this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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DeGoogle Yourself
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I have literally everything tied to gmail, no idea how to escape
if you switch to protonmail itll foward emails from your gmail to proton, then you can slowly move stuff over
You can probably (never used proton) set up a filter on the new address to mark or move stuff that was originally sent to gmail, too. Helps visualize the accounts you need to migrate/update.
It does that automatically
It's a slow process. Took me 2 and a half year to completely move away from Gmail. Worth it.
Why was it worth it? What benefits did you gain from the change?
I'm a simple man. Just knowing some entity is not munching my mail data is an enough reason for me.
That is quite simple. You're the only one to provide a coherent answer so far so thanks for that.
I'm looking for a bit more info though. Did you get any other benefits besides the equivalent of warm fuzzies? Sounds like an extremely outsized cost/benefit assessment you had to confirm.
Well, while that's the main reason, there are indeed some side benefits as well. I guess the first one that came to my mind is, I got rid of a lot of spams. Mostly because my Gmail address was in lots of breached websites. I also deleted any unnecessary accounts at variety of websites, because of these I haven't been in a breach scandal since 2019 (That's the year I finalized my transition to Tutanota). I use it on my government accounts, banking accounts and any other formal accounts, or the ones I trust. For the rest, I use email alias services and if I get a spam or even an annoying mail through that, I can just stop it there and I forget about them.
Also it's not just warm fuzzies. Privacy is a basic human right and it should stay that way on the internet as well. So it's nice to know to be freed of personalized ads hell, at least from the voluntarily part. Can't really do anything for the involuntarily part besides GDPR. Big corporations getting our personal data is not different from someone watching my house with a binoculars, same level of creepiness. I don't think any sane mind would be comfortable knowing this.
Since I've stop using gmail et reduce the need for a gmail account, Google don't force connexion btw my account and the ones of people I share a computer with. I'm done seeing someone else youtube history bc someone forget to log out of its drive account. By gone the times where my contacts would become mixed up with my friend's who checked its emails on my phone. My children profil are not considered my secondary accounts. I am not receiving notification of one Google product telling my I haven't give full permission to another Google profil anymore. I don't feel like I've take time to configurate my account but thé software disant change its behavior.
I'm no longer forced to use a software or a option I don't want because this other software anable it automatically and that it is almost impossible to turn it off once you've start to use it.
What service did you move to?
Not op but I moved to proton mail, tutanota seems good too
I went through my stored logins to migrate the vast majority of my accounts one by one (and deleted quite a few old and forgotten ones in the process). Took a couple of hours, but went mostly well.
For everything that I might have missed, I have gmail set up to forward everything to my new address. The new address (I went with posteo myself) has a filter that automatically moves stuff addressed to gmail to a separate folder. Whenever something ends up in there, I go and migrate or delete the account.