Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

Anyway I wrote the details in the post.

Edit: I have to mention that I generated my PGP keys locally and then imported to Mailbox.Org

Renewing your domain, keeping your registrar account safe, keeping your DNS records safe etc

Some people prefer a domain registrar that allows 10 year renewals so pick carefully as not all do

Maybe I need to buy a domain that sounds like a generic email host.

For me and my partner was enough when Google started collecting info about purchases/delivery orders on gmail and dumping it in some separated page without any consent nor notification.

We moved to Proton but once they changed branding and starting introducing additional services beside mailbox we knew they enter milking-out path. Their newest AI plaything was reason to leave.

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 public switched telephone network (PSTN), then there is the Defense Switched Network (DSN)

When I finally changed, it was a lot easier than I thought. I just gradually migrated my accounts everywhere. I still have my old Gmail address, but I almost don't use it anymore.

Also (but I didn't try), couldn't you setup your own domain with Gmail? So that you still have everything in Gmail while you migrate all your accounts... but honestly for me it was really fine to deal with two email addresses for a while.

It’s even easier if you list out the most important senders in a checklist and move those first. But give yourself at least a few months time. It’s certainly possible.

Once you have your own domain, future migrations to another email provider would be a matter of moving the emails and updating DNS.

- set up new email address, hosted where you like

- https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10957?hl=en (forward your email)

- update your email address as many places as you can

As much as I don't necessarily like it, I think we have to put a price on our privacy and personal data. And for me, paying for the Proton family plan seems like a good trade-off, at least for now. So far, I haven't got any emails to bounce when using the @pm.me or @proton.me email addresses, except once (I forgot which web site).

They found a deal that seems to be ok for them. To get them to change providers, you need to suggest one that would be a better value, and to be honest, I don't think you can find one.

Running an online forum, I've encountered people using Atomic Mail, and that service has terrible reliability.

I'd say it's better (maybe gmail has features it doesn't, but fastmail does everything I need and loads much much faster than gmail)

Tech support forwarded an inquiry I was asking about an IMAP command in my MUA which led to an actual engineer that said my MUA was using an outdated/deprecated part of the IMAP protocol and provided the RFC for the new way of doing things, which then lead to a patch in said MUA. Very few companies offer this calibre of support, the only other one I can think of is Tarsnap.

(2) it is the best UI I've seen outside gmail

I think it's a much better UI overall than gmail; at least I found with gmail you had to manually paginate things, I can easily do a search in FM that might have 10000 emails over 20 years and I can usually jump to a specific month/year very quickly via scroll and then from there a specific day.

(5) Instead of inbox 0, I practice inbox 50k and it handles it fine.

Similar, 37k in my Inbox, nay issue. I have probably 200k overall across different folders. But I know I'm outsourcing a service, so I do full infrequent backups via IMAP.

Here's my (7):

Fastmail has the only web interface I've come across that handles (catch-all) aliases correctly and knows how to respond with the correct one every single time. Maybe roundcube/squirrelmail can do this, but roundcube/squirrelmail overall is not very good.

I was fortunate enough that my solution was to host my own mail server 20+ years ago and create a separate email address per relationship with a company, so I can tell the moment some 3rd party has been comprimised when I receive spam on a specific address. My personal spam has been minimal over time.

If for example moc.elgoog@mydomain.com gets spam - I know they're compromised or have sold me out.

Yes gmail has had something similar using the + character, but most people don't know about/make use of this and still abdicate spam filtering to things they don't understand like bayesian algorithms which suffer from false positives. (Have you checked your spam folder for our very important message...?)

Email has never been secure and despite modern updates, I still don't consider it as such. Then again I don't have much to worry about, so I'm ambivalent most of the time. That said, special 'fuck you' shoutouts to Ticketek for being compromised and their general ineptitude and shitfuckery in so many ways... It took them 2 months to respond to an issue I raised with them only to ask whether it was still an issue... (yes, it still is).

Unfortunately I don't know if you could easily manage to convince majority email providers you're legitimite with a new domain in this day and age - I suspect its now a major hurdle to overcome as I've read often enough of mail bouncing because "we've never heard of you until now, so we don't trust you" - which makes communicating with the majority of the world via email almost impossible to build up the trust level you're considered legitimite and that's despite all this extra DMARC, DKIM, and SPF and SSL/TLS supposed safeguards which have appeared over time and I've had to comply with.

Security as an afterthought means its still probably never going to be secure. I've always considered email the equivalent of transmitting plaintext and have always treated it as such. This has led to some pretty difficult situations where I don't email important stuff to a 3rd party just because they expect it and everyone else does it.

It is a problem with Gmail, because they're helping themselves into your email, as was explained by the author in the sentence immediately after the one you quoted:

> Technically, Google can store every message you receive and know everything, and U.S. agencies can request access to that data

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.

https://www.magicearth.com/ works well for car navigation with OSM data, and https://cycle.travel/ is the best way to navigate on a bike, also with OSM data.

In which country do you live, if I might ask?

Apple's software and services (sync, drive, photo backup etc) are so inferior, especially compared with Google's (technically speaking), you'd be anyway forced to use third party (often cross platform) solutions. No risk of going deep into Apple's ecosystem ;-)

I did the exact same thing with Immich (what a great software, by the way!).

And in case it helps:

Instead of always relying on google maps, I now mostly use CoMaps (https://www.comaps.app/). Way better than using directly OpenStreetMap. And for my Pixel 7, I switched to LineageOS with gapps (https://lineageos.org/) and I'm not missing anything and am very happy with it.

Also, I'm trying now Nextcloud (https://nextcloud.com/), with a setup similar to Immich, and now I do believe there is life beyond google, and it's a better life.