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the editor for Google Docs is the one really good thing I can't get elsewhere, but I don't do that much important stuff in it - just like planning vacations, etc. Once I'm done editing something, if I want to back it up I can just export it elsewhere

DropBox has a hook into Office's editors.

Microsoft has a very usable online version that's free (with a bit of upsell here and there). Arguably more capable than Google Docs.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Of course, I'm being a little flippant, but the MS ecosystem is not without its problems. A colleague has 3 MS accounts for dealing with 3 different things (a government contract, a 3rd party company contract, our company account). Because of this, he was in hell for days because of some fubar on the MS side. I have (seemingly!) different MS accounts, for Azure development and Office 365 and I am regularly confused by the various MS websites.

MS Azure accounts always seemed odd and overly convoluted to me. I had an issue with my personal Microsoft account where I couldn’t sign up for an Azure trial (wanted to kick the tires on Codespaces before it moved to GitHub). Turned out, my account got associated to my kids’ schools MS account because that email address was on a school mailing list. That was a pain (and many hours) to get figured out.

my friends that have one MS/Outlook account at their jobs, which have enterprise support reps for their big enterprise accounts sometimes have multi-day lockout for unknown reason, 2FA failure for days, absurd issues with timezones being inconsistent across MS services, etc.

Wait until you're locked out of your Outlook.com account. No way back.

I've really pared down my Google usage with the end of grandfathered GAFYD accounts as the last straw, so down to Sheets, YouTube, and Android as my last google usage. YouTube has no alternative, Android has too much sunk cost, Sheets I'm probably going to go back to Syncthing + Libreoffice I guess. Office 365 is the equivalent alternative, but not sure I feel much better about MS's consumer products than I do about Google.

Just use Invidious links instead of going directly to YouTube (for example, yewtu.be for the same remainder of the URL) for viewing. If you're talking about hosting videos, use Vimeo. Even when people post youTube links I use the Invidious alternative to stop feeding Google data. Also invidious has embedded download capability on their various sites.

What’s the sunk cost with Android? Apps? It’s very easy to switch to iPhone, I did it a year ago.

Apps and well the alternative to Android for me would be Plasma Mobile or something anyway. Many apps I use (Syncthing, Firefox, file manager, emulators) are forbidden or crippled by Apple policy.

While I have a work iPhone 12 so I use both iOS and Android daily, I do actually prefer the Android ecosystem, plus iOS being locked down in terms of installing third party apps is a disqualifier for my personal device. Also bugbears like the headphone jack, though I might be out of luck there in Android in another device rotation.

For Google docs I switched to using a Synology server. Very nearly as good (better, in some ways) and I don’t have to worry about what Google is up to.

The up-front cost and setup time is a stiff investment, but I’m much easier in mind now.

The other side of the coin is my wife’s gmail, which is going to be deleted come May. So... we gotta figure that out.

What sort of collaborative editing does Synology allow? Is there a Nextcloud / Owncloud alternative to Docs / Sheets for collaborative editing?

> Is there a Nextcloud / Owncloud alternative to Docs / Sheets for collaborative editing?

Yes, NextCloud and Owncloud both integrate with OnlyOffice Community Edition[0][1] which supports collaborative editing of text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

[0] https://www.onlyoffice.com/office-for-nextcloud.aspx

[1] https://www.onlyoffice.com/office-for-owncloud.aspx

Same as Google, afaict. It has a slightly better permissions model, imo (I can create a doc with a password and share the link freely, or I can give specific permissions per user, like Google). Same editing/commenting/viewing interface.

My collab needs are pretty light, I only work with a few family and friends, but I haven’t run into anything I wanted to do in Synology that I couldn’t.

In my case, I moved to Fastmail... and yeah, the hilarious thing is people remember moving from AOL to Gmail over a decade ago, and think Gmail is still so much better than everything else.

Gmail is worst-in-class at this point. It's slow, it's bloated, it's bad at spam filtering compared to the alternatives. They've been riding on people remembering email before Gmail, but not really actually stayed competitive with any modern alternative offering.

That's so true. Switched to Mailfence recently. I still can't get used to it that whenever I click on something, the action gets done immediately. Its web/mobile client is a bit limited but crazy fast.

