Bye Bye Gmail
m24tom.com
m24tom.com
I am all for moving away from Gmail, but I think this is completely the wrong way to do it. Why go through the hassle of changing your @gmail for @microsoft (or whatever it is?), already thinking about moving to @proton.me in the future?
Get your own domain, and then you won't depend on the service provider anymore. Try Proton, or Fastmail, or Migadu, whatever you want. Once you own your domain, you can change every year while keeping the same email address (e.g. me@m24tom.com)!
Note: I won't accept "it's too hard to setup a domain" from someone who spent more time writing a blog post than it would take to learn how to do it.
One fine morning, you'll find yourself locked out of your gmail account and every other Google service because they just decided that something you said isn't politically correct. You'll also be locked out of any external thrid-party services that rely on Google's OAuth service, email 2FA or verification. You'll never find any help to restore any of that, except to write a whiny blog post and hope that it goes viral on HN or something. It's not an indignity you want to live with.
Another scenario is Google changing their ToS or their service degrading (especially like their really bad spam filters these days). You don't really have a choice of migrating, because you'll have to change your email address as well.
That doesn't happen when you have your own domain. If they do something wrong, you just take your domain to another provider. And all these are worth doing while your gmail is still active, because it will take a few months to migrate your third-party services and your important correspondences over to your new account.
And finally, I really hate the pervasive argument and attitude on HN in the lines of "They trample on us regardless. Might as well learn to live under their feet". Why do you deny yourself self-respect like this? Even if the odds seem insurmountable, it's worth resisting the tyranny in voice and in action. And your voice is important to other people, even if you don't know it. Your defeatist attitude can influence them as much as your relentless defiance can. Choose how you want to influence the society.
I don’t use google oauth, prefer user pass and email
I use google for email and docs, it’s convenient. i use my own domain though, and i backup my data nightly.
I feel like i have de-risked the relationship as much as is reasonable and am happy to move if i have to with minimal data or access loss (time to restore all data somewhere may be a bit of an issue, but there are workarounds)
Often it is not so much about "not using Google" (they are pretty much a monopoly, they don't care). It's more about "supporting something that is not Google".
> and am happy to move if
In order to move, you need for an alternative to exist. And alternatives exist because some people use them :-).
Total people using email (2024–2025): about 4.5–4.6 billion.
Google (Gmail consumer + Google Workspace): ≈3.0 billion active users/mailboxes.
numbers from perplexity, but probably good enough for casual conversation
Even if you use Gmail, you should do it behind your own domain. So that you are not locked in.
Now I can understand saying "I have been on Gmail for years and I can't be arsed to update my address everywhere". It's not a lot of work (I've done it and it was actually a lot easier than I had anticipated), but it's work. And in a world where people can't be arsed to spend 3 clicks installing Signal, updating an email address sounds like a PhD. (I am being judgemental here, but you get my point :-) ).
But the article says "I am moving, I decided to do the work of updating my address everywhere!". And the only reasonable way to do this is to move to your own domain, IMO.
- Grammar
- Spelling
- Auto-correct
Pretty dark UX to force users into an all AI or nothing situation.
PS1: Yes, I've paid for Google One for years and I'm not just a free user.
PS2: Yes, these features are entirely possible to provide without training on your specific user data.
I've helped nontechnical people move to purelymail as well, they all love it.
And even if I migrate, I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either.
Does anyone have concrete advice as to how to make the transition?
- Setup automatic forwarding
- Then probably just use that old email for searching old emails
This has worked okay for me
Ya, there's no way of not letting google know what your new address is, but you're going to be emailing a lot of gmail addresses anyway so there's no way around that, really. But with the forwarding they only know incoming mail.
I switched off gmail 3.5 years ago and all I can say is that it wasn't anywhere near as scary as I thought it would be. I setup an auto-responder that would hound people to update their contacts for me and slowly switched over services I cared about (and closed others!) An important point, though, is that I don't really care about old emails. I do still have access to my gmail account, of course, but I have yet to go back. Surely there is a way to export everything and import it into something searchable, though?
A dedicated client like Mozilla's Thunderbird might be helpful for de-cluttering.
Notion Mail also seems like it has potential - ability to group together certain types of mail.
Someone already recommended Google Takeout to back up all your mail, then finding a business email host that can easily import your data
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1. Register your domain (if you're doing that) and get fastmail set up -- I remember feeling a physical discomfort clicking "register" on fastmail, it felt like such an insanely impossible thing to do.
2. Set up the IMAP link so that anything sent to your gmail gets delivered to fastmail. Doing so also allows you to send email from your gmail address (with valid spf/dkim) if you want to.
3. Import all your old mail using fastmail's import tool, which Just Works.
4. Set up a vacation autoresponder in gmail that responds only to people in your contacts with a note telling them your new address.
