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After seeing posts like this on HN for years, this one officially scared me enough to completely migrate off Gmail altogether. I’m in the process right now of r

After seeing posts like this on HN for years, this one officially scared me enough to completely migrate off Gmail altogether. I’m in the process right now of removing my gmail from any online account. Pro-tip: if you use a password manager, it’s as easy as searching for your Gmail address. For all other accounts, I’ve been able to find them by searching for the phrases “verify your email” or “verify email” or “verification” in Gmail. Just imagining the nightmare that would happen if I got locked out of my Gmail account (10 years of accounts)…I can’t believe I didn’t do it sooner. You can also do a full export of your Google data, which I highly recommend. Switched to fastmail recently for my personal domain and could not be happier with the service. It costs money every month, so they have actual human support if anything goes wrong.

alasdair_ 5y ago
Your post reminded me to back using my gmail locally and to ensure a script does so automatically from now on. I need to do the same with google docs as soon as possible. I keep forgetting that “the cloud” just means “a computer that belongs to someone else, that they can take back at any time”
- sneak 5y ago
  The danger is not just that Google may one day delete your data, maybe. The danger is that an advertising surveillance company that has leveraged its ad surveillance into hundreds of billions of dollars per year in revenue has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence, today and every day, no maybe. Additionally, they regularly turn such data over to government snoops, without due process or probable cause, something that storing your data with them enables. This is a terrible thing for a free society even if you don't yourself personally care for or value privacy, as you opt in everyone who corresponds with you without their consent by using these systems.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    > The danger is that an advertising surveillance company that has leveraged its ad surveillance into hundreds of billions of dollars per year in revenue has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence, today and every day, no maybe. There is nothing dangerous with being shown more relevant ads.
    - eyelidlessness 5y ago
      When I have the stomach for it, I click irrelevant ads which don’t reflect my interests. You know—out of curiosity—to spend their money. It’s astonishing how quickly a silly hat becomes literal violent propaganda. I mean, in the same minute.
      - dotancohen 5y ago
        > It’s astonishing how quickly a silly hat becomes literal violent propaganda. I mean, in the same minute. Could you please explain?
        eyelidlessness 5y ago
        Like if I click an ad for, say, hunting gear… I’m instantly inundated with “thin blue line” and not very subtly threatening “guns rights” stuff and pretty much every single thing I would expect to see in a far right mob.
        dotancohen 5y ago
        Interesting, thanks.
    - rendall 5y ago
      You are correct, and if that were the end of it, people like myself who are concerned about it could rightly be labeled paranoid. However, the collected data create an intimate, detailed portrait of you. Data aggregators can know how old you are, your general state of health, where you have been, your interests, including sexual interests, your political views both expressed and unexpressed, your associations, your associates, your family, your daily habits, your unusual habits, your credit score, whether that credit score is accurate, etc, etc. And, this is true for everyone you come into contact with: friends, family, business associates. An AI could, with this data, model you and your behavior more accurately than could your own spouse. Moreover, not only must you trust the people with access to that data, and everyone they sell it to, to only ever use it for targeted ads, but you must trust everyone who will ever have access to it, forever. While you may believe you're boring and your views are entirely uncontroversial, times change. Or, hell, with enough data and motivation, someone can paint a damning portrait of you made up whole cloth from true, innocuous details. You have to just hope that neither you nor anyone you associate with become a political target, or the target of criminal activity, or garner just plain negative attention, for whatever reason, because if so, you and your loved ones will be trivially easy to find and manipulate.
  - fsckboy 5y ago
    > has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence I have nothing nice to say about google, so I'm not defending them, but didn't they announce our email is not getting scanned any more? Given that they reversed the do-no-evil motto, the sad part is that I guess they have enough information about us not to bother reading our emails.
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      They did, but they also have a feature that will tell you about everything you’ve purchased, mined from your email.
    - alasdair_ 5y ago
      They said email was not being scanned for adwords and similar products. They never said it wasn’t being scanned for other reasons.
