finally migrated away from gmail
Migrating away from Gmail is not easy, and this blog post isn't going to glamorize how I enjoyed doing it. It's freaking time-consuming and was a miserable experience overall. I was just reading Ava's defeatism antidote post about people detoxing from big Web services and admitting defeat before actually making an honest attempt. But to be perfectly honest, migrating away from Gmail really did feel like a herculean effort, and I wouldn't blame a person if they never worked up the motivation to do it.
First, there's so many options out there now, that when I asked around online about which to choose, I was absolutely crushed by the amount of suggestions. There's ProtonMail, Mailbox.org, Migadu, Atomic Mail, Tuta Mail, Fast Mail...you get the point. Decision paralysis is a real probability here, so my advice would be to come up with a list of needs, find a email provider that satisfies that list, and pull the trigger. Don't think too much about whether you made the right choice.
Secondly, updating your email across all your different online accounts is a MASSIVE task. It was easier for me, since I use a password manager, so I already had a master list of all my online identities. All I needed to do was go through that list, and one-by-one update the email address tied to the account. If I didn't have a password manager, I would probably still be playing wack-a-mole, trying to find all the accounts I still need to update. My advice here is use a password manager ASAP, and start adding all your logins to it, so you have a complete list before changing emails.
Anyway, my new email provider is Startmail, a company that's based in the Netherlands, along with their servers. They checked all the boxes for me:
- An email service that doesn't offer a free tier
- because I feel like a company is less-likely to sell your data if they don't offer their services for free
- An email service that lets me bring my own domain name
- because if I need to change email providers again, I won't have to update my login credentials across the Internet
- An email service that allows me to send email via my own code
- because I send out email verifications to new users who register on my forum, basement community.
Even though changing emails is indeed an insane amount of monotonous, grindy work, it's worth it. Hiding your personal information from AI models scraping the Internet is a challenge to combat, and while Google may not be training their Gemini product on your emails right now, there's no guarentee that won't happen in the future. Maybe Google doesn't actually delete your data or emails from their servers when you click the "delete" button. So maybe that existing data is a lost cause, and it's going to be harvested and sold or used to train AI. Regardless though, I still think you should want to prevent future emails from ending up on their servers.
Let me level with you: I think there's a massive security scandal waiting to happen with some of these AI products. Most software developers working in the industry are average at best, and if you trust these people to not accidentally implement some code that leaks your emails to their own AI models, you have more faith in these employees than I do. The Crowdstrike incident should be enough to convince you that software developers are not incapable of making critical errors.
Just do it. Pick another email provider - your future self will thank you.
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