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I dropped all google services and it wasn’t that hard. The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own d

I dropped all google services and it wasn’t that hard. The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail). Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is. On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do it, but doesn’t actually delete the old one on the backend so you get emails to both (and it becomes impossible to turn off notifications on the old one). One site couldn’t handle custom email domains, one site told me to create a new account and ignore the old one. One site changed my email, but still makes me login with my old email as the user, etc. I ended up using an alias for the less trustworthy sites and filing as many CCPA requests as I could to the companies to delete accounts (naturally the sites bad about accounts are bad about this too). The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. I plan to delete my old google account and have a fresh one with everything turned off that I only use for YouTube. Other than that though, it’s been a lot simpler than I thought it would be. Google is starting to feel like Yahoo to me, a company without clear vision or purpose. They better hope their ad revenue doesn’t decay.

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
Google's purpose is to help the NSA circumvent congress. Google is here to stay until further notice.
- Efuveo 6y ago
  This thread is filled with juicy dumb comments, but you certainly win.
  - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
    Seriously? Have you not read any of the snowden leaks?
    - fossuser 6y ago
      The leaks suggested the NSA was accessing information via taps between unencrypted data center connections, not via direct support or collaboration from the companies. After the leaks google encrypted those connections. The other parts are within FISA and other parts of the law. There may be disagreements with the transparency or way this stuff works, but your first comment was overly broad and mostly inaccurate.
  - ditonal 6y ago
    If you’re going to astroturf don’t use a brand new account.
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. "
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- dylan604 6y ago
  I hereby provide notice they can feel free to go away.
dnr 6y ago
An entire day! I wish it were that easy. My password manager says I have 331 accounts using my gmail address. I figure it'll take me a year to move everything if I spend a couple hours a week. I categorized them into tiers based on importance and still ended up with 63 in the top "important or regularly use" tier and 59 in the next "will probably use again" tier. The lower tiers, I'll probably not even bother with.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  There is an automatic email change option in few password managers but yeah, that's one of the reasons why I have been redirecting lot of things using my own domain name. If in future, some service go down - I can reroute that. If google deprecate gmail, no worries.
  - johannes1234321 6y ago
    Changing it in the password manager is the easy part. The tricky one is changing the account details on the different site and switching from @gmail.com to @myfancydomain.whatever
- fossuser 6y ago
  I have 163 accounts for clarity, so it’d probably take you two days. I do mean an entire day, I basically did it for 12 hours. Have to find some ways to entertain myself during the pandemic lockdown :).
- DavideNL 6y ago
  Same here, but I simply forwarded ALL incomming e-mail from my old Gmail to my new email address. That way, i did not have to change all website accounts at once. So I slowly updated a lot of less important accounts/websites to my new email address over the period of 1+ year.
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    The incremental approach is always the better solution imo. For email, for password managers, for any big migration. People always put off saying it'd be a lot of work, but if you start at any given time, within 1-2 year you'll be fully migrated. This is what I did for password manager, I migrated each website on a per-use basis. Every time I used a website with a manual password, I replaced it with a generated password. This automatically prioritizes more important websites, which you tend to use more often. For email, similarly, you migrate to the new email, and you give people the new one gradually too. Eventually anything that's left over will be spam, and that'll actually be your "less-important" secondary address you can give to websites you don't care about.
darrmit 6y ago
I did the same several years ago. Dropped a GMail account I had for ~10+ years and switched to Fastmail. I hard deleted the account. In hindsight I wish I hadn’t _deleted_ it but I’ve really only run into that on a very small number of occasions. I too switched to Fastmail and have been happy. I have a new Google account I use with YouTube and very occasionally Google Docs/Sheets, but I run it in a container tab in Firefox. If you have a password manager and have been using it for awhile it makes things a lot easier since you can identify what you have tied to the account. I had over 100 sites tied to my GMail account and was able to mostly clean it up in a Saturday.
submeta 6y ago
Same here: Migrated all my gmail accounts to Fastmail. Took me two days. Migrated Google Docs to Dropbox. And replaced Google Sheets and Doc with a Microsoft subscription (MS Word and MS Excel). Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind. Finally there is youtube for me. Ain‘t no alternative I know about. It‘s hard to leave google completely behind. Edit: Replaced Chrome first with Safari, then with Firefox and never looked back. Edit 2: Moved all my photos from Google‘s cloud solution to iCloud when I migrated from Android to iDevices. Edit 3: Fastmail (although a rather smallish company) do a phantastic job with their mail service. Their contact management and calendar are also superb. Fastmail + MailMate on MacOS are a dream-team.
- nowa1000 6y ago
  Fastmail also wants a phone number. I no longer know what mail service to use apart from setting it all up myself.
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    mailbox.org does not require a phone number. It also includes its own calendar sync and online office suite(although I've never really tried the office functionality myself). I've been using it for a few years now and I can't complain.
  - prox 6y ago
    I like protonmail myself, take a look at that.
  - iimblack 6y ago
    Tutanota seems like the safest and most secure option I’ve been able to find.
  - brongondwana 6y ago