Waterluvian 5y ago
I’m not saying this is bad advice. It’s not a bad idea to reduce single points of failure! But without objectivity about how often this happens, there’s probably a lot of other far worse problems that deserve our attention.
- ehnto 5y ago
  It's a digital life equivalent of a motorcycle accident I think. The risk is catastrophic, so any incidence rate is enough to require being prepared for it.
  - p1esk 5y ago
    At first I thought that losing access to my gmail would be pretty bad, but now that I think about it, I don’t see anything particularly troublesome if it happens tomorrow, let alone catastrophic. Can you give some examples?
    - ehnto 5y ago
      If you owm the email's domain you can switch the domain Mx record and continue just fine. But over the years a lot of accounts end up tied to Google SSO and if you are just using a plain old @gmail and have tied all your accounts to it you are probably in trouble.
      - p1esk 5y ago
        I’m not a business. I don’t use domains or SSO. Yes, I use my gmail address as a login to many websites, but losing access to gmail does not mean I can’t login to those websites anymore. It just means recovering an account is more difficult (but in most cases not much more difficult). And I do export my gmail inbox every year as a backup.
        ehnto 5y ago
        Fair enough, if you feel like you have a handle on your personal situation and are comfortable with the level of risk then by all means don't be worried. When I say catastrophic, I don't necessarily mean catastrophic to your entire life with no way forward. I just mean your digital life will be pretty toast and you'll have to start again on a lot of platforms that don't make the email changeover easy. That's not going to be true for everyone either. If you've got nothing important online, nothing to worry about. > but losing access to gmail does not mean I can’t login to those websites anymore. It just means recovering an account is more difficult (but in most cases not much more difficult). I think this is pretty naive though, this thread is really a story about how automated systems are making the digital world more challenging to navigate and how getting a human to help you is becoming harder in many cases, making those automated decisions final. If all you needed to sign up for something was your email address, it's possible they will have no way to verify you are the owner if you lose access to that, even if you can get in contact with a human.
el_dev_hell 5y ago
I did something similar. Searching for verify and verification are good for those cases where you signed up with a Gmail email. You can also navigate to Settings > Security > Signing in with Google to see everywhere that you've used Google Sign in (oAuth).
ksec 5y ago
This somehow reminds me of Yahoo. The fall of Yahoo starts with people stopped using Yahoo Mail and went to Gmail.
Alex3917 5y ago
> it’s as easy as searching for your Gmail address And then taking a week off of work so that I can change 672 passwords.
- pembrook 5y ago
  I thought it was going to be a huge hassle (I too imagined I had hundreds of accounts), but for me there were less than 30 accounts I actually cared about. Basically credit cards, banking, airlines, government services, social accounts, FAANG accounts, and domains/hosting. Annoying, but only took about an hour and a half. The rest that are non-important I'll just let languish in the Gmail account, assuming I'll be able to go back and get them if needed, yet, also not being heartbroken if I get screwed by some faceless algorithm like OP.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
jen729w 5y ago
Just gonna throw Migadu in here as a mail host. Everyone loves Fastmail, which is cool - I'm an ex-happy-user - but Migadu's point of difference is their pricing. Whereas Fastmail charges by the user/month (or did when I was there), which can add up quickly if you've got a bunch of domains, Migadu does not. They charge by volume. You can add as many domains and mailboxes as you like. For some use cases - mine, and likely many of you - that ends up with a way smaller bill. They're run by real people in Switzerland. I've been a customer for a couple of years now and it's worked flawlessly. Usual disclaimers, just a happy customer, not affiliated. https://www.migadu.com/pricing/ https://www.migadu.com/pricing/ https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/ https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/
- Macha 5y ago
  Note that if you're just using the domains for one user, you can set them up as aliases rather than seperate mailboxes to avoid stacking fees that way.
  - gonehome 5y ago
    I do this, but it does make me wary of lock-in. It’d be a pain to have to change all of these in order to leave fastmail.
    - sdoering 5y ago
      This is one of my problems for migrating from Google Workspace. I use aliases and groups to have significant numbers of separate email addresses for specific services. Mapping all these accounts will be a big pain in the butt.
- jwong_ 5y ago
  I had a very poor experience with migrating off Migadu when they dropped their free tier. It completely soured me off them forever.
  - lbotos 5y ago
rnotaro 5y ago
