I Moved My Gmail to Proton. It Was Surprisingly Easy | Hacker News Reader

I Moved My Gmail to Proton. It Was Surprisingly Easy

washingtonpost.com

33 pointsandrewl25 comments

Moving the actual messages is not the hard part, you could always just download them. Figuring out who all has your old email address and trying to update it everywhere is the hard part.

The first time I went through this exercise I decided to put the email address I'm using for each service in my password manager.

If I ever need to do it again, at least I know who has what.

I just set a autoforwarder in gmail for the time being, and then updated the important services as they came through.

This highlights the absurdity of using email addresses as immutable user IDs

Most countries with >1 telco needed to mandate phone number portability, because the telcos would not do it voluntarily. I can't see it being fixed for email though. The sanest ways would be to provide a domain per citizen (essentially operating as a registrar) or a centralized email forwarding service, and I don't see any government putting in that sort of effort for a problem most people don't realize they have.

iki.fi does that. It's excellent.

That’s part of what makes it convenient to own a domain and handle your email through that.

I moved my Gmail to Fastmail, it was surprisingly easy (and fast considering I had over 5gb in 20,000 emails).

And here’s how you can too: https://proton.me/support/switch-from-gmail-to-proton

What's more frustrating is the inverse. :)

That said, Proton has improved their product quite a bit over the years. I'm less sold on client-side-encryption-as-a-product these days but I would honestly wager their new email client is one of the better frontends I've used in the past 5 years. Makes me not bother migrating elsewhere at this point.

I would never trust proton mail

https://www.wired.com/story/protonmail-amends-policy-after-g...

What service do you trust and why?

I’m interested in what you use for mail service. Self hosting?

I just use gmail. Privacy is dead.

See the problem with services like proton mail and tor is it concentrates the activity of people with something to hide. It makes you a target

Like any company, Proton must follow court orders, but our encryption can never be bypassed. Also, in 2021, Proton won a court case that changed the way the law is applied (https://proton.me/blog/court-strengthens-email-privacy). Also, Switzerland has no logging obligations for VPN, so you can always use Proton VPN.

The metadata is as important as the message in many cases and very few people actually use PGP. If both sides use Proton mail the assumption is their browsers are secure. One plugin wrong and the screenshots will leak. PGP is a 90’s solution. It’s time for something radically new

While PGP was originally invented in the 90s, the latest iterations of OpenPGP, which Proton plays a key role in evolving and modernizing, looks nothing like the PGP of the 90s, and is now incorporating more and more modern features while maintaining the principles of interoperability. https://proton.me/blog/openpgpjs-4-streaming-encryption

Try migrating out of Proton. Much harder; no auto-forwarding in the free plan.

I think that is a good metric to judge companies/services by: How easy do they make it to quit?

Also democracies: "how easy is it to get you out of office?" is one of Tony Benn's tests.

You can use their first party tool called Import-Export: https://proton.me/support/export-emails-import-export-app

i was thinking to do the same, but i'm worried about the website i signed in using google sign in. has anyone tackled this issue? is there an easy way to migrate those credentials or do i have to change every account one by one?

I did one by one.

https://archive.ph/BIuQR

I moved everything to Zoho with custom domain to get rid of google's passive Ads from shopping, banking & whatnot

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