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Comment by martinko | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the reasons why I've finally began migrating to a custom domain + proton mail. Can't imagine the time it would take me to get back all the accounts registered to my email, not to mention those to which access would be lost forever.

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I've been wanting to migrate off Gmail since Snowden, but never looked closer. I need to get on that.

I looked into this a bit a year or two ago, and wasn't happy with the alternatives. The main issue for me is that I never delete anything, and so I have nearly 500GB of email, dating back over 20 years (sadly I've lost earlier email due to the cost of even local storage back in those days). I don't want to deal with the data in any way, sorting through it, splitting it up, etc. I just want to dump it all into an email account and have it forever. Many of the alternatives that offer good privacy top out at 20GB or so for their most expensive plan (or less).

Tutanota was the one service I found that let you add (IIRC) arbitrary amounts of storage to your plan, but I found their web interface to be kinda clunky, and let the account expire. I keep wanting to look into this again, but never get around to it.

OneDrive is pretty damn cheap _and_ comes with access to Office on the web. 1tb per family member, with Office? Goodly.

There's no official Linux client, but there are open source ones that perform well.

You could drop your mbox onto a OneDrive sync and then use fetchmail or similar to rip it out of your provider. Each email could be individually encrypted, so you won't have to deal with a 500gb blob to sync.

I recently culled a few of my larger gmail accounts.

This is what it took:

* Connect to Outlook and sync locally

* Sort All Mail by sender

* Delete All Mail per senders that aren't important

It took me a day, and I'm glad I did it. Not that painful. Outlook was a champ through the whole process.

Now I can move somewhere else, which I will.

I'm surprised Outlook held up. In my experience the program starts crapping itself after the first 3-4GiB of emails, and it only gets worse after that. I wouldn't rely on the file remaining intact for long with such a setup...

It was Outlook on a Mac.

I remember services available 5+ years ago that would help you with this kind of thing (scanning through email archives by sender), but the ones I remember have all morphed into "tame your inbox" apps, which doesn't solve the same problem.

Fastmail, maybe? Their premium tier offers a 100GB mailbox, looks like, and a retention archive on top of that.

I did it a few years ago and have been quite happy with the outcome.

I still use a Google account for my Android phone, but my PinePhone should be shipping in a few weeks.

I'm done with Google. Good riddance.

Are you hosting your own email server or going with a provider? Which provider, if so?

I use ProtonMail with a custom domain; the braindead simple email encryption is useful.

I switched to mailbox.org a few years ago. Service has been good and reliable at a good price.

What is the advantage of using a provider like Proton Mail versus using a client to make a local back up of important Gmail labels (or regularly using Takeout to back up a email label with your most important stuff in it)?

Unfortunately Protonmail is not good for long term mail storage. Their web mail app has hardly improved in years, and it is abysmal in terms of search and handling thousands of emails. If you depend on PM, you may find some years later that your emails are trapped and incredibly difficult to access except painfully individually, with much manual effort.

I’ve been using Protonmail for years, with many tens of thousands of emails, and this does not match my experience at all. It is far, far easier for me to find old emails sent to my Protonmail account than to my old Gmail account, which seems to randomly decide that some emails shouldn’t be searchable.

With a paid account it is trivial to export your emails as well: https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/export-import-...

Interesting, because I had exactly the opposite experience. My 70,000+ gmail account from 2004 is still easier to find things in than my 10k email account on PM was before I gave up.

I use my own domain and gmail for phone access, but I download all my emails to Outlook via imap. I have about 20GB of emails in outlook (my entire life's emails basically) which are instantly searchable.

Indeed if you are willing to have all your emails downloaded to local disk, but that's really inconvenient if you want to live with disposable hardware and cloud-based storage.

when i upgrade my laptop i just transfer the 20GB file via external hard drive (where I keep a backup anyway).

I agree 100%. Used ProtonMail for a while and this is an issue that's made me think about looking to migrate elsewhere. Tutanota had similar problems when I messed around with it last year. It is hard to find one with good UI, my needed functions, while still having a solid security reputation.

Have you tried the beta web app [1] recently? I have seen steady, albeit slow, progress and welcomed improvements in recent months.

[1] https://beta.protonmail.com

Multi-year mostly-satisfied Protonmail user and ... can confirm this.

My gold standard is mutt with its powerful and fast search filters (gmail is a serious downgrade).

Protonmail's lack of search is crippling.

Email export ... I don't even want to think about.

The bridge is open source and works on Linux, there are AUR packages for Arch.

It's fairly easy to extract your data.

Yes, you can extract to local files, but if you just want to keep your data on PM and try to access it, it's a very unpleasant experience.

Er, not really?

I use Outlook to access it on my work PC, the Android app on my phone, and the web interface elsewhere. Seems quite usable and painless, to me; even search.

But then, I fastidiously organize my email and so I don't need to rely on "smart" , privacy violating, deeply intrusive search.

Good luck when you notice your registar is less reliable than Google’s one-per-million account deletion.

You have actual recourse--through TLD registry procedures or the courts--should your registrar Googleify your domain.

You have no effective recourse should Google Googleify your Gmail account.

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