one
special person who wants to help you.

------
TrueDuality
I've been considering doing a similar thing but I'm in a different situation
with Gmail. I hopped on to their business domains when they were initially
released (and free) and I'm still grandfathered into their free plan.

I use the account as my primary Google account which includes purchased
Android apps, and I make pretty heavy use of that Google Drive with several
external organizations.

I'd like to move just my email away to my own hosting, but I'm worried Google
might do something sneaky when they realize my MX domains no longer point at
them.

I haven't herd of anyone attempting to migrate just their email from a Google
on a custom domain while trying to maintain the rest of their account and that
fear is the only thing keeping me on Google.

~~~
judge2020
In my experience (G Suite Basic) it doesn't do any MX record checks, I still
have a domain "active" that had its MX records removed (expired domain) almost
2 years ago.

~~~
TrueDuality
Niiiccceee. That does make me a bit more confident about it.

~~~
sdan
You can actually get a google account with any email (hosted on your own
platform, etc.)

------
emilburzo
> Technically, I could use GMail with my own domain, but only by signing up
> for a business GSuite account.

Actually it is possible to use your own domain with even a regular Gmail
account (although not straight-forward), and it works well -- I know because
that's how I have set it up.

Requirements: own domain with MX records pointing to your server(s) running
SMTP software

Receiving: SMTP server forwards to gmail account, SRS (Sender Rewriting
Scheme) takes care so SPF doesn't fail, DKIM just works.

Sending: you configure Gmail to use your SMTP server for sending.

Gmail side: add email alias and verify it, the "reply" function is even smart
enough to use the correct alias depending on the "TO"

Besides the bonus of "owning" your email while still using the goodies of
Gmail, having "catch-all", being able to easily migrate if shit hits the fan,
there were also some other things I didn't realize until doing this:

You can save a local copy of the emails on your server (nice extra backup).

You have access to email logs, if you are worried about reliability you can
just check it on-the-fly, you don't have to wait for the "email delivery
failed" notification.

~~~
PhilippGille
Wow I didn't know that! Do you know if there are more detailed tutorials for
this?

~~~
emilburzo
I guess it depends on how detailed you want it, but maybe Google's own help
page already helps?

[https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370)

------
rootsudo
Moving away from Gmail isn't that _hard_. It's on my list forever, but an
Subscription to O365 and an IMAP migration is both great because:

A: You're paying Microsoft for a service, and that has many more features than
gMail.

B: I believe Microsoft is more transparent than Google.

C: You remove the identity (IAM) part of Google from your Email and separate
yourself from Google's Ecosystem.

D: Finally doing an IMAP migration gives you an independent copy of all your
email to date. You can also download all your data from Google too, through
some obscure settings page.

Having your own domain. Enable SPF. Enable DMARC/DKIM if you dare. Enable hard
failure on SPF.

All that you need.

Running your own server is _HARD_ there are projects that make it easier like
mailinabox, but it is HARD and annoying work. If you ever want to see how
annoying it can be, load up shodan.io and just look up postfix CVE + postfix
version numbers.

Granted O365/Exchange is it's own thing and can become a headache, but there
is tons of support available and it's meant to be portable and easy to move
away from.

gMail is Google. Google is designed to trap you in forever. :(

~~~
SahAssar
> You can also download all your data from Google too, through some obscure
> settings page.

If anyone is looking for how to do this: google.com/takeout

Also IMAPsync works well for migrating email into another provider.

------
DeathArrow
I, too, want to switch from using Google services.

I find it hard. I have hundreds of website accounts, all registered through
Gmail. I don't even know all the websites I have accounts on. Switching all to
use another mail address, would be at least very tedious and would take a very
long time.

Also I have many contacts mailing me on my Gmail address. Making all those
people use another address would be hard.

I can redirect Gmail probably, but that would mean still using Gmail.

Also, using Google's services is very convenient. And the only other provider
which the same level of integration and which has e-mail, online docs,
calendar, storage is Microsoft. And you have to pay if you want to use docs.

Maybe I'll use different providers for different services, but I 'll lose the
integration.