That's why I pay for Gsuite. I only need to worry about not losing control of my domain name. If my mail provider decide to kick me out, I just need to get a new host.
- searchableguy 5y ago
  I've been worried about someone taking over domain in recent years as well. I've bought a bunch of decentralized domain for this reason on handshake, sol, etc. They aren't super usable yet as most email services won't resolve the alternative DNS but who knows what future holds. Namecheap acquired namebase (namecheap of handshake world), recently. https://www.namebase.io/blog/namebase-has-been-acquired/ https://www.namebase.io/blog/namebase-has-been-acquired/ So I've hope it will go somewhere.
coffeefirst 5y ago
Another pro-tip: forward to your new email, and set up a filter that labels all the items sent `TO` your old Gmail. This becomes a record of items you missed, and can update (or better yet, unsubscribe) as needed.
- YPPH 5y ago
  This is a great idea. I thought about forwarding, but hadn't thought of automatically labelling them as requiring an update (or unsubscribe).
thelittleone 5y ago
I've tried and failed to migrate off Gmail a few times. Mostly due to the number of SAAS accounts I've created with that email address. I like your suggestion to search for "verify your email" etc. I tried searching my Gmail inbox using search you suggested: “verify your email” or “verify email” or “verification”. I got 3 results despite having hundreds of signups since starting the account back in 2006. Something that would be super useful is a script that can be run against a local Gmail mailbox file that does a comprehensive search for "account created" type confirmation emails and produces a CSV of domain, date, etc. Something that would enable user to delete old accounts, or migrate them to a new email service.
throwaway984393 5y ago
> Just imagining the nightmare that would happen if I got locked out of my Gmail account (10 years of accounts) We think the things we've built up over the years are important, but really they're just digital sandcastles. The only account you have online that matters is your bank account. When everything else goes, it turns out it doesn't affect you in the future. You just create new accounts and move on.
- p1esk 5y ago
  The only account you have online that matters is your bank account Can’t you just visit your bank office in person and reset it? Or if they can’t do it, just withdrew all the funds and create a new account?
  - throwaway984393 5y ago
    Oh sure, you can recover your account or create a new one in person. I imagine online banks have similar avenues
ehsankia 5y ago
I'm not sure what the situation described above has to do with Gmail and migrating off of it. OP was storing hundreds of videos, probably against Youtube ToS, to run their business. Pretty sure unlisted videos can't run ads either, so they were basically using Youtube as a free hosting service for their business.
- laserlight 5y ago
  According To OP, YouTube noticed them about cyber bullying, not ToS violation because of hosting many unlisted videos.
- unclekev 5y ago
  The common thread that they are trying to raise awareness about is that Google at any time, for any reason, can lock you out of your account with no way for you to actually find out why or what's happened. Yes it's probally against YouTube's ToS to get people to pay for content in unlisted videos, but the terms of service doesn't explicitly talk about using YouTube to host paid-for content - it is covered in a border statement though in their ToS [0] But they should still at least be able to talk to a real human about it and get told the actual reason "Your account was terminated for commercial use of unlisted videos" instead of automated email bot responses/Or have been given some warning "This is against our ToS, your account will be terminated in 7 days" [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/38348285?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/38348285?hl=en
- kitd 5y ago
  1. Why would hundreds of unlisted videos be against the ToS? 2. OP didn't say the videos contained ads. And why can't unlisted videos contain ads anyway? 3. YT weren't complaining about ads anyway. It was "cyberbullying" in one video.
  - ehsankia 5y ago
    > Why would hundreds of unlisted videos be against the ToS? It's most likely against ToS if you use said videos in a commercial way. Youtube isn't your companies private video hosting service. > OP didn't say the videos contained ads. No, but they were used to run their business. So it was commercial in nature. > And why can't unlisted videos contain ads anyway? Mostly a quirk of how Youtube works. > And why can't unlisted videos contain ads anyway? Looks like I was wrong about this one, sorry. It does seem like unlisted videos can indeed run ads. That being said, it still seems like a bad idea to run company crucial part of your business off of a free ad-based service.
matfile 5y ago
burntoutfire 5y ago
I'm not sure if Google can kill Gmail. If any major competitor takes over, they could mine emails for ad value, which would give them a large edge.
- runeks 5y ago
  Perhaps, but they can kill individual accounts.
runeks 5y ago
The simplest solution to this I can think of is to use a mail app on your laptop that syncs with your Gmail. That way you will always have a local copy of your emails.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

