Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

I really wish all mail providers made it easy and seamless to bring your own domain (or register and manage one in the background for you, without you having to care for the details). Obviously giving a service-tied email domain to users is a great lock-in strategy. But it's worrying that so many people have a big part of their online identity tied to Google.

(You can even sign up for a Google Account without GMail, using a third-party domain. And this is distinct from Google Workspace, or whatever they're calling it today. You get a normal, regular, personal Google Account, just without GMail and using your own non-gmail.com address.)

This would be easily solved for customers who care about it by allowing you to pay a one-off fee to reserve the name for ~100 years.

Or they could just absorb that.

Any idea why it works that way? Have they offered an explanation?

I'm a Fastmail customer but I've never noticed this because I use my own domain.

It is easier to change MX records for your personal domain.

That is 100% unacceptable.

I use Fastmail with my own domain. I am not sure of the logic that says paying $60/year for email is fine, but $8/year for a domain is a bridge too far.

Do that, it's a non-issue, though I do agree with you that it shouldn't be a thing (or at least have like a multiple year embargo on the address).

How's that different from any other provider?

I don’t see masked email feature in Migadu, is there one? Useful for burner services

Having used both Google and Apple for notes, calendar, docs, cloud back up (general files) and photos I have come to believe Google has the better tech but Apple has the better product. It fascinates me how Google just can’t design a simple and intuitive UI for its products, which are by all means technically superior.

I'm a happy icloud photos user. Other sync is not so good, but icloud photos works fine.

Was about to mention magic earth, but of course someone else has recommended it already. Was talking with a coworker about degoogling and they brought up this. Surprisingly works good enough where I live.

It's quite possible to use Android without a Google account.

GrapheneOS lets you use Play Store apps

It is still viable to self-host everything from photos to mail yourself and sync to cloud/storage services as disaster recovery. It helps if you have an infrastructure background but anyone can set this up. Mail is the most annoying, not because it's technically difficult but because deliverability is a long-term reputation function. Nevertheless I've been my own MX and storage provider since the early '90s and it's too late to change my ways now, you just have to keep up with the gold standard as it varies.

The biggest hazard, especially if the whole family uses your stuff, is key-person risk, since infrastructure requires maintenance. The second biggest is being out of your depth in securing it.

My only regret in all my years of self-hosting was that time I returned a portable /24 to APNIC. Still stings even if it was the right thing to do, civically speaking.

I retain gmail & hotmail accounts for deliverability checks and as signup swamps.

To be fair if both google and dropbox can't take care of 1TB of data, who can?

My solution against photo anxiety is to actually look at them and decide to physically print the best ones every year. More likely to be used as gifts or just fun to look through them in a photo album, nobody is going to sit next to you on a phone or computer but bring out an old photo album and everyone is on it.

Back it up to S3 glacier, or to Backblaze. The cost of it is pretty low, much lower than a VPS / bare metal box + 1 TB cost for the photo app hosting.

Can you use GrapheneOS with your bank app? With a digital wallet for NFC cards? With Uber or Lyft? (Asking seriously, not rhetorically.)

Someone showed me OSMAnd recently while we were hiking. I installed it as soon as I got home. Great for hiking.

Then last week I used it for navigation (on a phone with no SIM card).

Absolutely. Terrible.

Worst navigation app I've seen. Told me to make a turn at an intersection that did not allow turns. Then at another intersection, it told me to "Turn left", but the display clearly showed it going straight. I'm guessing that the straight road probably is angled 1 degree or something at the intersection and the app was viewing that as a turn.

There is CoMaps on iOS that is open source and is based on OpenStreetMap. Highly recommended.

I've largely de-Googled myself, but not my family. The only Gmail I have is from a few old accounts that hardly ever email me anymore; I've been on Apple's email, calendar, photos, etc. for years, and use Kagi for search. Nor do I feel any pull back toward Google. The biggest involvement I have is for the correspondents I have who are still using Gmail; every time I email them, my stuff ends up in Google's system.

I've de-Googled myself and this idea does not match my reality.

1) "De-googling" doesn't need to be a binary, all-in or all-out situation. Any reduction in reliance of Google (or any single point of failure) is good. Diversifying the big stuff (mail, storage, etc.) is a great start. About last on the list is worrying about the occasional allowance for gstatic.com or whatever.

2) While I occasionally need to allow some scripts from google, it's absolutely nowhere near 1/3rd of sites.

The article does call out plain text email without formatting or attachments. Plain text typically refers to visual formatting, while clear text refers to lack of encryption.

Unfortunately this is common in many smtp servers and is configuration dependent: After you authenticate as usera@example.com you can send emails as userb@example.com.

You mean e2e? on-disk encryption (ie. "encryption at rest") is basically used by everyone, including gmail and outlook.

Mailbox doesn’t support it, but on mailbox you can use your IMAP app with Proton not.

And on mailbox you can easily send and receive PGP encrypted mail on mailbox.org. They provide a page for key import, allowing you to send encrypted emails like regular mail when needed.

It’s your choice, if you always want to use proton mail app everywhere you can use proton.

Self-hosting seems a bit extreme. The first step is actually to have your own custom domain, so that you can change provider easily. Granted you still depend on a provider, but you are not locked in.

What bothered me about Gmail was that it was central to my life and if something were to happen and they locked my account they have zero support.

With that out of the way I feel perfectly happy with FM — no need to go further down the paranoia hole.

> self-hosting on your own metal, where you're now just dependent on your ISP

Your ISP, the hardware not failing, needing to do routine maintenance and (expensive!) upgrades, having room in your house, having consistent power to your servers, possible theft, natural disasters causing you to lose your home, etc.

There's a reason I use a VPS for hosting a lot of things haha. Mostly because I live in a small apartment and don't have room for a server rack.

Backup your data. Email is data. It is easy enough to do and frees you from many problems. You restore from backup and go on with life.

It's more about diversifying at least that was my intention when I moved mail to a new provider.

Unfortunately, most big mail providers won’t accept email from your self-hosted mail server, even with DKIM, SPF, etc. So, diversifying is as good as it gets.

Which is why you should buy your own domain so you can easily move to another provider.

And backup your emails of course.

There's no reason to self-host your e-mail server. As long as you own your domain, you can simply point the DNS to a different provider when you want to switch.

Namecheap's "private email" service.