To be fair it does take much more than $20 worth of effort to migrate all your stuff from gmail.
How much more I don't know since I've yet to do it, even though I've been paying for another email service for more than a year.
This reminds me to actually check how many emails I received over the past year that came via gmail. Off the top of my head I can only recall a single one, at least from a person I know and wanted to receive email from. I swiftly replied with my new address of course.
I'm going to stop forwarding now, and set up an auto-reply to give people a new address. Not my personal one, but an alias I'll set up in a minute, so that I can shut that down eventually too. Probably useless paranoia, but it floats my boat.
I don't regret the move one bit, and the whole process of setting up my account and moving all ten or so years worth of email from gmail to Fastmail was over and done within a week. Fastmail does what it says on the tin – it's very fast. It also pretty much never fails. In the past two or so years that I've had my account I have only experienced downtime once, for a few minutes. I made myself some coffee and then service was back again.
I am not affiliated with Fastmail in any way, shape or form – just a very happy customer.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, if you ask me.
This is why even an upgrade to GSuite is better, being governed by a different ToC.
Google's standard ToC says that their service:
1. may use tracking pixels, web beacons, browser fingerprinting, and/or device fingerprinting on users
2. may collect your device fingerprint
3. can use your content for all their existing and future services
4. can share your personal information with other parties
5. may stop providing services to you at any time, for any reason
6. keeps the rights on your content when you stop using it
And as we've seen, Google indeed does all of the above.
The second problem is one of lock-in. If you're using an email address that's not on your own domain, you're locked into Gmail and the cost of switching is higher, as can be seen by the people complaining about it. But that's a situation of making your bed and then sleeping in it.
And in the case of Chrome, we are already in a situation in which Google can crush its competition and impose whatever standard they want. It's the new IExplorer and the fact that it has an open source core doesn't matter that much when speaking of Google's lock-in on the market, because the Google-free forks are completely irrelevant.
I'm gonna stop you right there, because a ToC can only enforce certain provisions and companies can change their ToC anytime they want, as per their ToC. It also does not explicitly prohibit them from doing anything not on the ToC, just as it wouldn't prohibit a user from doing something not covered by the ToC. I guarantee you that Fastmail has this clause.[0]
> second problem is one of lock-in. If you're using an email address that's not on your own domain, you're locked into Gmail
That's irrelevant and a false equivalency. You can use Gmail with your own domain.
> in the case of Chrome, we are already in a situation in which Google can crush its competition and impose whatever standard they want.
Again, completely irrelevant to the question that I asked.
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/11/white-paper-clicks-bin...
At which point they tell you that they have changed their ToCs
> It also does not explicitly prohibit them from doing anything not on the ToC, just as it wouldn't prohibit a user from doing something not covered by the ToC.
Which is why you check the ToCs to ensure that main classes of poor behaviour that you want to avoid are included in there.
And after a malicious ToC change, the company can immediately act on the policy, meaning if you're even a few minutes late to the party, or if it takes more than a few minutes to completely scrub your data from the website (it does) then your data is now subject to the new ToC.
So the ToC offers no legal protection from data abuse. It's just a nice thought.
It may be possible in the US, but especially if it's not in the interest of the consumer and if there is a service fee involved, then you need to be notified about such changes in the EU and an online publication won't do. Service providers in my country send me SMS messages and postmail with pickup confirmation required. If they don't have proof that I received that notification, then the new contract does not apply, by law.
Also these contracts can't be applied retroactively. So your point is irrelevant to the issue at hand.
>> "It also does not explicitly prohibit them from doing anything not on the ToC"
Indeed, but the law does. Especially in the EU companies cannot use personally identifiable information without explicit consent. And now with the GDPR, they can't track or profile users without explicit consent either.
We'll see what will happen in the following years, but guess what, Google and Facebook are still doing the same shit, without asking for consent, because they consider that a sign-up is enough, since you've read and agreed to their terms and conditions ;-)
>> "You can use Gmail with your own domain."
I already said in my previous message, along with other messages here, that "even an upgrade to GSuite is better, being governed by a different ToC" and I don't like repeating myself.
Please make an effort to read, or we're going to simply talk past each other.
>> "Again, completely irrelevant to the question that I asked."
You mean the one where you asked about jumping from a frying pan and into the fire? I assumed it wasn't a question related to cooking.
Getting away from the convinient variant, for which I paid with my user data, to privacy oriented choices felt empowering.
I went with Posteo for email and calendar (EUR12/pa), went from mostly FF to all-in FFk (donated to Mozilla), from Google search to DDG and Qwant.
It's somewhat more effort. But it is worth it imv.
I am still on Android though. But I installed netguard, which reigns in Android somewhat. The only thing I struggle to find: A good alternative to the Google maps app (open street maps is decent for desktop).
On my phone I try to use OsmAnd on iOS, based on Open Street Map, see: https://osmand.net/ — my experience with this is mixed, where I live (in Bucharest Romania) it definitely has more info than GMaps on points of interest, however it's not as reliable for car navigation or public transit, so it's not as reliable for getting directions.