Many people consider Gmail as consenting to spyware. Unfortunately, lots of people don't know any better or haven't bothered to take a good look at the account settings or Google's policies.

Anybody that knows better, will avoid Gmail like the plague or use it for only the minimum.

I tried switching to Fastmail (from Gmail) 7-ish yrs ago, and I ended up switching back to Gmail specifically because the spam filtering was far worse with Fastmail. Is it Fastmail's spam filtering actually better now, or does it just seem that way when you start a new account because you're not getting much spam in general?

I switched to Fastmail (with my own domain) about a year ago, and haven't had any issues with spam so far.

So, I moved to Fastmail in 2016, and I'd say I've never had to get a legitimate email out of my spam folder, and I've never seen obvious spam hit my inbox. I do occasionally get the "my husband left me five mil overseas" type garbage, it's always spam-binned correctly. (Meanwhile, my Gmail account I retain in case someone tries to reach out to it, regularly has emoji-subject-filled spam and other garbage Gmail fails to classify, and also has a deluge of garbage spam coming in... at this point, Gmail is 98% spam for me?)

One important point here, and I don't know how long you used Fastmail when you tried it, is that Fastmail uses a personalized spam filter. It probably took me six to eight months to receive enough spam on Fastmail to actually train it. (In the interim, they use a non-personalized filter, which as I said, still worked!) Gmail doesn't seem to be able to make personal spam decisions: When I was regularly using Gmail, some types of regular messages would spam-bin no matter how many times I marked them not spam or classified them as a particular category of mail.

Another anecdote - I switched earlier this year (prompted because of the ending of my grandfathered Gapps account, but my experiences are largely with the "standard" Gmail account vs. Fastmail).

Spam filtering on Fastmail has been the same/better than Gmail was - including possibly fewer false-positives on the Fastmail side. Gmail was getting worse about those, both with mailing lists and individuals' emails.

Like many on HN, I'm diversifying my data/access risk across more providers. Too many wake-up calls recently about Google locking people out. There are still some services Google is compellingly better enough that I still use them (Android, Maps, YouTube, Google Sheets), but Email was too precious to tie up with them. I also wanted to finally kick myself into stoping using the `gmail.com` address at all anymore (maybe 20% of my emails before the migration).

I admit I don't have a lot to compare between, but my company switched from Rackspace mail a couple years ago because of the unrelenting spam and seemingly no way to stop it. I suggested Google because I hardly ever see any spam there in my personal account, so we made the switch.

The difference is night and day. I can look in the spam folder for my work email now and there are hundreds of spam messages there for the last 30 days, and absolutely zero false positives. I have seen a handful of spam messages come through, but it's in the single digits over the last two years.

I believe you, but there is still the usual dark side that has been mentioned maaany times here: very often emails sent by small/tiny email providers aren't delivered at all to Gmail receivers.

That's often the case with one of my friends who has a Gmail email address: anything that I send him (once or twice a year) doesn't even show up in his spam list without first making him start an email exchange to me => in my opinion that kind of filtering is just too easy to do (come on Google, at least put it into the spam folder and/or show it as a colored/blinking line and/or put some warnings whatever - don't just delete it), and of course it poses questions about oligopoly etc. How Gmail works is just not fair (in my opinion) :(((

Silently dropping mail is something that should just not be tolerated. We need to enforce that email providers either deliver something (to the inbox or spam folder) or reject the mail at submission time - with legislation if needed.

It's the ones that never come through you need to worry about.

I’m happy with Proton right now too. Really just need a mobile app for the calendar and I’ll be all set.

There is a mobile Proton calendar app.

There is an Android one, but not an iOS one (at least last time I checked a few weeks ago)

Not yet for iOS from what I’ve seen.

EDIT: Verified. Not yet for iOS.

I use it, but the requirement to be online in order to add or update entries is quite annoying

Obsidian?

I'm assuming they are referring to the note taking software: https://obsidian.md/

Correct, it's pretty great and by design immune to Google-like rug pulls.

Nice, thanks!

So how do you know those services don't pull the same stunt?

I use various google services, and do a monthly backup of everything. I guess that's a sane thing to do with any service, even self hosted ones.