    Unfortunately we still need some kind of signal that you're a unique person at signup to avoid infinite fraud (as it is we still get waves of thousands of accounts at a time who have worked out a way to get their hands on a pile of numbers and are finessing an attack on someone else via us). You can delete the number once you've signed up, though of course that means that if you forget your password is reduces the channels by which we can validate that you're the same person! (this is also quite common: many HN users would be surprised how often people forget passwords)
gabruoy 6y ago
Newpipe has completely replaced my Youtube usage since I mostly use it on mobile, and it lets you save your subscriptions locally. Its actually really nice and imo superior to the dumbed down Youtube app used nowadays anyway. Freetube is the same idea but for desktop, but I've found it to be much buggier in using it, so I occasionally just use youtube in a private tab and directly search for a video on desktop, usually after seeing in my Newpipe feed. Both of these are listed in the original list, but they deserve special shoutouts since YouTube is the site with the most universality within Google's ecosystem. Also many of your favorite video creators may already use services like LBRY and Bitchute.
- fossuser 6y ago
  It’s less about the product to me and more about the content. YouTube has the content I want to watch, creators that use YouTube rely on it for their revenue and recommendation algorithm. Until that problem is fixed the alternatives won’t work.
  - gabruoy 6y ago
    Newpipe and Freetube are YouTube frontends, so all the content is there just without having to sign in. If you only really use a subscriptions list and directly related videos as your way to find youtube content, it's a drop in replacement. If you want to use google's recommendation algorithm though,I don't think anyone is going to be able to recreate that experience any time soon.
    - fossuser 6y ago
      Thanks, that’s good to know - I’ll check those out.
- viraptor 6y ago
  > Also many of your favorite video creators may already use services like LBRY and Bitchute. Or moving to Nebula. Somehow https://watchnebula.com/ https://watchnebula.com/ gained a lot of attention recently with maybe half of my yt subscriptions also publishing there. (Or maybe it's just my bubble)
Shacklz 6y ago
> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. For following channels, I personally use Feedly and can only recommend it - it's not exactly the same but for me it comes close enough.
actuator 6y ago
I know it is easy to hate on big companies but how do you leave them when credible alternatives are not even close in productivity/performance. I tried leaving Macbook, but whenever I have tried the alternatives(even Thinkpad with Ubuntu), Macbook still seems to be at the sweet spot of life time ownership cost/performance. I do care about repairability, good keyboards etc. but I do have to look at things in balance. On just principles, I tried switching to DDG, Gmail alternatives like Hey etc, Maps alternatives but they are not even close to making your life easy. At the end of the day, I really don't want to take time categorising every email, handle spam on my own, worrying about data security. Services like Gmail seem far superior to alternatives to me. Edit: Lastly, I would add one can pay for Gsuite and then Gmail etc. are ad free. I doubt they would be mining paid Gsuite user's data since companies use that.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I have a MacBook and it’s great, I also have an iPhone. It’s the business model that matters to me more. It’s not a “hate on big companies” thing. In fact the big software companies usually have better security (google included) because they have some of the world’s best security people. I try to avoid companies that have an incentive to collect user information for ad targeting. Apple doesn’t have that (and they’ve also made privacy a brand thing now so they’re even better than average). Gmail was great when it came out, but today it’s a pretty mediocre product. Fastmail is actually better and I don’t say that as someone making excuses for non-google services. Their docs and custom domain support are really great. Their support for aliases is also great. They have good fancy workflow options I just don’t need so I don’t use. DDG was worse for a long time, but for the last year or so it’s become good enough for me to make default. I occasionally g! to run a google query, but that’s probably only 10% of the time (and of those only half are probably actually good).
  - RealStickman_ 6y ago
    Apple's privacy protecting actions only apply in countries where they can go through with it. Here's one example where they can't protect your privacy. [1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insight-idUSKCN1G8060 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
dheera 6y ago
How do you deal with work situations that want you to use Google Hangouts, Docs, or Calendar?
- fossuser 6y ago
  I’m lucky that I don’t have any of that at work. If I did I would need a google account just for that purpose.
mehrdadn 6y ago
Do you use complicated Gmail filters? What did you use instead of them after migrating? Also, any Google Apps Scripts?
- fossuser 6y ago
  No google apps scripts for me so I didn’t have to deal with that. My email style is inbox everything and route emails to folders or delete on read. If there’s something I’m always routing without reading then I unsubscribe. Workflow may not be for everyone, but it keeps my email under control and organized.
  - mehrdadn 6y ago
    Ah thanks. Sounds like you had it quite easy to be honest, and you must not get a lot of emails at all. Not every email is an action item for me—many are just for record-keeping purposes and later searchability, though I have certain filters for those to mark the occasional ones that require action. I would go absolutely insane if I had to look for even 0.1 seconds at every email.
    - fossuser 6y ago
      The fastmail filters are supposedly pretty good, but I can’t personally vouch for them. I also have a lot of email for record keeping (amazon orders etc.) I just route those to folders myself. You’re right though that I probably have it easier than most generally.
neckardt 6y ago
Is fastmail the best email service provider these days? I switched my own domain to them a while ago, but then abandoned it when I heard about the new laws in Australia.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I treat email as an insecure mostly public form of communication. This is particularly true when most of the people you’re emailing have gmail anyway. Things like proton mail make no sense to me in that context. Fastmail works well and has design incentives aligned with the user, I thought they were the best of the options available when I switched.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Agree with your first point, but Protonmail is at least a marginal improvement.