alasdair_ 5y ago

Your post reminded me to back using my gmail locally and to ensure a script does so automatically from now on. I need to do the same with google docs as soon as possible. I keep forgetting that “the cloud” just means “a computer that belongs to someone else, that they can take back at any time”

sneak 5y ago
The danger is not just that Google may one day delete your data, maybe. The danger is that an advertising surveillance company that has leveraged its ad surveillance into hundreds of billions of dollars per year in revenue has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence, today and every day, no maybe. Additionally, they regularly turn such data over to government snoops, without due process or probable cause, something that storing your data with them enables. This is a terrible thing for a free society even if you don't yourself personally care for or value privacy, as you opt in everyone who corresponds with you without their consent by using these systems.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  > The danger is that an advertising surveillance company that has leveraged its ad surveillance into hundreds of billions of dollars per year in revenue has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence, today and every day, no maybe. There is nothing dangerous with being shown more relevant ads.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    When I have the stomach for it, I click irrelevant ads which don’t reflect my interests. You know—out of curiosity—to spend their money. It’s astonishing how quickly a silly hat becomes literal violent propaganda. I mean, in the same minute.
    - dotancohen 5y ago
      > It’s astonishing how quickly a silly hat becomes literal violent propaganda. I mean, in the same minute. Could you please explain?
      - eyelidlessness 5y ago
        Like if I click an ad for, say, hunting gear… I’m instantly inundated with “thin blue line” and not very subtly threatening “guns rights” stuff and pretty much every single thing I would expect to see in a far right mob.
        dotancohen 5y ago
        Interesting, thanks.
  - rendall 5y ago
    You are correct, and if that were the end of it, people like myself who are concerned about it could rightly be labeled paranoid. However, the collected data create an intimate, detailed portrait of you. Data aggregators can know how old you are, your general state of health, where you have been, your interests, including sexual interests, your political views both expressed and unexpressed, your associations, your associates, your family, your daily habits, your unusual habits, your credit score, whether that credit score is accurate, etc, etc. And, this is true for everyone you come into contact with: friends, family, business associates. An AI could, with this data, model you and your behavior more accurately than could your own spouse. Moreover, not only must you trust the people with access to that data, and everyone they sell it to, to only ever use it for targeted ads, but you must trust everyone who will ever have access to it, forever. While you may believe you're boring and your views are entirely uncontroversial, times change. Or, hell, with enough data and motivation, someone can paint a damning portrait of you made up whole cloth from true, innocuous details. You have to just hope that neither you nor anyone you associate with become a political target, or the target of criminal activity, or garner just plain negative attention, for whatever reason, because if so, you and your loved ones will be trivially easy to find and manipulate.
- fsckboy 5y ago
  > has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence I have nothing nice to say about google, so I'm not defending them, but didn't they announce our email is not getting scanned any more? Given that they reversed the do-no-evil motto, the sad part is that I guess they have enough information about us not to bother reading our emails.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    They did, but they also have a feature that will tell you about everything you’ve purchased, mined from your email.
  - alasdair_ 5y ago
    They said email was not being scanned for adwords and similar products. They never said it wasn’t being scanned for other reasons.

Waterluvian 5y ago

I’m not saying this is bad advice. It’s not a bad idea to reduce single points of failure! But without objectivity about how often this happens, there’s probably a lot of other far worse problems that deserve our attention.

ehnto 5y ago
It's a digital life equivalent of a motorcycle accident I think. The risk is catastrophic, so any incidence rate is enough to require being prepared for it.
- p1esk 5y ago
  At first I thought that losing access to my gmail would be pretty bad, but now that I think about it, I don’t see anything particularly troublesome if it happens tomorrow, let alone catastrophic. Can you give some examples?
  - ehnto 5y ago
    If you owm the email's domain you can switch the domain Mx record and continue just fine. But over the years a lot of accounts end up tied to Google SSO and if you are just using a plain old @gmail and have tied all your accounts to it you are probably in trouble.
    - p1esk 5y ago
      I’m not a business. I don’t use domains or SSO. Yes, I use my gmail address as a login to many websites, but losing access to gmail does not mean I can’t login to those websites anymore. It just means recovering an account is more difficult (but in most cases not much more difficult). And I do export my gmail inbox every year as a backup.
      - ehnto 5y ago
        Fair enough, if you feel like you have a handle on your personal situation and are comfortable with the level of risk then by all means don't be worried. When I say catastrophic, I don't necessarily mean catastrophic to your entire life with no way forward. I just mean your digital life will be pretty toast and you'll have to start again on a lot of platforms that don't make the email changeover easy. That's not going to be true for everyone either. If you've got nothing important online, nothing to worry about. > but losing access to gmail does not mean I can’t login to those websites anymore. It just means recovering an account is more difficult (but in most cases not much more difficult). I think this is pretty naive though, this thread is really a story about how automated systems are making the digital world more challenging to navigate and how getting a human to help you is becoming harder in many cases, making those automated decisions final. If all you needed to sign up for something was your email address, it's possible they will have no way to verify you are the owner if you lose access to that, even if you can get in contact with a human.

