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Right now I have everything tied up to my Google account (primary email, drive, photos). Has anyone moved away and if so, to what?
by itg 6y ago
Right now I have everything tied up to my Google account (primary email, drive, photos). Has anyone moved away and if so, to what?
- speeder 6y agoCurrently I am trying to figure out how to move e-mail away from google, not my personal one, but my company e-mail. Couldn't figure out yet... The reason is that despite being a corporate costuemer we don't pay enough to have access to support, and some issues we had, the only thing the FAQ and documentation did was redirect us to a page behind payment.
- csdreamer7 6y agoHave you considered Zoho? They have a free tier and gdocs competitor.
- blunte 6y agoI left Gsuite for Zoho (mail) a couple of years ago after reading so many of these Google account closure scares. I cannot speak to the quality of the Zoho office apps, but their email seems reliable and allows me to have over a dozen domains tied to one account at a tiny cost per month. Fastmail, as I recall, couldn't or wouldn't allow many domains tied to one account (otherwise I would have chosen them).
- techsupporter 6y agoI don't know if your account was different, but I have 15 domains on my Fastmail account and almost a hundred specific aliases (in addition to the catch-all) and they've not complained one bit.
- icf80 6y agoUser https://www.thunderbird.net/ https://www.thunderbird.net/ to make a local backup copy, then you can sync it with other accounts.
- speeder 6y agoWe already use thunderbird. In fact that is part of the reason we want to move away from Google, they declared Oauth 2 will be mandatory, and thunderbird last I checked didn't had all the certifications needed, and we had a scare when suddenly all our company thunderbirds couldn't login on gmail-based accoutns at all, and we needed them to, to send urgently some documents to the government.
- blahyawnblah 6y agoI use nextcloud with s3 as the backend for file sharing and storage. Backblaze backs up the folder that contains nextcloud. I self host email using the standard dovecot/postfix
- blunte 6y agoWhen this topic comes up periodically, some people comment about the difficulty of having their outgoing mail often blacklisted or automatically marked as spam when being sent to major email hosts (such as Google, MS, etc.) Have you found this to be a problem?
- blahyawnblah 6y agoOnly without outlook. I am currently working to fix the issue. They have a process, and it's definitely a process. Barring that. I still have my gmail account.
- nobody9999 6y ago>When this topic comes up periodically, some people comment about the difficulty of having their outgoing mail often blacklisted or automatically marked as spam when being sent to major email hosts (such as Google, MS, etc.) Have you found this to be a problem? I had this issue a couple of times (with Comcast IIRC) in the early oughts (somehow I found myself on a RBL/DNSBL). I resolved that fairly quickly. I haven't had problems since. Just to make sure, I implemented SPF/DKIM/DMARC in my DNS zones. And I'm sure implementing DNSSec didn't hurt either. And except for those few times 15-20 years ago, my environment has worked like champ.
- tptacek 6y agoImplementing DNSSEC didn't help your deliverability.
- tunesmith 6y agoI would love to see a step-by-step guide on how to move away from centralized services entirely. Maybe in favor of the various federated services that are popping up.
- blunte 6y agoPeople post guides to HN periodically about how to do exactly this. But it will require a lot of effort and a carefully designed backup/failover plan for when your self-hosted things tank (or get hacked).
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago> But it will require a lot of effort and a carefully designed backup/failover plan for when your self-hosted things tank (or get hacked). One assumes that it will require no more effort than when your Google account tanks or gets hacked?
- ffpip 6y agoDon't use Gmail to signup for stuff. If you lose the account, you lose all the forgot password links, the email 2FA codes, and the communication with support.
- Someone1234 6y agoAnd use what instead? You're just re-stating the problem, not offering anything in the way of a solution.
- ffpip 6y agoShould have been clearer. Preferably, you should use your own domain (atleast for signing up). Or use something like Tutanota [0], only for signing up for stuff. They have a very generous free plan. You should open it only to verify new accounts, and for 'forgot password' links. [0]- https://tutanota.com https://tutanota.com
- Semaphor 6y agoA real sign up with your email address on your own domain.