5. Set up a label and filter in fastmail for anything that was addressed to your gmail, so you can easily see what is still sending you email on your old address to assist with migrating services.
--
It worked a charm. I was completely convinced of it within a week, long before the 30 day free trial ran out. I have been an immensely happy customer since then. Could not imagine going back.
Also, I very much recommend using your own domain. It greatly eases the feeling of having to commit, because your email address is not tied to your provider. That is, if you ever decide fastmail is not for you, next time the switch will be invisible to everyone else.
* You probably don't have that many accounts associated with the email, actually. I have about 50 accounts that I care about enough to move, which took me a morning, but it's doable.
* For the same reason, you probably don't have that many (real human) contacts as well. But I could be very wrong. For me, I still occasionally use Gmail to communicate with a few people (like every two months), but that's infrequent enough that I don't care about how bad Gmail is.
* You probably want to review which services you don't regularly use any more, and if you don't have precious data stored with them (you probably shouldn't), consider closing the account instead of changing the email address, if that's an option for the provider.
* You can of course keep checking the original inbox or do forwarding. My experience is that, very quickly, I only need to occasionally check the old email. I still get a few useful emails here and there, but it's manageable. (Plus emails that remind me I should just delete the account)
You can do it.
Basically all email I get is from accounts created on services. Almost never it is an email from a real person.
The ones that matter I have been migrating to Proton (e.g.: bank, utilities, etc).
Out of the pan, into the fire.
my recommendation: i've been happily using fastmail for years.
I am also extremely frustrated with Gmail’s AI features now being apparently impossible to disable.
I had issues with it early on, and after some back and forth with support they explained to me what is going on: it takes about 200 spam emails before your personalized filter kicks in, before that you might see something slip through. Also, the spam filter updates after you delete emails from your spam folder. Just remember to empty your spam folder, and add some custom rules until you reach that 200 threshold.
5+ years in, everything is working great, nothing to complain, best email provider I've ever used. I only wish they had servers in the EU.
Microsoft is an insane choice, just look at what they've done with Windows and their Office suite.
My ISP has already said they're going to stop providing email service at some point in the near future and I'll have to migrate at some point. In the past I'd picked up a cheap domain and self-hosted for a bit, but I'd love to not have to. Any good email providers out there that actually respect their customers and support IMAP?
Work email is moving from Google to https://www.infomaniak.com/en/ksuite/ksuite-pro - if you're not bothered about custom domains, they also offer an excellent free tier for personal use: https://www.infomaniak.com/en/ksuite/myksuite
Very weird and it feels misleading because they advertise free so much. I just wanted to try it out with an intent to subscribe but I left it because of that.
That's the main advantage of not using the provider's domain as a part of your email address (like @gmail.com, @outlook.com or whatever).
My VPS host lets me use hundreds of emails for like $7/month besides the actual hosting. Of course, Microsoft charges even more for a single...
Please tell me this is parody.
- Mailbox.org is what I use and it's pretty good. I often see Fastmail recommended too.
- Use a standalone email client that allows you to connect to multiple email servers. This makes it easy to continue to monitor your old email account while you use the new one. I use Thunderbird on desktop and FairEmail on Android (though Thunderbird also has an app for Android).
- Transfer all of your most important accounts over initially. As long as you continue to have access to your old account, you don't need to transfer absolutely everything all at once, you can do it over time.
- Use a custom domain name so if you decide to change providers again in future you just need to update your DNS records rather than changing your email address in all your accounts.
- You may also want to set up a catch-all email address or use a service like https://addy.io/ to generate email aliases on the fly, and create a new alias for each service you use (for example, your email for GitHub could be github.com@mydomain.com). This helps protect your actual personal email address from spam.
Why? What did it do?
This is the problem. Overload. It is not a google problem. If you get 200 emails - even without AI - just by using Thunderbird or k9mail (android) it will be a problem.
edit: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322?hl=en
I cannot find that "Messages and attachments might be reviewed by humans, so don't share any sensitive or confidential information."
anywhere.
Of course, there is nothing wrong about changing the provider. Variety is good.
Unfortunately, in the past few months, Gemini AI really started shoving its way in. And there were some features that were really unpalatable, that were basically dealbreakers for this. Yeah, I believe the "AI Summaries" had a lot to do with it. They were bad, misleading, and I did not want them crowding up my app.
I couldn't disable those features without disabling Smart Features entirely. So that's what I did.
So now I sort of suffer without the automatic email event-calendar integrations, and the other cool stuff that AI had provided, but it's totally usable. I have no trouble using it as an email service with that AI disabled. It works fine.
Anyway, it is no secret that Google has always used the text of our emails for their own marketing and analysis purposes. Always has. Why did you think Gmail was a free service? Obviously, you were paying for it! We all paid for it with our email content!
