Hacker News Reader

Comment by Trundle | Hacker News Reader

Holy shit. As someone whose first.last@gmail address is basically their online passport, I'm going to spend this evening doing what I can to spread things out and investigate alternatives to their assorted services that actually come with support.

If Google suddenly turned me off right now I don't really know what I'd do. Probably cry in the shower.

View on HN

1. Get your own domain and email address 2. Use mailgun to forward to gmail 3. Set Gmail from to your new mail 4. Slowly start changing your login/email everywhere you use Gmail 5. Make a proper backup of all your Gmail mail

In time, you will no longer depend on Gmail for the rest of your life and can just switch to, for example Fastmail, any time.

Doesn't Fastmail has similar terms of service, i.e, that they can terminate your account any time for any reason whatsoever. Source : https://www.fastmail.com/about/tos.html

This is the biggest reason I am hesitant to try fastmail.

Fast mail are generally good at support, so unlike google you're not dealing with a black hole when something needs to be fixed.

Yes, but their terms of service are absolutely preposterous (unjustified and unannounced termination at anytime).

Most mail providers can terminate users for any reason, but at least with a few days of notice, allowing you to move the data elsewhere.

This is why step 1. is important, along with step 6. have an automated backup of your mail, whatever the provider.

I'd like to do this, but 2 things are keeping me with gmail. The first is their spam filter. I find it works pretty damn well. I don't think a self-hosted solution would beat it.

But for me, the really killer solution is their 'important mail' filter. I'd love to find an alternative to gmail with a similarly well-functioning system.

"Important mail" just never worked correctly for me :/

Fastmail's spam filter is good† and customisable[0] (with niceties like score displayed right there[1]), to the extent that I just forward things from Gmail by wildcard-disabling the Gmail spam filter[2].

† the learning filter won't kick in until you make it learn 200 messages.

[0]: https://s3.postimg.org/v42zaper7/Screen_Shot_2017-08-23_at_1...

[1]: https://s3.postimg.org/ryidkhw4z/Screen_Shot_2017-08-23_at_1...

[2]: https://s3.postimg.org/lyumgubcj/Screen_Shot_2017-08-23_at_1...

You can add your own domain to Gmail if you use G Suite, the SME offering. It's $50/user/year, but in exchange, you get to turn off ads, and I think there's some support included.

Google can still terminate your account without notice, but if you're using your own domain, you'd at least be free to move to another service immediately.

Oh, and don't forget to get regular backups, so you don't have to start at zero in the case of an account termination.

if google suddenly decided to ban me from all its services it would suck

My main email is in gmail still,no more google searches (resorting to bing would suck), no googlemaps to help navigate, and youtube for content, etc

going to swap to proton mail later or just use my hosting provider on my domain to handle email. Plus local backups

Reply on news.ycombinator.com