> So how do you know those services don't pull the same stunt?

It's a questions of eggs per basket. Google wants you to keep everything in their one basket, and the result is that if they arbitrarily terminate your account, you lose everything. If they give you 30 days like OP, you have to remember all the different places you need to download content from.

If you split your services up, a sudden termination only affects a few things rather than everything, and a forewarned termination has a much smaller surface area you need to consider.

> If they give you 30 days like OP, you have to remember all the different places you need to download content from.

Google Takeout (takeout.google.com) should give you almost everything in one place. It's a good idea to do this periodically in case you don't get the 30-day notice. Be prepared to download a few dozen GB, though. And there is no "incremental" option.

Takeout is nice, but I am surprised by the lack of features in other products that would easily allow to import the data from Takeout format.

I wanted to migrate from Google Photos to iCloud. Turns out there is no easy way how to import the photos to iCloud without loosing metadata. I gave up and just bought more storage on Google.

I agree with you there. All the data is right there, in fairly open (if not exactly standard) formats. They even include an index document and basic descriptions of the data formats. One would think their competitors would want to make it easy to port exports from Google Takeout into their systems.

I'm a bit surprised that you had trouble importing photos, though. Isn't most of the metadata kept in standard EXIF tags in each file?

Everything has benefits and drawbacks of course. It's true that you can minimize the impact of one service pulling this stunt.

However, I don't agree with "remember all the different places you need to download content from". Google does this with Takeout, so I can have 1 backup of most of my things. When using different services, I need to have various backups.

Reason is: I don't depend on services giving me 30 days. I assume they can block access on the spot.

When they start growing close to the size of Google you could start worrying about this type of problem. With smaller players you could reach them easier if something happens, especially if they care about their customers. Ultimately nothing is guaranteed so backing up the data regularly is a good idea but that's not the only problem though, a lot of people's identity is tied to some services that if they stop functioning for them they're in a bit of a nightmare situation.

Obsidian is a self-hosted repository that ultimately stores everything as plaintext markdown (.md). It is 100% portable and by default owned by you.

Protip: you can easily sync obsidian by sharing the top-level vault directory with syncthing. Its entirely transparent, you just start obsidian and open the vault, and changes you make on one system automatically appear on others.

As for protonmail, its better than google -- but you're right in the data ownership. In the case of protonmail, they have a much better track record than Google, but if you are really paranoid choose a service that supports SMTP/SNMP. You can then just have a mail client store the mail as an archive or connect it to any other mail system.

I have mentioned my preferences before, but I'll refrain from turning this comment into an unpaid ad. Drew Devault's recommendations are pretty good though: https://drewdevault.com/2020/06/19/Mail-service-provider-rec...

I think you mean IMAP. Protonmail supports SMTP (the mail-sending protocol; it needs to to interoperate with other mail servers) but not IMAP (the client side mail-reading protocol).

SNMP is something entirely unrelated, afaik.

ProtonMail offers an “IMAP Bridge” application that keeps a local IMAP server running on your machine, while still decrypting your messages on-device.

Ah, yes you're correct. Total brain fart, unfortunately too late to edit so my mistake must live on in infamy...

Depends on the service. For example, if proton bans me I can move my email to a different provider because I own my domain. In case of Obsidian, it's an offline app that uses Markdown, so I can easily migrate to a different note-taking software for any reason.

Your backup note is on point; I highly recommend everyone to do a Google Takeout every few months (or at least years!!). If you've never done one, like most Google users, you're playing with fire.

If your domain registar bans you, you’ll lose your email all the same.

“GoDaddy has two major problems.

First, their customer service (…).

Second, if there are accusations made against you, they will shut you down and side with your accuser more often than not.“ https://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discuss...

Fair point. I think in this case relying on a domain registrar or an email service is somewhat inevitable, though.

Domain registrars are indeed a single point of failure :(. Do you recommend something here? Because I haven't found a proper solution myself.

> If your domain registar bans you, you’ll lose your email all the same.

Maybe? I would hope that you could raise the issue with the dowmain registry or ultimately ICANN if the registrar does not let you move the domain elsewhere after banning you. Registrars do not have the same platform ownership over domains that Google has over gmail accounts, they are just middlemen.