The only two downsides:
1. A few people have reported my emails from fastmail (calendar invites mostly) going to their spam folder. Not enough reports so I'm not worried.
2. Google won't let me sign in and create / edit /comment in google docs with my custom email hosted at fastmail so I have to have a random@gmail.com account just to use free google docs to collaborate with people who only send me google docs.
Overall I think AI features are going to be great but give me the ability to pick and choose which I enable / disable and we should be good. If not then I agree with OP - Bye Bye Gmail.
oh, and don't read my emails and protect my privacy google! - no? Ok bye bye!
(Workspace TOS is now part of the Cloud TOS https://workspace.google.com/terms/premier_terms/)
Section 12.11 of the Workspace specific terms confirms that Google will not train on customer data(which Gmail emails in workspace are). Incidentally, this is where Generative prompts and responses submitted or created via GA versions of Gemini in workspace are identified as “Customer Data”, which is not used for training. https://workspace.google.com/terms/service-terms/
* Server-side filters.
* Tags. No, not folders. Many of my emails have 2-3 tags, some have 4-5. I wonder if it can even map to IMAP4; I see a few ways to model it.
* Good deliverability.
* Reasonable spam protection.
* Not hugely expensive. Ideally near-free, or self-hosted.
What are some options?
Re: tags, you can switch between classic folders or Gmail-style labels.
Re: filtering, it has an easy-to-use UI but you can write your own custom Sieve filtering rules if you want.
i use supmua (which inspired notmuch) which like gmail uses tags instead of folders. i could not go back to a folder based system. but i am really missing a webmail interface that works with tags.
Why not both?
The best thing I did recently was turn off the smart features, add a bunch of filters, and unsubscribe from stuff I was no longer interested in.
It was initially a shock to see so many emails I hadn't cared for, but an hour of curation, and it has been a delight ever since.
I'm planning to move to another service provider though. I can't trust Google anymore.
SMTP/IMAP/POP3, webmail (Roundcube), CalDAV/CardDAV, unlimited mailboxes, catch-all. Starting at $5/year for 2GB.
No marketing spend, and I terminate spammers immediately. If you run a legitimate domain, you subsidize yourself.
This isn’t for bulk senders or SLAs. It’s for developers and side-project founders who can configure their own clients and don’t want to pay $60-120/year.
My setup include notmuch as MUA, muchsync to have messages via ssh on some machines, MailDrop to auto-refile them and keep my inboxes clean enough. Generally speaking it's not that hard, but the need of many components and the absence of a shiny UI for end users makes their use a no go even for many generic GNU/Linux user.
Most development since to many years is only on WebMails that's the issue.
Being "an early adopter" is not proof of anything other than being an early adopter.
> My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, so hopefully will be free of the outages
Ironically Microsoft just had an outage a couple of days ago.
Been using ProtonMail for 5 years but so annoying I can't propely search my emails because of the encryption, can't use standard IMAP without a proprietary connector, and their Drives/Docs suite is missing a lot of features.
Sure.
Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours
I’m not sure what to do except encourage others to consider, in the wake of the Snowden revelations and everything else, whether you really want Google to have all your email. And half of mine.
They then have all your email. Fingerprint.
Big tech,.NSA, 5 eyes won the game. No chance unless something truly citizen oriented happens in most countries.
* add a filter that moves all email with "unsubscribe" into an "unsubscribe" folder
combined with fastmail spam filtering, my inbox actually became usable again instantly...
Easy: I don't think so.
Advisable: Hell no.
I believe you have to constantly maintain it, and good luck with deliverability.
Anyone: correct me if I'm wrong.
Mostly sending stuff from marketing automation/newsletter software.
Not an issue. Will be migrating the first few domains of off paid google workspace E-Mail to a self hosted solution. I actually don’t expect too much trouble.
But that’s currently still a hypothesis. I have seen a few people do that successfully. So I know it’s possible. Still. Not having hosted a mail infrastructure in 20 odd years…
OK: it's easy, unless you're the "atechnical" sort.
Is it recommended? I'm torn here, because the big beasts are systematically spam/junk-classifying and even rejecting e-mail sent from independent MXes despite ticking the right checkboxes (FQrDNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and having a clean IP-address in a tidy network.
The fear around self hosting seems overblown. LetsEncrypt falls over more often than my E-mail.
However I did have issues with the VPS provider I was using getting blocked and not just my VPS’ IP but the entire block. So at some point it became tok tedious to have to follow the unblock process.
And so I switched to fastmail and have been using it for over two years. No major complaints.
Would I self-host again? If I have the free time I think its fun and you can learn a lot. However, if you have young kids and are too busy with life I would say go with a provider you trust with your data.
