Has anyone migrated to Protonmail from Gmail?
Forwarding everything from the old account to the new account made it pretty easy so I only had one inbox to check, and I could take my time migrating all of my accounts to the new address. I also created a rule to sort things coming from my old account to a folder so I knew which accounts and subscriptions and whatnot I still needed to update to the new address. To this day I still have the old email forwarding, and occasionally something real comes through on it.
Fastmail also makes it easy to add other addresses on custom domains, so I have several email addresses that all deliver to the same inbox, with rules to sort them into the right folders.
It's probably because it's a business account and Google and LinkedIn have sold my address, but fwiw I receive about 100x more spam in my work gmail than I do in my personal fastmail account.
I’m slightly annoyed that I can’t remap the keyboard shortcuts.
I then moved from Protonmail to Migadu in 2021 because Migadu prices per email volume not domain (which 99% of companies price by) and I frequently set up mini projects with their own hello@email.domain. Migadu lets me do that.. for free! I only pay for the sum total email volume that is used (or not!).
Also I had problems with Protonmail’s bridge on Linux at the time that I nor others via IRC could figure out. I was using Arch (btw) and it worked fine on Ubuntu but I didn’t want to use Ubuntu.
A good list of providers can be found at https://privacyguides.org/providers/email/
Protonmail is best in class when it comes to encryption etc, but the trade-off is that it's not as easy to get it working with custom email clients, and it's also more expensive. That's what I understand from reading into all this, but I never actually used Protonmail.
If you're using a custom domain I don't think it needs to be painful. I haven't bothered to export all my mail to my new account; I just keep my Gmail account connected to my clients alongside my new email. But if you did want to export I believe there are tools that help with it.
I've been reorganizing my email usage the past few years. I first adopted a ProtonMail email for all accounts related to financial data. That just involved going to each bank, credit card, loan, etc. and following the update email address process for each. It doesn't take too long.
More recently, I moved everything else from Outlook.com to an email address using my own custom domain. I set Outlook.com to forward/redirect all email to the new address and then made a filter/rule on the custom domain email address to drop all mail addressed into a folder. As mail comes into this folder, I take whatever action is necessary to either update the sender that my email address has changed, or stop receiving email from that sender by unsubscribing or whatever.
As for switching, I did it few times.
From microsoft to migadu. Switched to custom domain at the same time. Migadu was good for the price but in the early days it wasnt very stable and I wanted something more private.
From migadu to Tutanota. More private but tutanota wasnt as polished and can only be used with their custom email clients. Again great value for the money but I was missing better UX.
Finally from Tutanota to Protonmail. It was painful to export emails from Tutanota. I am very happy with Proton. If money isnt a constraint I think it is the best option for privacy focused providers.
UPD: The poblem is that I still keep receiving some important mails to my gmail account which of course get forwarded to my home box, but I'm working on lowering this dependance. Couple of years more and I'll be able to shut my gmail account down. I had been using gmail since 2005.
I moved my domain from G Suite Legacy to iCloud+ but kept a separate free Protonmail so other contacts who care about encryption can see the "@protonmail.com" email and message there.
With a custom domain, people wouldn't know if it's Protonmail encryption compatible without typing the email into the send message window first.
I have also connected it to my custom domain so that if I need to do this all over again to a new provider, it will be much faster - since I can point the domain to the new provider.
I am very happy with Microsoft 365 Family, since it gives me Office Apps, 1 TB storage, custom emails for upto 6 people in the family.
If this is the main motivation here then I would look into Google's advanced protection program that allows you to lock down your account with two Yubikeys and disables all other forms of 2FA.
As far as I'm aware, you still can't use a YubiKey to secure a Proton Mail account.
I am of the opinion that Google have the best security in the industry, have the best incentives, most investment and are pretty much guaranteed to be around in 20 years from now.
The most high value accounts in my life around banking, investment, taxes etc are all tied to my personal identity anyway, so privacy is less important to me, I'd rather have the most established and secure service. I don't use email for communication so E2E encryption etc is not hugely relevant to me.
Instead of thinking about it as a single migration, be a little easier on yourself. Even if all you do is start giving out your protonmail address starting now, Google will be reading a lot less of your emails.
Protonmail has an import feature that works extremely well when migration from Gmail, and from there you would forward any mail from Gmail to your custom domain. Whole thing takes maybe 10-15 minutes.
Your mileage may vary slightly however.
I would suggest organising your email how you want it in your current account and use imap to migrate - makes it take easy. I'm not sure if that was part of your question but I didn't see it mentioned in the other comments.
Incidentally, there might be a market opportunity for people like me who just want simple ultra-cheap low traffic email. Self hosting your email server just means your emails get sent to spam and all the services I've seen bundle calendars/cloud storage/groupware and charge >5$ a month. Maybe a PAYG model? I have no idea about the costs involved.