- abawany 6y ago
  I use a combination of Mailo, Mailbox.org, and Runbox with my domains. They have their varying quirks but I am happy with my choice esp. wrt. their host countries.
- loh 6y ago
  What new laws in Australia are you referring to? I did a quick search and I saw a lot about anti-spam laws (which is great), but how does that affect switching your own domain to fastmail?
  - zahllos 6y ago
    The grandparent comment is likely referring to the TOLA Act, which allows Australian police and intelligence agencies to issue for example technical assistance requests to decrypt or otherwise get access to whatever data they want. As I understand it the oversight is relatively minimal and any company operating on Australian soil can be subject to such a request. Here's their government web page on it: https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/national-security/lawful-access-telecommunications/data-encryption https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/natio... It passed around the end of 2018 and a lot of Australian companies (e.g. Atlassian) were not fans of it.
keb_ 6y ago
I also moved all my e-mail off Gmail and onto Migadu using my own domains. This ensures that even if Migadu goes under, I could swifty move to another service and keep my same e-mail addresses (for the record, Migadu is awesome). Like you mentioned in another comment, it did take me some time to move all my accounts over (about 2 days worth), but I'm so happy I did.
- hx2a 6y ago
  How well does Migadu handle spam filtering? I recently switched from Google to AWS Workmail and get spam and junk I never saw before.
  - keb_ 6y ago
    Quite well in my experience... sometimes too well. When you sign up with Migadu, you are essentially your own postmaster and can set how aggressive you want to filter spam on the domain level as well as per mailbox.
- maps7 6y ago
  Lots of text on Migadu's site but no pictures of what the inbox looks like
  - keb_ 6y ago
    I think they appeal to powerusers that probably already use a client like Thunderbird. :) However, their webmail client is just RainLoop, which you can find a demo of here: https://www.rainloop.net/try-now/ https://www.rainloop.net/try-now/ Also, they are currently collaborating with sourcehut to develop a new webmail client to replace RainLoop. For the record, I like RainLoop quite a bit and find it to be very speedy.
    - tjoff 6y ago
      Sure, but as a poweruser with a surname domain I have to be considerate of all none-poweruser relatives that are going to be using it. So even though I'll barely use it at all I signed up for Migadu only so that I could have a look at the webmail UI. But I couldn't even get a look at it, likely because I have yet to configured my domain. But I will not disrupt my domain just to get a peak at the UI... Thanks!
texasbigdata 6y ago
Stupid question but why not just forward if all your other activity is off of google? Do you believe the gmail data capture is high enough that your otherwise complete migration would be compromised?
- fossuser 6y ago
  Totally reasonable question. I haven’t deleted the old account yet and do have it importing right now (that’s a good strategy for catching any straggling accounts or friends you haven’t given your new email too). I don’t have a good answer beyond some weird sense of aesthetic tidiness. I have a dash of wanting to compulsively organize things, so having the old account bothers me irrationally.
birdyrooster 6y ago
I needed way longer than a day to get all of the accounts I created over the years with my gmail. I found I had to check my gmail for over a year until I was confident that I wasn’t missing any accounts. Still use YouTube and Google search. They have no (decent) competition still.
abawany 6y ago
The thought of arbitrary shutdown and their 'legendary' customer service got me moving off Google services. I started with Runbox using my own domains, which works well though some emails just never got delivered. I'm now on a combination of Runbox, Mailo, and Mailbox.org with long-term prepaid plans and I'm satisfied - I'll probably prune at some point but the prices are so reasonable that the urgency to do so is not there. Support by Mailo and Runbox has been excellent.
jjoonathan 6y ago
> The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail Every time google has done something to piss me off over the last few years, I have channeled that into migrating a few accounts away from google. It's a good way to unwind and has the bonus of being an action that speaks louder than words.
ryantgtg 6y ago
A few months ago I started an Etsy shop, but I couldn’t create an account using a fastmail address. I got an “unknown error.” And the help desk suggested I use a more mainstream email service. That solution worked, and then I switched it to fastmail. But this goes to show how basic the opsec is for some companies. Similarly with Twitter, each time I create a dev account for a bot, if I use fastmail my account will get locked 3-4 times in the first 20 minutes after creating the account (and not so with gmail). I’m not sure why they think that bad actors can’t also sign up for a Gmail account, and are more likely to use fastmail.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
  > I’m not sure why they think that bad actors can’t also sign up for a Gmail account Because it requires a phone number? Or does fastmail do too?
  - ryantgtg 6y ago
    Not sure if fastmail does. And I didnt know gmail does. But, so does a twitter dev account. And they still lock me out like crazy if I use a non-gmail account.
switch11 6y ago
Kudos absolutely great to see you do this I moved off Google after they started doing some strange things with our adwords accounts Anyways Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. Google's earnings from ads went down last quarter. First quarter that has ever happened They are definitely at risk of becoming Yahoo 2.0. The only thing is the immense amount of spying on the world and American citizens they provide to Intelligence agencies. They will stay relevant/be too big to fail because of that Search -> Use Bing, then DuckDuck Go, and if still not good results, then Google Admittedly Google Search is still ahead of everyone Browser - never touched Chrome. Use Epic and Edge. Mobile use UC Browser (possibly even worse for privacy than Google, owned by Tencent), and on iOS use Safari Never used gmail so avoided that entirely. Use outlook, however, it is pretty bad. USe internal email server for work. Rainloop. Don't recommend that either avoid all google services as mucha s possible Trying to find an alternative to Android. Have an Apple iPhone, however, also wants a non Apple alternative to play Android Games
- sadfklsjlkjwt 6y ago
  Browser - use Firefox.
  - ColinHayhurst 6y ago
    Browser - I use Firefox and Vivaldi Search - I use Startpage, DDG, Mojeek