And Google tries to make your life harder if you are not using Chrome and you
are not logged in into Google account. You' ll see lots of recaptchas
triggered if you use Firefox or Edge and you'll get the bot treatment if you
try to access next pages in Google search.

~~~
DavideNL
> Also I have many contacts mailing me on my Gmail address. Making all those
> people use another address would be hard.

What i did is, i automatically forwarded all incoming Gmail emails to my new
new@domain.com address. Then when someone sends me an e-mail to my old Gmail
account, i simply reply to it from my new new@domain.com. That way contacts
will gradually/eventually update me in their contact lists... it worked really
well.

> I have hundreds of website accounts, all registered through Gmail. I don't
> even know all the websites I have accounts on.

It doesn't matter, just keep using them and register all _new_ accounts with
your new e-mail address. You can slowly update your email address in old
accounts over time, Gmail will stay accessible anyway.

------
aorth
> _Ability to use multiple aliases. I want to have site_name@rolisz.ro,
> besides the main address I will give out, but still have everything come in
> to my main inbox._

It's not an alias, but you can effectively get this for free with any mail
provider by using a plus sign (+). For a really extreme (and awesome) example,
see:

[http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2002/08/24/email...](http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2002/08/24/email_addresses_with_a_are_valid.html)

He suggests using emails like:
aorth+news.ycombinator.com+2020-04-12@example.com. The benefits are that you
get a lightweight alias that you can filter on, but you also get a canary that
tells you which site sold your email address when you start getting spam to
it! :)

~~~
inapis
Sites have started being smart about it. I also now know of services which
won’t allow you to create an account if the string contains the service name
in it.

------
Daegalus
This is some good info, I personally still use GMail and used to use GSuite.
Migrating from GSuite -> Gmail was a nightmare in of itself, but I found a
service that helped me keep my custom domain emails and no longer feel like a
second class citizen. So even if someday Google decides to kill my Account, I
can just reroute my domain to a new service with not issue.

The service I used is ImprovMX. YOu just setup your DNS records, and they
handle your domain emails. Any number of aliases and redirects you need. Their
free tier is very generous with 10 domains, and I think 15-20 aliases per
domain. Super easy to get my family on there for our family domain and my
other custom domains.

I then made a new standard gmail account, migrated everything I could,
repurchased apps, and then just forwarded my email to the gmail account after
detaching it from GSuite. It was fairly painless on this front.

You can do email alias sending of emails with any provider, but ImprovMX has
SMTP services now that get rid of that pesky "on behalf of" label of your
emails. It is part of their Pro feature set, but that's just $9 a month for a
ton of features and peace of mind. Full DKIM support and the such.

You can even setup a custom domain as a login email for your GMail and most
other services, so you can login with it just like you would with GSuite.

Now I know this is a post about moving away from Google, but this could be a
stepping stone, because once you do all this. If i decided I want to use
Fastmail, PurelyMail, Outlook, Yahoo, or whatever the hell else I want. I can
just change the target email in ImprovMX and it goes to the right place. The
rest is all just import/export from gmail.

You can just GYOB to make detailed Maildir format backups of Gmail, and either
restore them into another gmail account, or find a way to import them into
your new service using similar tools.

Or just keep a local backup, use NotMuch or a NotMuch UI like Neit Viel to
search/lookup your old emails, and start fresh in your new place.

One little gotchya if you do this. Gmail saw the initial set of ImprovMX
emails as spam or fraud for a few emails as they would come from 1 email, but
had ImprovMX redirect info. SO be sure to double check spam folders for a a
few days for miscategorized emails. Once the spam blocker learns ImprovMX is
ok, it will start working as normal. (Thought I think ImprovMX improved
something on their end as I have even seen this particular thing happen in a
while.

~~~
crispinb
GYOB?

~~~
Daegalus
Sorry, I meant GYB: [https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-
back](https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back)

~~~
SahAssar
Why not use google.com/takeout to download it instead?

~~~
Daegalus
sorry for the late response, but reason is you can't do a restore with
takeout. I can backup from GSuite, and restore into consumer gmail. Its how I
did my migration. Or any other combination. It also backs up in Maildir
format, which is more compatible with more tools than in mbox format that
takeout gives us. So it's just a more versatile tool. You can always convert
mbox to maildir, there are tools like mb2md. but ive had issues where it
mangles HTML emails and images.

------
hanche
I'm a happy user of runbox myself. I learned about it here on HN, in fact.
Good security and privacy, reasonably priced, and a quite good webmail client
(I think – I haven't used it extensively). Of course, it helps that they're
based in Norway, where I live.

------
kh_hk
The only thing that makes sense is getting your own domain first. There after
you can look into email providers, but to avoid lock in, first you need your
own address, owned by you. Only by then, you can rent the email service into
it if you want, or run your own.

~~~
yokto
Then again, that's potentially an additional attack surface that you need to
be mindful of: [https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-
username-...](https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-
username-24eb09e026dd)

------
crispinb
Can anyone recommend tools for removing email duplicates? I have a mess of
archived email from different sources I intend one day to consolidate onto a
decent IMAP provider. Over the years I've done all kinds of forwarding from
one account to another, been in & out of gmail,etc. It's a bit of a mess, and
consolidation would result in me using much more storage than I need because
of dupes.

A trustworthy deduping tool (whether operating via IMAP, or on local maildirs)
would be useful. I've seen a couple around when I've searched in the past, but
would like a recommendation from experience before running something over some
gigs of archived mail.

