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Comment by xab9 | Hacker News Reader

Question: how do you move away from gmail?

Phone providers in the last decade came up with number transfers (I can talk about Europe only), but how do I transfer my gmail.com address? I have hundreds of registrations tied to my gmail (been using it since it was available, more than a decade now), some are for my bank, others are for webshops, countrywide tax management system, ebay, amazon, healthcare, friends etc.

I read how people are not relying on gmail and running their own servers, but how do they do it? How do they cut loose the ties with their past?

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This is what I've done: sync your Gmail account with a regular mail client and backup the mail clients database so as not to lose any old emails.

Step two create new email address with dedicated email provider, one known to have good customer support.

Step three, stop giving out your Gmail address, and over time update your email address on all the services you use.

You can't take your @gmail.com address with you to a different provider, I think that would break the way the Internet works.

Another option is to get a personal domain where the dedicated email provider can support. If you own the domain to your email, you can switch providers more seamlessly, of course you gotta back up your emails through a third party client. Maybe a third party web client you can host yourself that stores your emails.

Maybe something like Mailpile:

https://www.mailpile.is/

Oh yeah, I should have mentioned I registered two domains. One is my firstnamelastname.com and the other is k45j.com so I use a364@k45j.com because it’s short and unambiguous to say over the phone.

This is mostly what I did but using a domain of my own. I made an email forwarder using my own domain and pointed it at my Gmail. Over 18 months I moved every account I came across over to it. So when I switched the forwarder to FastMail, most of my email transitioned immediately.

And since I used my own domain, I never have to go through this again. If I move from FastMail, I just change where the forwarder points again, all my mail already uses it.

You can have gmail forward everything to the new address.

You ‘just do it’.

Don’t host your own email server unless you want maintaining it as a hobby. Fastmail, Kolabnow (my nerd-deluxe choice; OpenPOWER CPUs, 100% Free Software and green energy, Swiss jurisdiction) etc. are great.

Buy a domain, gradually move accounts over when you use them at a desktop, it takes about 30 seconds. Or, even better, just let them die and set up a new one if you ever need it.

It’s not instant, but it’s very possible, and not even that difficult.

Start the transition by buying your own domain and starting to use it, notifying your correspondents. Run both for a while and once you are satisfied that only spam and stuff you don't care about still go to your gmail account stop using it (don't delete it, you don't want to risk it being re-allocated to someone else and that person accessing your recovery email on some forgotten service).

Once you own your own domain, you can move wherever you want whenever you want. The service you use is just a provider, no lock it other than the hassle.

>(don't delete it, you don't want to risk it being re-allocated to someone else and that person accessing your recovery email on some forgotten service).

Deleted email addresses on gmail and pretty much every online service are never reusable for exactly this reason,

Don't rely on it though. Yahoo made a large number of disused addresses available.

I really wouldn't count on that being the case. Even if it's the case now for a specific service I don't think they take as much care of those blacklists as they do of active accounts.

That's not really hard to do. Setup your email an a publicly accessible server. For all the services that you use until now, change your registered email address. That's PITA once, but after you are done you don't need to change it anymore. For friends, keep accepting emails through gmail but reply from your new address and the conversion will happen progressively.

I moved to the free version of protonmail. Having my gmail fw all emails to this account.

It was this or managing my own mail server. For now I’m happy with thier service and their privacy policy of course. But, it’s not gmail or even close to it feature wise.

Its actually quite easy to move. In your Gmail settings you can have everything forwarded to another email so when you set up your new one you wont lose any emails sent to your old address

I auto-forward all my @gmail emails to my @owndomain one. This removes manual checking of multiple accounts, at least.

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