    - sadfklsjlkjwt 6y ago
      Startpage has changed ownership recently. I would look into the new owners...
  - therealmarv 6y ago
    financed mostly by Google
    - sheeshkebab 6y ago
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
What was your replacement for YouTube?
jsinai 6y ago
> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. I would include Maps to this list. Outside of the US (and presumably China although I do not have experience here), Google Maps has no real competitors.
- Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
  For motoring, commercial POIs, and address-level searches. For walking/cycling and non-commercial POIs, OpenStreetMap is consistently better in Europe.
mths 6y ago
> On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. I have this problem on Steam of all places. Way back when, I guess you had to sign up with your email as your username. I've long long since left that email behind, but it's still my username for logging onto Steam.
- lkois 6y ago
  Same here. I got steam when a friend bought HL2 waaay back, finished it, then gave me the game by giving me his account. All these years later, I've changed the email and built up the library, but the username is still my friends real name.
ekianjo 6y ago
> On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. Interesting, how do they such sites deal with people who lose their email account (phishing or others?)
- fossuser 6y ago
  They tell you to just make a new account with a new email.
vinni2 6y ago
I live in a country which is very sparsely populated and there are really no good alternatives to google maps and google translate which work most of the time unfortunately. Most other maps services like open street maps and Apple maps are so outdated and sometimes so wrong it is even dangerous to use them for navigation. As per translation everything really sucks. But google is better of them all.
dickdung 6y ago
google is well on its way to being dead. their customer service doesn't exist. gcp is a joke -companies either go with smaller cheaper providers or azure/aws. their flagship os is famous only heavily modified on other vendors' phones. for the simple, they get an iphone. the reason people use their search is that it's default -if it was bing no one will notice. ads? super customized ads are not worth the money to companies, lighter cheaper personalization is available from many vendors. google literally is yahoo. to tech people -the ones who made google what they are, google is actively their enemy, and for the regular user, they want an iphone, and they want customer service with a smile -google has none. me, i never googled-up. zoho for $1 a month, create new aliases for spam and filter them into folders. no gmail needed. maps? apple for iphone is ok, but i just use heremaps. you click a country, click download, and a couole of gig later you have full search offline. now youtube, that's an interesting product that's only popular because it's popular. and it was popular before google bought it. there are many unpopular competitors. all it takes to take down youtube is an app for another service included by default on samsung and iphone home screens, and youtube is gone. the same goes for facebook and twitter. myspace, yahoo, aol -all had their 15min of fame, all thought it would last forever. who cares. google is old news.
john4534243 6y ago
Two years ago i created a gmail account without providing mobile number and was using it on youtube for commenting on political videos. In the past few months i noticed my comments were getting upvoted frequently and then last week gmail is forcing me to provide mobile number for verification to login to my account. If google wants to have mobile number for creating accounts that fine but why force after 2 years. That feels cheating. The whole point is i don't want retaliation from political parties for commenting on the internet and don't want to be tied to my real identity with my mobile number. Sadly there is no competitor for youtube.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
agarzenm 6y ago
I have seen fastmail mentioned many times on this thread. They seem to be incorporated in Austrailia. Given that you clearly care about the use of your personal data; wouldn't moving something so sacred to a company incorporated in a country that actively tries to backdoor encryption/push easier wire tapping make you concerned? Have you considered this in your threat model?
- seriocomic 6y ago
  Not OP (but another Fastmail customer) - but there's a difference between caring about the use of your personal data from a eaves-dropping/tapping/threat perspective vs having your personal data used to make you the product. Fastmail is a paid service that provides an excellent service/product where the email you send/receive isn't monetised or incorporated into a revenue/ad machine.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I give an answer for this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24246733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24246733 In addition to that, I think Fastmail also has servers based in the US (though I’m not sure that matters for the law). You’re right though that the new laws coming out of Australia are pretty bad. The way I treat email takes that into account.
  - agarzenm 6y ago
    Apologies for only getting back to you now. Yeah this is all fine once you have accepted the trade offs and designed your threat model around it. People get extremely zealous around this sort of shit. One decision for another person does not need to be taken by everyone else just because it makes sense for you. I, like you am concerned about the use of data but I take a different approach. I don't mind if my data is used for product insight/generation once it is aggregated anonymized data, with the caveat that the website and or service is GDPR compliant. I give bonus points to any website that lets you nuke your account from the profile page without having to jump through e-mail hoops. I had a recent experience of requesting an account erasure under GDPR via e-mail. I expected the usual "are you sure?", "do you know the implications?", "who are you?" but no they just deleted the account straight away. I only found out it had been done by trying to login to the service again. 10/10
the_other 6y ago
Props. I did a very similar thing. For me, google docs was the hook that made me create another account. Every volunteer project I go near uses them. I tried creating aliases for the projects so that each product team could reference me by an email address that reflected the project. But after a year or two I had loads of these aliases and would accidentally open a doc for one project whilst logged in to gdocs as the identity for another project. I now just have one identity for google. And I feel dirty.