No regrets (since I am a mac & iphone user).
Plus, I can have a email per website, without exposing my main address.
The rest of the complaint was about a bug that happened, just today, with sorting and spam control.
"I tried to turn it off. I can."
The complaint was about the summary, which Mimestream doesn't include.
A service to clean up the UI does nothing to solve the issue at hand.
The complaint was about the summary, which Mimestream doesn't include.
"We are going to use your email to train our LLMs. I'm not okay with that... my confidential commercial information is NOT okay to use to train your models [...] So... goodbye Gmail."
The title is Bye Bye Gmail.
I don’t even know where to begin with this...
I feel I'm missing some part of the story. Where are they saying that?
Despite that, it appears it's not good for me (https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...) It's great, it's easy, makes me feel good in the moment..of course it's bad for me!
Here's the thing. I like to read things from my friends that they have taken the time to write. I personally hate texting. All the nuance is gone. Often the humor. Sad. Makes me want to have a beer with you...eye contact...blech. The LAST thing I want is a summary...at the top of the email...highlighted..that I CANNOT turn off.
I tried to turn it off. I can. It's under `Gmail -> Settings -> General -> Smart Features (checkbox)`. BUT..the AI summaries is now grouped with the Smart Tabs.
For those of you who do not use Gmail Smart Tabs, Smart Tabs (officially the Tabbed Inbox) have been part of Gmail since 2013; well actually the technology behind them—Smart Labels—actually debuted two years earlier. (Thank you Gemini, yes I DO truly love you. Tell me again about the comparisons of Stephen Miller and Heinrich Himmler's tactics please?)
Smart Tabs automatically sort my incoming flood of solicited commercial email (cue laughter from those who know my first start-up) into five buckets:
* Primary: Email from you. * Promotions: K&L Wine Merchants at the top of the list. * Social: Hi Andrew on Facebook (that I only log into from Firefox running on a VM). * Update: Actual transactional emails from companies. * Forums: The Information at the top of the list (a newsletter I'd like to read but don't want to make the time justify paying for the content).
I tried turning off Smart Features and oh my, that's not usable. So I lived with the AI summary at the top. For a week. Then this morning, I saw several messages in my Primary tab that normally get sorted into Promotions, Social, Updates or Forums. This is not unheard of; sometimes a company uses a new incoming address or something and stuff gets put in the wrong bucket.
But THIS time, I got a popup that says I must "Share" this message with Google and links to the Privacy Policy and Google Terms of Service. And an explicit sentence: "Messages and attachments might be reviewed by humans, so don't share any sensitive or confidential information."
I'm not naive. I'm an early adopter, my email address includes my name and no numbers. I AM a direct marketer. From the get-go, having Google read my email in order to provide targeted advertising was part of the deal. I was fine with that.
BUT...now...what they are saying is that...we are going to use your email to train our LLMs. I'm not okay with that. That knowledge of my way of writing, my personal details, my confidential commercial information is NOT okay to use to train your models. 'Cause I expect mistakes will be made and more information will reside in the model than those at Google (or FB, MSFT etc) intended. And I'm not really up for assuming that risk.
So...goodbye Gmail. It's been great. Really great. I'm sure I'll miss you. Bye.
My email is now being hosted by Microsoft, so hopefully will be free of the outages and limits some of you have experienced with that email in the past. There it will reside until I cannot turn off MSFT's ability to read my email. Then I guess it's off to Switzerland ( [https://proton.me/about](https://proton.me/about) ); my email can be with my gold. JK.
Tom
p.s. why thank you Gemini for reformatting that for me into a clean, engaging markdown blog post. Yes, I do agree this is a sharp, timely take on the "AI-ification" of tools we use every day. I love you. Kill me last?
Instead of the transaction info which is strictly defined and uniformly formatted, they've attempted to give "friendly names" to each one and "simplify" the descriptions.
This has been a supremely bad idea. Firstly, it deprives me of essential info about each transaction, which I cannot access at all in the mobile app. I need to go into the website on a desktop computer, click through a few screens to say "this description is incorrect!" and request that they show me the original.
The "simple descriptions" elide a lot of useful info, such as the vendor's phone number.
Sometimes they are completely incorrect, like the name of my church gets a completely different and misleading name in every transaction. I cannot disable this.
Last year, there was a transaction during tax time that I believed to be some sort of penalty by the government, and I was freaking out about it, but it turned out to actually be my refund and had been "helpfully renamed" by my bank to be extremely misleading.
I have discussed these issues with the online support staff, and in person at my branch, and they are sympathetic, but there is nothing they can do about the app, and the only workaround for me is to individually flag each transaction as it comes in, and fix it, and there is no "global disable" or "global unfuck everything" button for any of us, anywhere.