Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

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I try to do a lot of this, but it's rather exhausting and a moving target, due to acquisitions or shifting priorities and directions from various providers. When work and life get busy, I just don't have the energy for it.

I often envy the people who simply seem to not care or notice.

I've been trying to clean up my account sprawl for years. Every so often when I have some time off I'll try to tackle it. I think I've deleted over 100 accounts, but I still have over 300. It's a lot of work on some of these sites. I spent 45 minutes on hold with Sony just for them to tell me no and hang up on me before I could reply.

I've also tried moving off Gmail several times, but this usually just ends in more account sprawl... I now have 3 inboxes to manage. Rome wasn't built in a day, but 1500 years later the ruins remain. That's how migrating email feels to me. I don't think I can ever actually delete an email account I used for over 20 years. If I switch to another provider (or one I've already half moved to) what will they look like in another 20 years. With email being our identity online, it isn't so trivial, unless you've only ever signed up for 5 websites and a handful of people have your address. For some reason I have an issue with the idea of setting up a forwarder to push everything to one place. Pushing spam around just feels like it makes a bigger mess.

Thanks for the detailed reply.

I acknowledge is hard, but everything worth in life seems to be, so fighting against what they try to shove down our throats seems to be the only meaningful way.

If I may give you a suggestion for how to get rid of GMail:

1. register your domain 2. either have the registrar redirect your emails to e.g. your Pronton address, or pay Pronto the 3$/month premium to host your domain emails directly. Nice benefit: you now have unlimited aliases for your @domain.tld domain 3. setup a redirect for all the other GMail / etc mailboxes to your new Proton account

In this way you won't lose any email and will start to advertise your own email address, which is also allegedly giving a more professional feeling that <something.something>@gmail.com for who's receiving it.

I went down that road before, it's how I started at Proton. I ended up with an .io TLD, which now has an uncertain future. Right now, I'm not too invested in it and I'm not sure I want to invest further in a TLD that could rug pull me in 10 years. I just spent several hours looking for a semi-decent .com (and to some extent .net/.org) I could live with and it's rough out there. Everything is being squatted on.

If I can find something, I'm not sure I want to stick with Proton. Their growth into new apps has felt pushy and spammy, there is a degree of lock-in where their apps are required (or a bridge), and search isn't the best. I was looking at Fastmail if I do make the jump, but that all hinges on finding a better domain situation I can live with for the next several decades. I think my current Proton subscription renews in December, so I should probably act now if I'm going to do something.

The unlimited aliases are kind of a gift and a curse. I always thought having a unique email for each site would be great, to figure out who is selling my info. However, keeping track of every address I gave out was tedious, and out of the 40 or so I did it for, I don't think I ever ran into an issue (which is good)... so it was a lot of work for little to no payoff. I did see that my adobe email got out there from using a +alias with Gmail years ago. With the new features that were added to Gmail and Proton to highlight newsletters and easily kill them, I was able to dramatically cleanup my inbox pretty quickly about a year ago. Though I suspect they just made a rule behind the scenes and didn't kill them at the source, which would be my preference.

With email, I do question if it's worth it. Even the privacy stuff that companies like Proton talk about... it's mostly marketing. Gmail controls a majority of email. When emailing anyone using Gmail, Google is still getting the email. The protections only exist if emailing Proton to Proton, which I've never done.

So it's hard... but is it worth it? That's a question I struggle with. I prefer my experience in Kagi to Google Search, and I like supporting a business model where I'm the customer instead of the product, but is my life materially better than someone who isn't up at 3:30am thinking about this stuff? My quiet rebellion feels insignificant.

I'm feeling like the guy in the middle right now, and have felt that way for many years now... https://imgflip.com/i/b329ok

It's really interesting to hear other experiences, I see this really goes deep for you... I guess I'm much less overthinking the whole issue than you are All my switching feels organic in retrospective and creating a Proton mail account + GMail forward didn't seem like a big deal at the time, it's not like you have to self host your SMTP server or similar effort after all.

I agree the "e2e-encrypted email" bit is mostly marketing until GMail keeps its dominion on the market, which might be still for a very long time, but that's entirely up to us. I have some contacts who use Proton and some not, in the same way I have contacts who use Signal and some who don't. It doesn't have to be a full victory for me to make the switch worth it, even if just a minority of the users, the ones that I care about, do jump on the wagon I consider that a full personal victory.

I really haven't felt the Proton marketing push either... actually quite the opposite! I found out they have now a Meet application by chance even after so many years being a paying customer. Not sure what "bridge" you're talking about, unless you refer to accessing encrypted mails via IMAP, which I don't do so I don't care, webapp or `brew install protonmail` or installing the iOS apps do the trick for me and I don't see how that can be a win for GMail, it's just a different app which looks similar, no? AFAIK you can use all Proton applications from any browser, the ones I use (mail, calendar and meet) definitely work on Firefox for me.

About the domain ragpull fear... that sounds very unlikely? I mean, unless you choose a very esoteric TLD the probability of Google automatically banning your account seems to be a much much higher one? but still, if you switch to another provider you don't really need to setup a fancy domain, you can still setup GMail forward etc to the new @pm.me address or else. By the way, the "receive wildcard domain emails" is also an opt-in in Protonmail, you don't get it enabled automatically, so shouldn't be a blocker in itself.

Probably I'm a much simpler minded person, my heuristic goes somehow like "do I hate the company? yes -> is there a decent alternative? -> yes -> use it"

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