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago

Google's purpose is to help the NSA circumvent congress. Google is here to stay until further notice.

Efuveo 6y ago
This thread is filled with juicy dumb comments, but you certainly win.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  Seriously? Have you not read any of the snowden leaks?
  - fossuser 6y ago
    The leaks suggested the NSA was accessing information via taps between unencrypted data center connections, not via direct support or collaboration from the companies. After the leaks google encrypted those connections. The other parts are within FISA and other parts of the law. There may be disagreements with the transparency or way this stuff works, but your first comment was overly broad and mostly inaccurate.
- ditonal 6y ago
  If you’re going to astroturf don’t use a brand new account.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. "
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dylan604 6y ago
I hereby provide notice they can feel free to go away.

dnr 6y ago

An entire day! I wish it were that easy. My password manager says I have 331 accounts using my gmail address. I figure it'll take me a year to move everything if I spend a couple hours a week. I categorized them into tiers based on importance and still ended up with 63 in the top "important or regularly use" tier and 59 in the next "will probably use again" tier. The lower tiers, I'll probably not even bother with.

searchableguy 6y ago
There is an automatic email change option in few password managers but yeah, that's one of the reasons why I have been redirecting lot of things using my own domain name. If in future, some service go down - I can reroute that. If google deprecate gmail, no worries.
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  Changing it in the password manager is the easy part. The tricky one is changing the account details on the different site and switching from @gmail.com to @myfancydomain.whatever
fossuser 6y ago
I have 163 accounts for clarity, so it’d probably take you two days. I do mean an entire day, I basically did it for 12 hours. Have to find some ways to entertain myself during the pandemic lockdown :).
DavideNL 6y ago
Same here, but I simply forwarded ALL incomming e-mail from my old Gmail to my new email address. That way, i did not have to change all website accounts at once. So I slowly updated a lot of less important accounts/websites to my new email address over the period of 1+ year.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  The incremental approach is always the better solution imo. For email, for password managers, for any big migration. People always put off saying it'd be a lot of work, but if you start at any given time, within 1-2 year you'll be fully migrated. This is what I did for password manager, I migrated each website on a per-use basis. Every time I used a website with a manual password, I replaced it with a generated password. This automatically prioritizes more important websites, which you tend to use more often. For email, similarly, you migrate to the new email, and you give people the new one gradually too. Eventually anything that's left over will be spam, and that'll actually be your "less-important" secondary address you can give to websites you don't care about.

darrmit 6y ago

I did the same several years ago. Dropped a GMail account I had for ~10+ years and switched to Fastmail. I hard deleted the account. In hindsight I wish I hadn’t _deleted_ it but I’ve really only run into that on a very small number of occasions. I too switched to Fastmail and have been happy. I have a new Google account I use with YouTube and very occasionally Google Docs/Sheets, but I run it in a container tab in Firefox. If you have a password manager and have been using it for awhile it makes things a lot easier since you can identify what you have tied to the account. I had over 100 sites tied to my GMail account and was able to mostly clean it up in a Saturday.

submeta 6y ago

Same here: Migrated all my gmail accounts to Fastmail. Took me two days. Migrated Google Docs to Dropbox. And replaced Google Sheets and Doc with a Microsoft subscription (MS Word and MS Excel). Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind. Finally there is youtube for me. Ain‘t no alternative I know about. It‘s hard to leave google completely behind. Edit: Replaced Chrome first with Safari, then with Firefox and never looked back. Edit 2: Moved all my photos from Google‘s cloud solution to iCloud when I migrated from Android to iDevices. Edit 3: Fastmail (although a rather smallish company) do a phantastic job with their mail service. Their contact management and calendar are also superb. Fastmail + MailMate on MacOS are a dream-team.

nowa1000 6y ago
Fastmail also wants a phone number. I no longer know what mail service to use apart from setting it all up myself.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  mailbox.org does not require a phone number. It also includes its own calendar sync and online office suite(although I've never really tried the office functionality myself). I've been using it for a few years now and I can't complain.
- prox 6y ago
  I like protonmail myself, take a look at that.
- iimblack 6y ago
  Tutanota seems like the safest and most secure option I’ve been able to find.
- brongondwana 6y ago
  Unfortunately we still need some kind of signal that you're a unique person at signup to avoid infinite fraud (as it is we still get waves of thousands of accounts at a time who have worked out a way to get their hands on a pile of numbers and are finessing an attack on someone else via us). You can delete the number once you've signed up, though of course that means that if you forget your password is reduces the channels by which we can validate that you're the same person! (this is also quite common: many HN users would be surprised how often people forget passwords)

gabruoy 6y ago

Newpipe has completely replaced my Youtube usage since I mostly use it on mobile, and it lets you save your subscriptions locally. Its actually really nice and imo superior to the dumbed down Youtube app used nowadays anyway. Freetube is the same idea but for desktop, but I've found it to be much buggier in using it, so I occasionally just use youtube in a private tab and directly search for a video on desktop, usually after seeing in my Newpipe feed. Both of these are listed in the original list, but they deserve special shoutouts since YouTube is the site with the most universality within Google's ecosystem. Also many of your favorite video creators may already use services like LBRY and Bitchute.

