how practical is it to drop GMail for these guys? I'm tied fairly heavily to the Google ecosystem (Chome, Play, Finance, etc etc). They already have a mountain of data on me, but I really want to start taking encryption and privacy more seriously.
I mainly use IMAP via Mail.app on my laptop and phone, Pantheon Mail (formerly Geary) on my desktop. I use PGP wherever I can. I haven't received any spam at all yet, so I can't comment on how their spam filters compare to Gmail. I maintain a zero inbox – important stuff gets archived, and everything else is deleted. This means that I don't miss Gmail's search feature as hardly keep any emails. Obviously your mileage may vary here. They also support CalDAV and CardDAV – so all of my notes, contacts, calendar items etc. are synced across my devices.
I've moved from Google completely, and for the most part, I don't really miss them all that much.
- Search -> DuckDuckGo (I do miss Google here – DDG's search results pale in comparison)
- Gmail -> Fastmail
- Maps -> Citymapper and Apple Maps
- Chrome -> Safari on macOS, Firefox on everything else (my experience with FF is a bit 'meh' – it was incredibly laggy on my work laptop, but runs great on my desktop)
Google does derive real revenue from me, but not so much via their advertising business.
Edit: FastMail is a very good email service, BTW.
I found the tool to be fast, comprehensive, and the partial migration was very effective.
One the search front, I've been finding https://www.startpage.com/ to be a really nice alternative to DDG.
I receive more spam in my inbox than in Google Mail (I used Google Apps), but it's not extreme. Typically two or three spam mails per week.
Of course, you get a lot back. As you say, I better web interface and standards-conforming IMAP.
Honestly, DDG surpassed google search years ago. I've preferred Firefox for a long time, and Fastmail's UI and service is incredibly superior to GMail. I guess the cost might be the only downside.
While I use Fastmail with my own domain, it is not self-hosted. My MX records point to Fastmail's servers.
I've been tempted to add the support in myself, however I do not have any experience with the elementary codebase or Vala, so a cryptographic system would be a very poor choice for a first project!
One could probably automate a browser to log in, iterate mailbox and dump contents, but that certainly won't be fun.
(Also, no way to use your own pre-existing key, only somehow generating a new one somewhere - not sure how exactly it's implemented and whenever I can trust it all...)
In general, I should say I am pretty happy with protonmail. I've been using it for over a year now, however, in general I'm still pretty dependent on google for calendar, android, etc.
When it comes to spam, my feeling is that I do get more now. But as long as it is properly categorized -- which it is -- I don't really mind getting it.
> I suppose org-agenda could substitute but the way Inbox organizes all my travel is worth the fact that Google knows i'm flying to London.
Well.. at some point you have to choose something over the other.
https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/transitioning-...
What may give you a push is that Google seems to be trying to make Gmail a more proprietary and less of an interoperable standardized email service. Eventually it may not be as easy to get out of that "lock-in" as it is now (even though it seems hard, but it's mostly a matter of habit and will to change to a new service).
I've realized that I don't really care about Google having access to my transactional mail (things knowable from third parties anyways), but do want personal communications properly encrypted. Basically, I've only moved over my "priority inbox," and keep using Gmail for junk.
Very satisfied with Protonmail though. Especially knowing they are working on fixing their lock-in issues.