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?
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.
So first off, not sure if you’re in a different country or something, but I live in the US, and basically every website, Government or not, has a way to easily change your email address.
I’ve run into one or two that I had to call to confirm, but still, it was pretty painless.
Second, gmail allows you to automatically forward your emails to a different email address. While you’re going through the process of changing your primary email on different websites, set up a universal forwarding rule on gmail to send all emails to your new address.
Third, for actually transitioning your emails, sit down and write a list out of all your services that are tied to your email starting with most critical first. This would be banking, auto bill payments for utilities, car payments, credit cards, phone/internet payments, investment logins, etc.
Basically, the sites that if you lost access to or couldn’t auto pay with, you would be screwed or at risk of late payments.
Getting all of those down should be pretty quick because there shouldn’t be that many unless you have a ton of different loans, banks, and investment portfollios.
Getting those taken care of will take your stress down significantly. Then move on to important, but not critical, this could be your streaming services, other subscriptions like news sites or newsletters, important apps or services you pay for.
Then tier three is everything else. Stuff that doesn’t really matter that much.
This is what I did and now I’m completely off Gmail/Outlook and onto Protonmail and love it.
Last thing to remember is to download anything in your email that might be important. Just force the rule to run through your whole inbox and it will forward all your old emails to your new address. This will likely take many hours to fully sync, but eventually all email records will be moved over to your new email address.
I just finished this as well with Proton and SimpleLogin. Tier 1 get my actual Proton address. Tier 2 gets an alias address. Tier 3 gets closed as needed or an alias address.
Start with one site at a time, and if a site/service doesn’t allow you to change your email without contacting them, make a note of it, and don’t worry about it for now. To begin with, focus on the sites that you can change yourself. This will give you a sense of making progress, perhaps faster than you might think.
I started switching off of gmail about 4 years ago and I’m still checking it periodically. Most of the messages I get to my gmail account these days are spam or mistaken emails due to people signing up for services and thinking that my email address is theirs (I have an early “first initial/last name” gmail address that I got in 2005). But every once in a while something legit will pop up and I make it a point to change the address.
I don’t know if I’ll ever actually close my gmail account or stop checking it, but at this point I’ve got 99%+ of the services I care about switched over to my new address, so if Google boots me, I won’t care.
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
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.