- Daniel_sk 6y agoPay few $ a year for your own domain and then you can switch email providers. I love Fastmail.
- wtf_is_up 6y agoMicrosoft 365
- RonanTheGrey 6y agoI don't know why this got downvoted, I use 365 (in addition to other non-Google providers) and am quite happy with them for the accounts I use them for.
- macintux 6y agoI love Fastmail for email; I’ve used them as long as I can remember, probably 20 years now.
- mmm_grayons 6y agoI don't really use google for anything; I never did, which probably made it easier than for those who had to switch. For e-mail I run a standard dovecot and postfix set up. For drive, I just scp files to a server. I don't take many photos or care. If I did, I suppose I'd just copy them over to my server as well. I run all of this stuff on a few old boxes at home (ancient laptops, old towers, what-have-you). As a side question, to those who use google drive or similar, how do you stand it? I hate having to click through a bunch of dialogues to do stuff. Just being able to use a plain HTTP link is much better. I put stuff I want private in a directory that requires HTTP basic auth and it's so much easier. I can copy to/from on a phone by VPNing into my house and using a samba client. So much easier.
- ssijak 6y agoI moved my email + contacts + calendar to Fastmail, for files I use dropbox or iCloud it depends on the purpose and I use Apple Photos for photos. All services are much better than Google services. I would never again trust Google with anything important on consumer services, I had similar experience as the OP.
- rdschouw 6y agoI use Google Apps but with my own domain. My own domain gives me the opportunity to take my business elsewhere with limited impact. The caveat is that I pay $6 / month (instead of free).
- snazz 6y agoYep! This is exactly what I do. With Google Takeout, I don't have to worry about data loss if I get locked out of my account or other issues like that.
- x0x0 6y agoUse your own domain. Use fastmail for email: it's best of breed outside of gmail. (This isn't damning with faint praise; it's quite good. Just not as good as gmail). Use Arq for backup from your devices into google cloud storage or aws s3.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoFastmail. But the key thing is using my own domain name. You can actually use Gmail safely... as long as you are using your own domain name. If Google (or Fastmail) terminated my account, I could point my domain name to another mail service, and not lose access to any of my other services. But as long as you're using an @gmail.com address as your digital identity, your access to all of your online accounts is tied up in that single arbitrary point of failure, to a company that does not view you as a valuable customer.
- beamatronic 6y agoIs there any US-based company, which offers a paid email service, and great customer support?
- nomdep 6y agoHey.com ?
- ceejayoz 6y agoI'll switch to them in a heartbeat once they have custom domains. (Apparently that's coming this year! https://hey.com/custom-domains/ https://hey.com/custom-domains/)
- beamatronic 6y agoWhat about Microsoft/outlook.com?
- gothroach 6y agoIt's definitely not the cheapest option, but if you don't have a large storage requirement, 25 Mail St. is a good option. I host my own personal email, but have set a couple clients up with 25 Mail St. and it's been excellent. By far the best part is the support - all support is done by the engineers instead of customer support staff following a script. They're incredibly transparent about things like support statistics, and are understandably proud of their metrics. The main downside is the low amount of storage offered for the price. It's run by the same company as Rimuhosting and Zonomi, if you're familiar with either.
- alpaca128 6y agoI use a more privacy-focused email provider, their lowest tier costs 1 Euro/month and is enough for me, which means I still have near free email with calendar sync. I don't upload any photos or other files anymore, though. The problem is that you can never fully trust those cloud providers to keep the data safe, so you need other backups anyways. I was thinking about using a more trustworthy service for off-site backups though.
- ryandrake 6y agoI have my own domain, and run exim+dovecot on a Linux machine for E-mail. This setup has run solidly for years. I serve E-mail for family and friends. No reliance on some cloud account for what is essentially the gateway to all of your password reset functions. When I first set it up, I had some deliverability problems, but once I had DKIM and SPF set up, it's been rock solid.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]