fossuser 6y ago
It’s less about the product to me and more about the content. YouTube has the content I want to watch, creators that use YouTube rely on it for their revenue and recommendation algorithm. Until that problem is fixed the alternatives won’t work.
- gabruoy 6y ago
  Newpipe and Freetube are YouTube frontends, so all the content is there just without having to sign in. If you only really use a subscriptions list and directly related videos as your way to find youtube content, it's a drop in replacement. If you want to use google's recommendation algorithm though,I don't think anyone is going to be able to recreate that experience any time soon.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Thanks, that’s good to know - I’ll check those out.
viraptor 6y ago
> Also many of your favorite video creators may already use services like LBRY and Bitchute. Or moving to Nebula. Somehow https://watchnebula.com/ https://watchnebula.com/ gained a lot of attention recently with maybe half of my yt subscriptions also publishing there. (Or maybe it's just my bubble)

Shacklz 6y ago

> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. For following channels, I personally use Feedly and can only recommend it - it's not exactly the same but for me it comes close enough.

actuator 6y ago

I know it is easy to hate on big companies but how do you leave them when credible alternatives are not even close in productivity/performance. I tried leaving Macbook, but whenever I have tried the alternatives(even Thinkpad with Ubuntu), Macbook still seems to be at the sweet spot of life time ownership cost/performance. I do care about repairability, good keyboards etc. but I do have to look at things in balance. On just principles, I tried switching to DDG, Gmail alternatives like Hey etc, Maps alternatives but they are not even close to making your life easy. At the end of the day, I really don't want to take time categorising every email, handle spam on my own, worrying about data security. Services like Gmail seem far superior to alternatives to me. Edit: Lastly, I would add one can pay for Gsuite and then Gmail etc. are ad free. I doubt they would be mining paid Gsuite user's data since companies use that.

fossuser 6y ago
I have a MacBook and it’s great, I also have an iPhone. It’s the business model that matters to me more. It’s not a “hate on big companies” thing. In fact the big software companies usually have better security (google included) because they have some of the world’s best security people. I try to avoid companies that have an incentive to collect user information for ad targeting. Apple doesn’t have that (and they’ve also made privacy a brand thing now so they’re even better than average). Gmail was great when it came out, but today it’s a pretty mediocre product. Fastmail is actually better and I don’t say that as someone making excuses for non-google services. Their docs and custom domain support are really great. Their support for aliases is also great. They have good fancy workflow options I just don’t need so I don’t use. DDG was worse for a long time, but for the last year or so it’s become good enough for me to make default. I occasionally g! to run a google query, but that’s probably only 10% of the time (and of those only half are probably actually good).
- RealStickman_ 6y ago
  Apple's privacy protecting actions only apply in countries where they can go through with it. Here's one example where they can't protect your privacy. [1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insight-idUSKCN1G8060 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...

dheera 6y ago

How do you deal with work situations that want you to use Google Hangouts, Docs, or Calendar?

fossuser 6y ago
I’m lucky that I don’t have any of that at work. If I did I would need a google account just for that purpose.

mehrdadn 6y ago

Do you use complicated Gmail filters? What did you use instead of them after migrating? Also, any Google Apps Scripts?

fossuser 6y ago
No google apps scripts for me so I didn’t have to deal with that. My email style is inbox everything and route emails to folders or delete on read. If there’s something I’m always routing without reading then I unsubscribe. Workflow may not be for everyone, but it keeps my email under control and organized.
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  Ah thanks. Sounds like you had it quite easy to be honest, and you must not get a lot of emails at all. Not every email is an action item for me—many are just for record-keeping purposes and later searchability, though I have certain filters for those to mark the occasional ones that require action. I would go absolutely insane if I had to look for even 0.1 seconds at every email.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    The fastmail filters are supposedly pretty good, but I can’t personally vouch for them. I also have a lot of email for record keeping (amazon orders etc.) I just route those to folders myself. You’re right though that I probably have it easier than most generally.

neckardt 6y ago

Is fastmail the best email service provider these days? I switched my own domain to them a while ago, but then abandoned it when I heard about the new laws in Australia.

fossuser 6y ago
I treat email as an insecure mostly public form of communication. This is particularly true when most of the people you’re emailing have gmail anyway. Things like proton mail make no sense to me in that context. Fastmail works well and has design incentives aligned with the user, I thought they were the best of the options available when I switched.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Agree with your first point, but Protonmail is at least a marginal improvement.
abawany 6y ago
I use a combination of Mailo, Mailbox.org, and Runbox with my domains. They have their varying quirks but I am happy with my choice esp. wrt. their host countries.
loh 6y ago
What new laws in Australia are you referring to? I did a quick search and I saw a lot about anti-spam laws (which is great), but how does that affect switching your own domain to fastmail?
- zahllos 6y ago
  The grandparent comment is likely referring to the TOLA Act, which allows Australian police and intelligence agencies to issue for example technical assistance requests to decrypt or otherwise get access to whatever data they want. As I understand it the oversight is relatively minimal and any company operating on Australian soil can be subject to such a request. Here's their government web page on it: https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/national-security/lawful-access-telecommunications/data-encryption https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/natio... It passed around the end of 2018 and a lot of Australian companies (e.g. Atlassian) were not fans of it.