~~~
virgoerns
I use mutt for that which modifies local maildir so it's super fast. Commands
are: "D~=$". Then it's just a matter of syncing local changes back e.g. with
mbsync.

~~~
crispinb
Thanks. I suppose I should take another look at mutt. When I have in the past
it's seemed a bit overwhelming with features & config. Does that command
remove dupes in a single folder or a hierarchy?

~~~
virgoerns
It works in a single folder only. It's actually a set of the following
commands:

    
    
      - D tells mutt to delete messages by pattern
      - ~= is pattern which selects all the dupes in current folder
      - $ finalizes the command
    

I think this [1] is where I learned about it and there's also a handy folder
hook for mutt which automatically removes duplicates when you open the folder.

[1]: [http://promberger.info/linux/2008/03/31/mutt-delete-
duplicat...](http://promberger.info/linux/2008/03/31/mutt-delete-duplicate-e-
mail-messages/)

~~~
crispinb
Thanks. Could prove useful.

------
thdrdt
Some weeks ago I decided to be brave and build my own mail server. With a
great tutorial [1] I was able to do this in a few hours and learned a ton
about email along the way. Because today it is possible to setup a lot of
features via DNS I got no problems with email being marked as spam.

But I can understand this is not for everyone. Personally I got some problems
with DNS misconfigurations and file access rights at first but got it working
perfectly after a day or two.

[1]
[https://workaround.org/ispmail/buster/](https://workaround.org/ispmail/buster/)

------
marie37
I moved away from gmail, as I started my own business, the webshop
[https://kaninbutikken.dk](https://kaninbutikken.dk) , to my own mail. So now
I both have a personal mail and a business email. However, I have some issues
with the fact that many of my mails from my new emails end in the spam filter.
I cannot figure out what I can do to make sure that my future mails doesn't
end in the spam filter. I didn't have this problem, when I used my gmail. Do
any of you guys have the same issues?

~~~
rootsudo
It's most likely not setting up your SPF record. Most email servers reject
email that do not contain an SPF DNS record.

Then there's also general reputation, and blocking non US TLD's.

It depends, you really need to have the other party check their email server
logs or do a mail trace to find out _WHY_ but then comes the chicken and egg -
how can you contact someone via email if their server is automatically purging
your communications.

------
wheresvic3
This post came at a very opportune time as I was having some issues recently
with my email provider and was looking for alternatives. I own my main email
address but I do have a few other domains which I would like to have mailboxes
for.

Anyways, after some consideration I went with fastmail for my primary email
but I will definitely check out purelymail for my other low-traffic domains!

Of course - this also led me into the rabbit hole of realizing that my email
is not backed up anywhere :)

------
timwis
I switched from Gmail to Fastmail a year ago and I really miss how Gmail
filtered things into primary/social/updates/forums. I feel overwhelmed with a
single inbox, and can’t possibly keep up with my own custom filters. The
result is I’m likely to miss something important. Does anyone have a solution
for this?

~~~
distances
Do you feel like you're getting something out of all those email updates? My
solution was to simply cut down the amount of incoming mail. Nowadays I
receive about three emails a day, with some days of zero emails in between.
Feels like a good number to me personally.

------
mzzter
I’ve had a great experience with Purelymail, though I haven’t figured out how
to complete the DKIM and DMARC setup.

When I was evaluating options for hosting an email address from my own domain,
two things sold me on Purelymail: \- special characters allowed in the name,
like "~" \- the pay-as-you-go pricing

~~~
crispinb
I set up a account and was considering it for an intended email consolidation.
But Roundcube is hopeless - keyboard shortcuts are a 'planned' feature. That
makes Roundcube a pre-alpha product in my view.

------
soufron
This really seems like a bad solution to me.

Any domain name provider will allow you to create personalized mail addresses
for a total cost of around 10$/y.

Then -> imap -> Thunderbird.

And you're set for life with a nearly unlimited set of features.

It's easy to backup.

It can sync between different computers and mobile phones.

I don't get why he would chose something else.

~~~
abdabab
Does that setup allow you to check mails from multiple computers and phones?

