>What’s a good privacy-oriented, web-based email service? I’ve heard of ProtonMail but haven’t used it.
Been Firefox user out of conviction for 10+ years, made the switch to DuckDuckGo as my main search engine with about a year ago, no regrets. But Gmail? It's sticky.
I have so much stuff tied to my email account and it just sucks looking for alternatives. I'd even happily pay. The main difficulty is finding a service that's as mature, feature-wise, as Gmail and a sensible way to migrate all my stuff (email-logins for major websites, informing clients of the new address, etc).
I think the best compromise is using two accounts for a couple of years, heavily focusing on the non-Gmail one and dropping Gmail once you had no interaction with it for a while. But all the obvious alternatives people post don't quite cut it for me, I've been searching for ages.
I've been "meaning" to switch off of Gmail for years, with all of the issues with Google. I switched to Firefox/Safari a couple years ago, then DDG a year ago..
Finally, a week ago, I switched my email to fastmail. Bought a new domain for 10 years explicitly for that purpose.
I'm slowly migrating everything to them... Every day or two I think of something else that needs to be migrated, and do it. I don't feel a need to rush because I just have them both simultaneously.
I have to say though, Fastmail feels better than Gmail in every way. The UI is fast and snappy, looks clean (with a few themes), includes a calendar and notes. The first month is free, so I figured I'd try it before I decided to go all in. After about 20 minutes I was sold and bought a year subscription...
They have this really cool feature with subdomain forwarding so you can organize things into folders automatically. As I've been migrating emails, I've been giving each service it's own unique email address. Eg `amazon@stores.domain.com` will automatically add the email to my "stores" folder, and I'll see it came from Amazon. I can put unlimited anything before the @ sign, which will be really nice for signing up for one-off forums. If they sell my email address or send spam, I'll know exactly who did it and can just block that address.
They also have a bunch of other features for organization like the "+ addressing" that Gmail has. I definitely recommend checking them out though. I feel so good having an email that won't get shut down
The good thing is you never need to drop your Gmail. I use Fastmail since 4? Years and still get all the mail from all private accounts I've ever had. And they have excellent guides for migration, or so I recall (it's been a while)
get your own domain name. then you can move between webmail providers quite simply: just change the mx records and you can shift between most reponsible providers. it incurs a small cost.
i setup a gmail redirect when i switched to fastmail, that was more than a decade ago. it may or may not still be an option.
Maybe you can setup your new service to pull email from your Gmail account via POP3 or something, so you still only need to login to one account. Then you can gradually move further and further away from the Gmail account.
Been Firefox user out of conviction for 10+ years, made the switch to DuckDuckGo as my main search engine with about a year ago, no regrets. But Gmail? It's sticky.
I have so much stuff tied to my email account and it just sucks looking for alternatives. I'd even happily pay. The main difficulty is finding a service that's as mature, feature-wise, as Gmail and a sensible way to migrate all my stuff (email-logins for major websites, informing clients of the new address, etc).
I think the best compromise is using two accounts for a couple of years, heavily focusing on the non-Gmail one and dropping Gmail once you had no interaction with it for a while. But all the obvious alternatives people post don't quite cut it for me, I've been searching for ages.