keb_ 6y ago

I also moved all my e-mail off Gmail and onto Migadu using my own domains. This ensures that even if Migadu goes under, I could swifty move to another service and keep my same e-mail addresses (for the record, Migadu is awesome). Like you mentioned in another comment, it did take me some time to move all my accounts over (about 2 days worth), but I'm so happy I did.

hx2a 6y ago
How well does Migadu handle spam filtering? I recently switched from Google to AWS Workmail and get spam and junk I never saw before.
- keb_ 6y ago
  Quite well in my experience... sometimes too well. When you sign up with Migadu, you are essentially your own postmaster and can set how aggressive you want to filter spam on the domain level as well as per mailbox.
maps7 6y ago
Lots of text on Migadu's site but no pictures of what the inbox looks like
- keb_ 6y ago
  I think they appeal to powerusers that probably already use a client like Thunderbird. :) However, their webmail client is just RainLoop, which you can find a demo of here: https://www.rainloop.net/try-now/ https://www.rainloop.net/try-now/ Also, they are currently collaborating with sourcehut to develop a new webmail client to replace RainLoop. For the record, I like RainLoop quite a bit and find it to be very speedy.
  - tjoff 6y ago
    Sure, but as a poweruser with a surname domain I have to be considerate of all none-poweruser relatives that are going to be using it. So even though I'll barely use it at all I signed up for Migadu only so that I could have a look at the webmail UI. But I couldn't even get a look at it, likely because I have yet to configured my domain. But I will not disrupt my domain just to get a peak at the UI... Thanks!

texasbigdata 6y ago

Stupid question but why not just forward if all your other activity is off of google? Do you believe the gmail data capture is high enough that your otherwise complete migration would be compromised?

fossuser 6y ago
Totally reasonable question. I haven’t deleted the old account yet and do have it importing right now (that’s a good strategy for catching any straggling accounts or friends you haven’t given your new email too). I don’t have a good answer beyond some weird sense of aesthetic tidiness. I have a dash of wanting to compulsively organize things, so having the old account bothers me irrationally.

birdyrooster 6y ago

I needed way longer than a day to get all of the accounts I created over the years with my gmail. I found I had to check my gmail for over a year until I was confident that I wasn’t missing any accounts. Still use YouTube and Google search. They have no (decent) competition still.

abawany 6y ago

The thought of arbitrary shutdown and their 'legendary' customer service got me moving off Google services. I started with Runbox using my own domains, which works well though some emails just never got delivered. I'm now on a combination of Runbox, Mailo, and Mailbox.org with long-term prepaid plans and I'm satisfied - I'll probably prune at some point but the prices are so reasonable that the urgency to do so is not there. Support by Mailo and Runbox has been excellent.

jjoonathan 6y ago

> The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail Every time google has done something to piss me off over the last few years, I have channeled that into migrating a few accounts away from google. It's a good way to unwind and has the bonus of being an action that speaks louder than words.

ryantgtg 6y ago

A few months ago I started an Etsy shop, but I couldn’t create an account using a fastmail address. I got an “unknown error.” And the help desk suggested I use a more mainstream email service. That solution worked, and then I switched it to fastmail. But this goes to show how basic the opsec is for some companies. Similarly with Twitter, each time I create a dev account for a bot, if I use fastmail my account will get locked 3-4 times in the first 20 minutes after creating the account (and not so with gmail). I’m not sure why they think that bad actors can’t also sign up for a Gmail account, and are more likely to use fastmail.

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
> I’m not sure why they think that bad actors can’t also sign up for a Gmail account Because it requires a phone number? Or does fastmail do too?
- ryantgtg 6y ago
  Not sure if fastmail does. And I didnt know gmail does. But, so does a twitter dev account. And they still lock me out like crazy if I use a non-gmail account.

switch11 6y ago

Kudos absolutely great to see you do this I moved off Google after they started doing some strange things with our adwords accounts Anyways Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. Google's earnings from ads went down last quarter. First quarter that has ever happened They are definitely at risk of becoming Yahoo 2.0. The only thing is the immense amount of spying on the world and American citizens they provide to Intelligence agencies. They will stay relevant/be too big to fail because of that Search -> Use Bing, then DuckDuck Go, and if still not good results, then Google Admittedly Google Search is still ahead of everyone Browser - never touched Chrome. Use Epic and Edge. Mobile use UC Browser (possibly even worse for privacy than Google, owned by Tencent), and on iOS use Safari Never used gmail so avoided that entirely. Use outlook, however, it is pretty bad. USe internal email server for work. Rainloop. Don't recommend that either avoid all google services as mucha s possible Trying to find an alternative to Android. Have an Apple iPhone, however, also wants a non Apple alternative to play Android Games

sadfklsjlkjwt 6y ago
Browser - use Firefox.
- ColinHayhurst 6y ago
  Browser - I use Firefox and Vivaldi Search - I use Startpage, DDG, Mojeek
  - sadfklsjlkjwt 6y ago
    Startpage has changed ownership recently. I would look into the new owners...
- therealmarv 6y ago
  financed mostly by Google
  - sheeshkebab 6y ago

AlchemistCamp 6y ago

What was your replacement for YouTube?

jsinai 6y ago

> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. I would include Maps to this list. Outside of the US (and presumably China although I do not have experience here), Google Maps has no real competitors.

Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
For motoring, commercial POIs, and address-level searches. For walking/cycling and non-commercial POIs, OpenStreetMap is consistently better in Europe.

mths 6y ago

> On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. I have this problem on Steam of all places. Way back when, I guess you had to sign up with your email as your username. I've long long since left that email behind, but it's still my username for logging onto Steam.

lkois 6y ago
Same here. I got steam when a friend bought HL2 waaay back, finished it, then gave me the game by giving me his account. All these years later, I've changed the email and built up the library, but the username is still my friends real name.

ekianjo 6y ago

> On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. Interesting, how do they such sites deal with people who lose their email account (phishing or others?)

fossuser 6y ago
They tell you to just make a new account with a new email.

vinni2 6y ago

I live in a country which is very sparsely populated and there are really no good alternatives to google maps and google translate which work most of the time unfortunately. Most other maps services like open street maps and Apple maps are so outdated and sometimes so wrong it is even dangerous to use them for navigation. As per translation everything really sucks. But google is better of them all.

dickdung 6y ago

google is well on its way to being dead. their customer service doesn't exist. gcp is a joke -companies either go with smaller cheaper providers or azure/aws. their flagship os is famous only heavily modified on other vendors' phones. for the simple, they get an iphone. the reason people use their search is that it's default -if it was bing no one will notice. ads? super customized ads are not worth the money to companies, lighter cheaper personalization is available from many vendors. google literally is yahoo. to tech people -the ones who made google what they are, google is actively their enemy, and for the regular user, they want an iphone, and they want customer service with a smile -google has none. me, i never googled-up. zoho for $1 a month, create new aliases for spam and filter them into folders. no gmail needed. maps? apple for iphone is ok, but i just use heremaps. you click a country, click download, and a couole of gig later you have full search offline. now youtube, that's an interesting product that's only popular because it's popular. and it was popular before google bought it. there are many unpopular competitors. all it takes to take down youtube is an app for another service included by default on samsung and iphone home screens, and youtube is gone. the same goes for facebook and twitter. myspace, yahoo, aol -all had their 15min of fame, all thought it would last forever. who cares. google is old news.

john4534243 6y ago

Two years ago i created a gmail account without providing mobile number and was using it on youtube for commenting on political videos. In the past few months i noticed my comments were getting upvoted frequently and then last week gmail is forcing me to provide mobile number for verification to login to my account. If google wants to have mobile number for creating accounts that fine but why force after 2 years. That feels cheating. The whole point is i don't want retaliation from political parties for commenting on the internet and don't want to be tied to my real identity with my mobile number. Sadly there is no competitor for youtube.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

agarzenm 6y ago

I have seen fastmail mentioned many times on this thread. They seem to be incorporated in Austrailia. Given that you clearly care about the use of your personal data; wouldn't moving something so sacred to a company incorporated in a country that actively tries to backdoor encryption/push easier wire tapping make you concerned? Have you considered this in your threat model?

seriocomic 6y ago
Not OP (but another Fastmail customer) - but there's a difference between caring about the use of your personal data from a eaves-dropping/tapping/threat perspective vs having your personal data used to make you the product. Fastmail is a paid service that provides an excellent service/product where the email you send/receive isn't monetised or incorporated into a revenue/ad machine.
fossuser 6y ago
I give an answer for this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24246733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24246733 In addition to that, I think Fastmail also has servers based in the US (though I’m not sure that matters for the law). You’re right though that the new laws coming out of Australia are pretty bad. The way I treat email takes that into account.
- agarzenm 6y ago
  Apologies for only getting back to you now. Yeah this is all fine once you have accepted the trade offs and designed your threat model around it. People get extremely zealous around this sort of shit. One decision for another person does not need to be taken by everyone else just because it makes sense for you. I, like you am concerned about the use of data but I take a different approach. I don't mind if my data is used for product insight/generation once it is aggregated anonymized data, with the caveat that the website and or service is GDPR compliant. I give bonus points to any website that lets you nuke your account from the profile page without having to jump through e-mail hoops. I had a recent experience of requesting an account erasure under GDPR via e-mail. I expected the usual "are you sure?", "do you know the implications?", "who are you?" but no they just deleted the account straight away. I only found out it had been done by trying to login to the service again. 10/10

the_other 6y ago

Props. I did a very similar thing. For me, google docs was the hook that made me create another account. Every volunteer project I go near uses them. I tried creating aliases for the projects so that each product team could reference me by an email address that reflected the project. But after a year or two I had loads of these aliases and would accidentally open a doc for one project whilst logged in to gdocs as the identity for another project. I now just have one identity for google. And I feel dirty.