~~~
KitDuncan
Of course. You can setup your IMAP mailbox on any device. You can even use
your Gmail or Apple Mail Apps to set it up on your phone.

------
wildduck
If you know nodejs pretty well, try
[https://wildduck.email](https://wildduck.email)

Unaffiliated BTW. Just find that their storage saves space compare to Maildir
and pretty scalable compare postfix. It also allows unicode email addresses.

------
iliaznk
I'd recommend at least getting your own email domain so you are still able to
use Gmail's interface, but could easily switch to something else if necessary.
That's what I did with Pobox – reliable and affordable solution for that (and
even more).

------
javagram
It seems like G Suite meets all the requirements listed on the blog post, but
is not discussed. G Suite or Office 365 also work well as personal email
providers - they fulfill all the requirements mentioned such as a custom
domain, text search, and IMAP access.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The author talks about the risks of single point of failure being Google/a
Google account, and their lengthy and regularly amended Terms of Service. This
would arguably be true of Office 365 as well.

~~~
qwertox
Keep in mind that in G-Suite you can also enable email routing which will
enable you to create full backups of emails

[https://support.google.com/a/answer/6297084?hl=en](https://support.google.com/a/answer/6297084?hl=en)

> These options include rejecting, quarantining, or delivering email with
> modifications. For example, you can route mail to Gmail and an external
> server or set policies that vary by organizational unit.

That way Gmail becomes a single point of failure like any other service; you
will only lose the mail which didn't arrive during the outage, which will then
usually be resent at a later time. But you wouldn't care that much if they
lock you out, since you then can change the MX records to point to the
external server.

------
jbullock35
From the article: "One thing that I miss is the fact that in GMail folders are
actually labels and you can have multiple labels for an email."

Which competing services (apart from Outlook) offer Gmail-like labeling for
individual messages?

------
vinni2
I switched to posteo in 2015 and never looked back!
[https://posteo.de/en](https://posteo.de/en)

~~~
chappi42
They don't support custom domains
([https://posteo.de/en/site/faq](https://posteo.de/en/site/faq)).

~~~
vinni2
I never claimed that they support custom domain. Thanks for the down vote.

------
marban
Has anyone opted for Yahoo Business Mail recently? Pricing looks very
competitive; Just not sure how great their spam filter is compared to Google.

------
mattkevan
Been using Soverin after switching from Gmail a few years ago - really happy
with the service. Only €40/year for 25gb storage.

www.soverin.net

------
dehrmann
> it's a single point of failure

If Google blocked your Recaptchas, deleted your Gmail account, and disabled
you Android phone...wow.

~~~
downerending
I've lost one of my (two) Gmail accounts. Attempting to get it back was an
existential exercise in looking into the maw of nothingness. Kind of like that
thing from _The Fifth Element_ or something. Even know a ranking insider,
but... _nothing_.

Relying on any company for more than one divisible service in 2020 is
_insane_. Use Google for search? _Don 't use them for anything else._

There are lots of little guys out there doing great stuff. Put a few bucks in
their direction. Shutouts are fascist.

------
prescojan
I'm using fastmail for few months. Only when I switched I understood that
leaving google product is not that scary

------
twodayslate
Is there any mail client that has priority inbox like support? That's one
reason I still use gmail/g-suite

------
FpUser
I was never "in". Had my email for ages. I do not trust Google and the likes
to handle my email

------
foobarbecue
I've been using MailInaBox on a Droplet for a decade or so now and it's been
great.

------
paulcarroty
Use riseup.net last 5 years, great services(), but heavily relies from
donations.

------
longtermd
I moved to SuperHuman (SH) quite a while ago and really love it!

------
trengrj
I'm really looking forward to what DHH can do with
[https://hey.com/](https://hey.com/). My aim with an email provider is that I
trust it. A non-bootstrapped company with a founder outspoken against privacy
issues seems a good place to try.

~~~
ekovarski
Hey sounds promising but out of the gate it sounds like it will be missing a
lot of features I need, eg

no migration path, you start with a clean slate web based only, no imap access
(not sure of smtp) no custom domains on day 1

Maybe this will change as they delayed the launch due to covid-19 but right
now it's something I, and I assume many others, will watch from afar as its
missing crucial elements.

------
megido
Pure mail, but registration is such a nightmare

------
blntechie
Atlassianis launching an email service(Hey) later this year and I have kind of
pinned my hopes on it to replace gmail.

~~~
williw
Isn't Hey.com a Basecamp product?

~~~
1f60c
It is.

------
lma22
I've been considering moving to Outlook. Can anyone share their take on
Outlook?