Notice that Google Takeout is broken with regards to non-UTF8 email encodings (for some of you who archive old emails). I noticed it when coding a small tool https://github.com/karteum/gmvaultdb to (among other things) import the mbox from Takeout into an sqlite DB : Google performs some encoding conversions that permanently break all non-ascii characters in non-UTF8 emails (they are all replaced by 0xEFBFBD). In order to archive old emails, I had to use mbsync with IMAP (gmvault does not work anymore with Python 3, and I didn't try yet https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back ).

I think for email it makes sense to have an offline IMAP setup (i.e. a copy of all mail is downloaded) on at least one device (e.g. your desktop) so that you can still access things if you are abruptly cut off from the provider. This can come in handy even for temporary outages.

I agree, but an an alternative to mbox/maildir format on your machine : I wrote https://github.com/karteum/gmvaultdb in order to have a single-file SQLite DB with all old email contents (all UTF-8 inside, simple/minimalistic schema), together with a small GUI to consult emails and do queries (full-text not fully implemented yet but this is the target) and all attachments extracted in a side folder so that I can directly browse with a file manager.

Proton, or fastmail, or any number of other mail providers for that matter, don't control half of the internet. They don't associate personal accounts with professional accounts, and they can't block necessary services at a whim.

> they can't block necessary services at a whim

why not?

Because they don't _control half the internet_. They only have one service you use, not 50. Your phone (voice), cloud storage (drive), website hosting (sites), chat (not even gonna try), music streaming (YouTube music), video hosting, etc aren't all dependent on the same single point of failure like they are with Google. All your mail provider can do is stop processing your email for you (at which point you switch providers). If Google doesn't like you, you lose _all_ of those things, likely all at once. Google even has a hand in your credit card transactions with Google Pay (though anecdotally, I've never actually seen anyone use Google Pay, so not sure how many people that would affect). Google provides such a diverse range of services that having them all shut down on you is a huge deal. I'm currently in the process of looking for a replacement for my legacy Google apps account, and that's just email.

Thanks for explaining, I was curious too. I only use Google for email hosting out of your list. I can understand how people are deep in that ecosystem though.

If you like markdown note taking apps and want to move completely from being dependent on a 3rd party, I would suggest Joplin.

Currently I'm syncing to a s3 bucket with e2e encryption but of course you could sync to a server you setup yourself including a basic windows box.

Seconded on the Joplin recommend.

I've been using it for a little over 3 years and it serves all my note-taking/storage needs, especially with the relatively recent addition of extensions/add-ons. I have had no issues syncing through either dropbox or Nextcloud.

Protonmail specifically seems to have strange problems with some old and busted email systems, ex: I've seen several government ministries in Taiwan (roc) that for some reason can not send email to protonmail or domains MXed there and no one has been able to explain it to me.

Protonmail seems to routinely get flagged by fraud, spam, and security systems. You emails are probably getting eaten by a security appliance before it even reaches the government exchange server or whatever.

Protonmail is one of the few remaining email hosts that let you create a free account without a verified mobile phone number. It probably does get used for spam quite a bit - relatively to gmail/outlook/etc., not in absolute terms that is, IME most spam is from compromised hosts and botnets. Then again, the major mail providers, especial Microsoft, are really trigger happy and don't seem to care about the damage they do to smaller providers so it could just as well be lazyness or intentional anti-competitive behavior. I think at some point we will need legislation to keep email an open federated system.

> It probably does get used for spam quite a bit - relatively to gmail/outlook/etc., not in absolute terms that is

Not really, big players have the advantage that nobody is going to block them. Most of them spam regularly by thousands of letters before some automation of theirs triggers (or the spammer stops).

That is not the case as this is messages sent TO protonmail. It may be related anti-whatever measures, but is not typical anti-spam.

How is ProtonMail better than Gmail in your opinion? I use ProtonMail but find the UI meh, the spam filter worse, and the calendar bad (not to mention it's costing me $). I like the privacy aspect of course, which is what drew me to it in the first place.

ProtonMail doesn't do e-mail categorization like gmail, so "much better" is very subjective. Their IMAP gateway is also a paid feature, which is really sucky.