Been using a different mail provider for 5 years. Just the other month google deleted my gmail account (had it set up to delete after a year of no-login)
It is quite easy to migrate:
1. get a new mail account
2. forward everything from your gmail account
3. sort everything GMail into a separate folder in your new account
4. slowly change email addresses in accounts and let people know your new address.
I think after a year I had 99% of accounts migrated, and can only remember one or two that I moved after that.
It’s a good way to declutter accounts as well and was made a bit easier because I use a password manager.
Also with private emails, if someone contacts me after 5 years, they likely know someone I know and can get my contact Info via them or social media.
Take the opportunity to migrate to a domain you own, because then you are provider independent.
I went the extra mile and create a random, unique email address for every single service I sign up for, so I know precisely who sells my data to spammers if I ever get any. All the unique addresses redirect to a central one for ease of access.
Often do that as well, but then: What’s the point. Company X leaked my mail, so what? Not much that one can do about it. Now I often group services, e.g. car rentals with car@ and food delivery services with pizza@
It’s awesome for filtering and sorting emails though.
You can sometimes remedy the problem. I went through a few aliases with Amazon, and finally found the secret option to keep my email private. (By default, they post it on reviews or something stupid.)
It's especially good for apartment searches and job hunting. Companies that try to link buyer and seller are naturally spammy, so you create a new one for each contact. Then when you find one, you delete the others.
It's also makes it dead easy to filter all that information into folders, so you have a neat record of all your interactions with the various companies you're dealing with.
Most importantly: once you find a job / landlord / whatever, you really want a reliable line of communication. This way, your address with them never changes, but all the spam goes into the bit bucket.
If company X leaks your email, close your account with them and block the address.
Also, it's useful for have i been pwned. One of my few accounts which uses a grouped address is in today's data dump, and it wasn't clear what account it was, because of the grouping.
I've been doing that through sneakemail.com, but it's a forwarding service and the domains they use routinely get put on lists that claim they're a temporary email service. Then you can't use them to sign up on some sites.
Still, it mostly works. I've got 383 aliases, plus 93 disabled aliases.
Most email providers will let you create aliases, but aliases are an upsell for business plans. Tutanota lets you get more aliases, but they charge you, not kidding, 5 euros a month for 100 aliases. 10 GB of extra storage costs 2.5 euros.
Some of them advertise using address+alias@domain, but that's basically useless.
Fastmail is pretty decent with 600 aliases. That's a definite maybe.
The only one I've found with unlimited aliases is TheXYZ, and they've been around a while.
I did pretty much a similar thing years ago, but went self-hosted. It took a year or so including the transition phase.
1. Set up incoming E-mail forwarding from mydomain.org to Gmail. Exim will do this, probably all popular mail packages support forwarding well.
2. Start sending E-mail (from Gmail's interface) as me@mydomain.org, and tell your friends to use that one.
2.5. (optional) Get your local mail client to work with Gmail's IMAP and SMTP.
3. Take a deep breath and change that MX record.
4. Block out one or two evenings, pour yourself some Scotch, and go through each and every online account you have, changing your E-mail address. A password manager helps with this because it's also the definitive list of every online account you have. While you're at it, you might want to use me+company@mydomain.com so you can tell which E-mails come from which company, and know who is selling your E-mail address around.
5. Wait until people switch over and the vast majority of your E-mail is going to me@mydomain.org instead of your Gmail address. For me this took a year or so.
6. In the mean time set up locally hosted E-mail at mydomain.org. In my case I use exim4+dovecot+spamassassin. Don't forget to set up SPF and DKIM correctly.
7. Pick a time in your life when you don't expect to be getting urgent or important E-mail, like you're not buying a house or applying for jobs. Take a deep breath, and apply the exim config that changes you from forwarding to self-hosting.
8. Ask all your friends to send you some test E-mails, preferably from different providers. Make sure you can at least deliver mail from gmail, yahoo, comcast, verizon, etc. Send mails to them and make sure they're being delivered.
9. Assuming no problems in 7, pat yourself on the back for being part of the solution rather than the problem.
10. Periodically keep your eye out for trouble. Audit your logs every so often to make sure you're not having trouble sending or receiving. I had to change my IPv6 at one point because comcast decided mine belonged to a spammer, but other than that it's been smooth sailing.
11. Decide whether or not to keep your Gmail account. I kept mine, but it pretty much only gets spam now. Maybe once or twice a year I get a legit one there from someone I forgot to tell I changed my address. I keep an eye on my Gmail to find out when there are hot singles in my area or that there's a new sure fire diet pill that sheds fat instantly.
I tried self hosting. And even with SPF and DKIM set up correctly my e-mails to Outlook.com (and assocciated other domains) was just dropped. It didn't go to the spam folder, it was just silently dropped. At the time I heard that this was essentially expected behavior for an IP without a good enough trust record. This even happened when I replied to mail sent from an Outlook.com account. Having my e-mail randomly not reach its intended recipient was and is still unacceptable to me, so I bit the bullet and paid for hosting on my own domain. And while I'm still not happy about paying for hosting that I have sufficient capacity for on my own servers, I have otherwise been happy with it "just working".
If there’s one thing I want an antitrust investigation to focus on, it’s the gradual monopoly that Google/Microsoft/etc have inadvertently built over “clean” IP addresses. It’s now practically impossible for independents and small businesses to run their own mail servers.
I’m not blaming Google/etc for it, but it is a situation that requires a fix.
Might I ask what password manager you use? And what do you do when you need to access websites from a machine that isn't yours? Also, did you consider the single-point-of-failure argument? I would like to know your opinion on that.
If I need to access accounts from a different machine I use termux and manually type it in.
I'm not worried about it being a single point of failure (Data loss wise), as I have the password store backed up in multiple places. Security wise, I'm trading out my brain as a single point of failure for pass being a single point of failure. I trust pass more.
Not OP. I’ve been using 1Password for about 13 years now. I have the app on my phone and I can view the password and type it manually in a machine I don’t own. It’s inconvenient but it works.
Used lastpass back then, now Enpass with sync across devices (tablet, phone, PC). Regular backups of the Enpass file into a folder that is synced to my NAS.
Wanted to look into other password managers, preferably open source, but at the time Enpass had the best syncing options combined with a good enough user interface that’s suitable for less tech folks.
Edit: I mainly use all the things on my devices, and don’t try to use things from untrusted devices. The only use cases with untrusted are:
- copy shop -> Sending the file via share drop
- PC of a Family member -> manually typing password from phone.
It is quite easy to migrate:
1. get a new mail account 2. forward everything from your gmail account 3. sort everything GMail into a separate folder in your new account 4. slowly change email addresses in accounts and let people know your new address.
I think after a year I had 99% of accounts migrated, and can only remember one or two that I moved after that.
It’s a good way to declutter accounts as well and was made a bit easier because I use a password manager.
Also with private emails, if someone contacts me after 5 years, they likely know someone I know and can get my contact Info via them or social media.
Take the opportunity to migrate to a domain you own, because then you are provider independent.