If you keep using Google Maps (I still do), at least disable the location tracking in your Google Account.
There is no alternative (that I was able to find) for the "browsing what's nearby" feature of maps. It allows you to pull up the app and just look around from where you are to find stores, restaurants, museums and whatnot. You can check opening times, reviews, see pictures, all from inside maps.
But, if you are looking for a GPS navigator alternative, there are plenty, and some are much better than maps, IMO. I personally use Sygic on Android, in the free version, and I've found it more accurate than maps in many occasions. It doesn't have the live updates on traffic like maps, but it will take you from point A to point B with a few metres accuracy. While maps sometimes just gets you to the other side of a building, and leaves it to you to figure out that the actual entrance is on the other side, and to reach it you have to drive around half a block, be careful with access restrictions, and go through a traffic light. Sygic just always gets me to the correct place, on the correct side of the buildings, and even signals parking areas nearby.
Locus/Locus Pro are good for looking at maps, it's nice having half the continent available offline. Depends a bit if OpenStreetMap works well in your area or not, and not much in the way of routing/POI as far as I know.
For public transport, there's transportr and Öffi and probably a bunch of specific ones for different regions - again, coverage depends on where you are.
I'm saying this, because you started with "to be fair...". As if this was a good explanation for the double-standard your parent poster mentioned. You can still fix it, even though it now takes more time than never having used Gmail at all. Complaining about "the effort" just reinforces the double-standard.
Use something like Fastmail. No hassle with setting up your own domain or email server (although you can use a custom domain) and they offer a tool to migrate your email from any IMAP server (and probably from Gmail as well).
Edit: added 2nd paragraph
Another point of view is that this is just the reality. Loads of people are on gmail, and migrating isn't always simple. Pretending it is doesn't make it so, and pointing out that one never should have done it in the first place is a moot point.
It's a sad world and we're a very geeky crowd.
Maintaining your own email server is crazy and not feasible unless you're passionate about email servers.
It's also a false dichotomy. Nobody with any experience and common sense suggests that you should install your own email server. Use FastMail, use Protonmail, use Office 365, heck, use Google's G Suite.
Most such services have import tools that work and the option to work with forwarded emails and external SMTP servers, so migration can be smooth.
Seeing software developers complaining about migration costs makes absolutely no sense.
Just yesterday I migrated a GSuite account to FastMail. I just changed the DNS records and imported the email via FastMail's import tool, which was automatic. And with a @gmail.com address you can just work with forwarding until everybody knows of your new address.
I migrated email addresses several times, including from my old @gmail.com address which now no longer exists. It wasn't a tragedy.
Sorry but I think this is FUD and it potentially discouraged people from taking steps to be part of the solution and not the problem.
I’ve run my own mail server for years on a $5/mo Linode VPS, and am not passionate about email servers. It was a little difficult to set up but no more difficult than a lot of weekend projects the smart people on this site undertake. It should not be scary. You can also make the switch gradually by first setting up your MX and forwarding to gmail if you want to take it slow. There’s no reason anyone with a moderate amount of Linux skills and patience can’t host their own Email.
I don't want other people to read them but I'm resigned to the fact that they are.
In that context I'm not all that concerned about Google scanning my email to serve me ads that I'm blocking anyway.
For example your entire online purchasing history is in your email. That is not information that should be public ;-)
Hindsight is 20/20 and the email landscape is different now than it was then. At the time I got my gmail (back when invites were still a thing) most options available to me were either ISP email or free web email, and gmail was one of the best. Not to mention, I was a lot younger and probably not in a position where paying for email made sense, and certainly not running my own.
For those of us that started many many years ago with gmail and kept it out of an inertia of convenience, now it is difficult to get everything switched off of it.
The difficult part isn't moving emails over. The difficult part is all the accounts and websites online I've signed up on with gmail that I need to switch the email address on. That's going to be a nightmare.
I had a Gmail in the month it was launched and I switched to my own domain (ironically, still in GSuite) in a process that took a few years. Whenever I login into a site with my old email, I would update it to the new one. My current email still connect to my old Gmail over POP3, but it’s mostly empty.
https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync
After cloning the repository and installing the listed dependencies (some Perl packages available in your Brew / Ubuntu repository already), you can do:
imapsync \
--host1 imap.old.com \
--user1 "old@email.com" \
--password1 xxxxxxxxxxxxx \
--ssl1 \
--host2 imap.new.com \
--user2 "new@email.com" \
--password2 yyyyyyyyyyyyy \
--ssl2 \
--errorsmax 1000000 \
--syncinternaldates \
--useheader 'Message-Id' \
--noreleasecheck \
--noexpunge \
--automap
But with FastMail, for those interested, the out of the box importing tools in their web interface work great, so no need for any command line tools.
It's a hugely flexible and versatile tool and it's quite zippy as well, can highly recommend.