Been running gmail and proton side by side for over a year, slowly moving all accounts and redirecting contacts to my proton address. Really suggest getting a custom domain so moving providers is as easy as changing MX records in the future.
However - the local bridge has been crashing over the last several days for unknown reasons.
And, there are many sites which will not recognize @protonmail addresses as valid when signing up.
I am in the process of weaning off gmail completely - but expect it to take a lot longer than expected.
Ive already given up chrome completely on desktop - and run brave and ff.
I wish there were a way to just delete my entire online presence and start a new one.
I've emailed my contacts informing of the switch, and I'm passively migrating important accounts/services; in fact, this forced me to consider which services are actually important and worth receiving e-mail from. If I go a couple of months without getting e-mails from some service and nothing bad comes from it, then I probably won't ever read it anyway and it's not important.
As soon as their mobile app is better, I'll likely switch to their paid service, although a private calendar and a corresponding quality app would make the 5€/month seem like better value for money.
Register a domain (e.g. something23423.de for 15USD/year) and use that as your primary email address (e.g., name@something23423.de), then connect it to any provider you wish underneath via editing the MX records at the registrar. Many email providers support this and have instructions [1,2,3].
You can have Gmail then forward all emails to your new address, and then each email that arrives from Gmail, you know needs updating to the new address.
You do not need to change your email address when switching providers.
[1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains.html
[2] https://kb.mailbox.org/display/BMBOKBEN/Using+e-mail+address...
[3] https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/set-up-a-custo...
In your case deeper problem is that so much of you digital life depends on a single point of failure - your Gmail account and it can go in a blink of an eye.
Trick for a switch is to do one a time. Next time you visit a site, go to setting and set email to your new provider, like timpy+nytimes@protonmail.com or whatever.
Also can advise you password manager, like 1Password, that will make switch and maintenance much easier.
That said, Russia banning Proton Mail is one hell of an endorsement for Proton Mail, in my estimation. I want to believe in the dream of ubiquitous end-to-end encrypted email. I don’t know if Proton is the right manifestation of that, but it certainly doesn’t hurt in terms of keeping the dream alive. So, I wouldn’t want to wave anyone off Proton, even though Fastmail is a great service.
I think the major problem with any PGP Mail system is that nobody else uses it. I have a semi-technical friend who, for ideological reasons, decided to switch to Proton Mail. I dusted off a GPG-capable email client and provided him with my public key. After some technical headaches we exchanged a couple of emails and promptly went back to organizing the occasional happy hour or movie outing via Signal.
Protonmail bridge on linux has problem with attachments bigger than 2 MB and it disconnects a lot.
Android app is mediocre at best:
- feels really slow
- shows notifications for emails already read on web
- deleting or moving email to different folder waits for confirmation from backend which is really confusing (you can still see deleted emails but you can't delete them again)
I hope they will work on those UX issues otherwise I really like it.
I had an experience changing email address in the past and it's not that difficult, it's just time consuming. What I did is said to myself "that's it, I'm using this new address from now on". Then over the course of a year I monitored old email and evaluated each message. If I needed it (online shopping account, banking, etc), I went to whatever service sent it and changed my email. Some services don't support changing emails, in that case I would accept the loss and create a new account.
> Can anybody using ProtonMail recommend it?
Privacy concerns aside, to me it's not better nor worse than any other email provider. There is a caveat though. On Android (and web app) you can't search through messages' bodies, only by subject/sender/etc. This is because they don't index them. You can do this on desktop if you're using Bridge app with, say, Thunderbird. Thunderbird then will do the indexing.
Bridge is for paid users only, and it's not open source thing. https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail enables full-text search support for free accounts if the "local store" enabled, described in https://github.com/vladimiry/ElectronMail/wiki/FAQ.
After all this was done, I felt better, and still do after 2 years. Not sure of the other aftereffects regarding privacy and such. But I voted with my wallet, that's for sure.
[0] https://www.fsf.org/resources/webmail-systems [1] https://posteo.de/en/site/about_posteo
definitely use a custom domain so you never have to do this again.
I'm at the point now where I only get see that label every one in a blue moon. I'll probably switch over for good soon enough but I'm not in a rush either