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Comment by beart | Hacker News Reader

Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it was relatively painless when I actually committed to it. I did a search over my password manager for my old email and just went through the list logging in and switching to the new email. Probably took a few hours at most.

For anything I missed, I set gmail to forward everything to my new host. Cleaned up the few things I missed, and am only left with spam. I still leave the forwarding rule there in case a personal contact or service I forgot pops up, but it has been years without any issue, and I never feel the need to log into gmail. Certain emails are not forwarded I think, despite the "forward all" rule... but nothing I've ever found to matter.

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> Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it was relatively painless

If you have your own custom domain, changing providers is pretty easy, IMO. In fact, the portability factor is probably the best benefit of having your own domain.

Some TLDs get rejected or autocorrected by broken validators. I've had foo.dev changed to foo.de.

I was on the application for the .name top level domain back in 2000 and then there was a reasonable excuse for that - we were in the first new batch of TLDs. We had to contact a lot of site owners to try to smooth the path. But given the number of new TLDs since, you'd think people would've learnt.

I have a .name account and still occasionally run into sites that don't accept it.

This drives me insane. Lazy input boxes that only accept email domains from the big names.

Tradeoff: Failing to accept a limited number of rarer domain. Vs. all the errors caused by idiots who can't spell mgail.com, or gmail.cmo, or gmali.com, gmail.kom, or whatever the heck that thing is.

Excluding people from services because you can't be bothered to handle their perfectly correct and validated email address is actually a form of discrimination.

My pet hate is my bank refusing to email me bank statement notifications to mail@mydomain.com ("not a personal address"), yet their password validation and marketing emails get through quite OK. Somehow they seem incapable of acknowledging that one department of the bank has made a technical decision in conflict with other departments...

Is it discrimination if you decide to switch to custom power outlets in your house and then you complain that local hardware stores don't provide compatible parts?

> Excluding people from services because you can't be bothered to ...

Yes. But like most forms of discrimination, it's probably 100% legal. Same as Chuck's Pizza Parlor refusing to deliver outside an X mile radius, and 1st National Bank refusing to use the full legal name of anyone who's name exceeds the size of their DB's 'CustomerName' field.

"Not illegal" doesn't mean we should passively accept it whether we encounter it professionally at work or personally as a customer.

True. Vote your wallet as you will. Beyond that - discretion is the better part of valor, the low-level employees you can easily complain to are very unlikely to have any say in the policy, and Chuck is free to ask you to drive 40-mile pizza deliveries for the same pay and mileage as he gives at his 10-mile limit.

> Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it ... Probably took a few hours at most.

That does indeed sound as daunting as I feared, unfortunately.

> That does indeed sound as daunting as I feared, unfortunately.

You don't have to do it all in one go. It isn't like you have to move everything all at once like you're moving to a new apartment.

I started moving away from gmail years ago. It took probably like 5-10 minutes to set up email under my own DNS control and to set a forwarding address on gmail that pointed to that email.

I didn't even bother to do an initial bulk move of things over to the new email, I just switched things over individually as needed in a sort of on-demand fashion. 30-60 seconds here and there moving over individual accounts one at a time and only when it became obvious that I was moving over something worth keeping up on.

Spread out like that it felt like almost no effort at all.

In my mind it has to be done this way because there's absolutely no way you'll recall everything that needs migrating in a short time. Even if you have a password manager as your email is likely older than it, but it's probably a great start if you have that.

This is the way!

Every time google did something to piss me off I moved an account or two in anger. It felt good. It felt so good that when I searched my gmail and only found google-related hits in my password manager, I was slightly disappointed lol

Changing email providers was easy. But replacing gmail address in all my accounts with my own domain based address took me 2 years to complete. You only have to do it once though, and then you can change providers at will.

Not to mention all the sites where the email address IS the account, and often don't have good procedures to change it.

Having new email sent to my new inbox would actually be pretty easy for me even, since I've already been renting my own domain for ages now.

It's probably not even several hours of work for me, except that I do want to set that time aside in case something goes wrong and I need to revert things; I can't afford to not receive email anymore.

That, and I do want to transfer all my existing email history.

A few hours pf effort to liberate your email from Google. Well worth imo.

Well, at least the emails that I don't send at least one Gmail user...

(Don't get me wrong, I still want to do it, but it's still daunting.)

can always buy a domain with pop3 enabled mail like the old days. pretty cheap.

I want to try another provider, but my family (partner, kids, grandparents) stores pictures in Google Photos, shares docs from google drive, etc. It is all the extra stuff I get with Google that feels daunting to me, I'd love to switch for email and calendar.

You can just have a gmail account you don't use, and in fact even if you have your own domain, if you're willing to pay for Google separately, you can have a Google Workspace account for your custom domain and your e-mail for that domain at Fastmail and just not point any MX records at Google. It works fine - it's what I do as an artifact of having used them for e-mail and moved but not having bothered to untangle my other stuff (yet; but it's been years).

The only thing that's a bit of a hassle is the calendar. It also mostly works, since you can add your Fastmail calendar to Google Calendar, but Google is slow to sync.

I dont think you need a gmail account for that. just a google account without gmail would work.

And you can move your email but leave an unused account in existence if something really really needs a G login. Not great, but doable and some time later you might find out it isn't needed after all.

Have that problem here. I just mirror all that stuff offline. Someone has to do it.

I have no cloud document, email or photo storage at all. Just an IMAP box.

As an alternative to forwarding, you can also configure Fastmail to fetch mail from (and send via) Gmail like a mail client.

It's a process. I just set up a filter on Fastmail that showed me all mail that was delivered to my @gmail.com address within the last two weeks.

Then I went through that list every now and then, unsubscribing or changing email addresses as they came up. At the moment it's mostly just mail from sites I've used Google OAuth for some reason and can't be bothered to change (or just plain can't - one site actually uses email as a primary key and are completely 100% unable to change it.)

The daunting bit (if you're using gmail or something where you don't own the domain) is getting everyone to update their address books. I took the same approach that you did and it took years before the forwarded emails died down, even with responding to all of them with "please use my new address". I got there in the end, though.

I had an automated reply that pretended I didn't receive mails there anymore.

I would receive some messages twice for some time, as people resent their mails to the new address

Things sorted themselves out without much effort. But indeed, it took at least a year or two.

Yeah, it's a pretty easy process these days. Just insanely time consuming. Fastmail has an easy migration tool as well if you don't want to go the IMAP route.

Now, migrating filters and rules over on the other hand...

I did the same. I’ve been happy with the solution, except that many years later, I still get emails to my gmail - I just keep forwarding them.

> For anything I missed, I set gmail to forward everything to my new host

This is one of the big reasons I switched to GMail when it was new. Most free alternatives like Yahoo would lock forwarding behind a paywall. A very transparent attempt to keep users by force.

Did you migrate any old email?

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