el_dev_hell 5y ago

I did something similar. Searching for verify and verification are good for those cases where you signed up with a Gmail email. You can also navigate to Settings > Security > Signing in with Google to see everywhere that you've used Google Sign in (oAuth).

ksec 5y ago

This somehow reminds me of Yahoo. The fall of Yahoo starts with people stopped using Yahoo Mail and went to Gmail.

Alex3917 5y ago

> it’s as easy as searching for your Gmail address And then taking a week off of work so that I can change 672 passwords.

pembrook 5y ago
I thought it was going to be a huge hassle (I too imagined I had hundreds of accounts), but for me there were less than 30 accounts I actually cared about. Basically credit cards, banking, airlines, government services, social accounts, FAANG accounts, and domains/hosting. Annoying, but only took about an hour and a half. The rest that are non-important I'll just let languish in the Gmail account, assuming I'll be able to go back and get them if needed, yet, also not being heartbroken if I get screwed by some faceless algorithm like OP.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

jen729w 5y ago

Just gonna throw Migadu in here as a mail host. Everyone loves Fastmail, which is cool - I'm an ex-happy-user - but Migadu's point of difference is their pricing. Whereas Fastmail charges by the user/month (or did when I was there), which can add up quickly if you've got a bunch of domains, Migadu does not. They charge by volume. You can add as many domains and mailboxes as you like. For some use cases - mine, and likely many of you - that ends up with a way smaller bill. They're run by real people in Switzerland. I've been a customer for a couple of years now and it's worked flawlessly. Usual disclaimers, just a happy customer, not affiliated. https://www.migadu.com/pricing/ https://www.migadu.com/pricing/ https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/ https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/

Macha 5y ago
Note that if you're just using the domains for one user, you can set them up as aliases rather than seperate mailboxes to avoid stacking fees that way.
- gonehome 5y ago
  I do this, but it does make me wary of lock-in. It’d be a pain to have to change all of these in order to leave fastmail.
  - sdoering 5y ago
    This is one of my problems for migrating from Google Workspace. I use aliases and groups to have significant numbers of separate email addresses for specific services. Mapping all these accounts will be a big pain in the butt.
jwong_ 5y ago
I had a very poor experience with migrating off Migadu when they dropped their free tier. It completely soured me off them forever.
- lbotos 5y ago

rnotaro 5y ago

That's why I pay for Gsuite. I only need to worry about not losing control of my domain name. If my mail provider decide to kick me out, I just need to get a new host.

searchableguy 5y ago
I've been worried about someone taking over domain in recent years as well. I've bought a bunch of decentralized domain for this reason on handshake, sol, etc. They aren't super usable yet as most email services won't resolve the alternative DNS but who knows what future holds. Namecheap acquired namebase (namecheap of handshake world), recently. https://www.namebase.io/blog/namebase-has-been-acquired/ https://www.namebase.io/blog/namebase-has-been-acquired/ So I've hope it will go somewhere.

coffeefirst 5y ago

Another pro-tip: forward to your new email, and set up a filter that labels all the items sent `TO` your old Gmail. This becomes a record of items you missed, and can update (or better yet, unsubscribe) as needed.

YPPH 5y ago
This is a great idea. I thought about forwarding, but hadn't thought of automatically labelling them as requiring an update (or unsubscribe).

thelittleone 5y ago

I've tried and failed to migrate off Gmail a few times. Mostly due to the number of SAAS accounts I've created with that email address. I like your suggestion to search for "verify your email" etc. I tried searching my Gmail inbox using search you suggested: “verify your email” or “verify email” or “verification”. I got 3 results despite having hundreds of signups since starting the account back in 2006. Something that would be super useful is a script that can be run against a local Gmail mailbox file that does a comprehensive search for "account created" type confirmation emails and produces a CSV of domain, date, etc. Something that would enable user to delete old accounts, or migrate them to a new email service.

throwaway984393 5y ago

> Just imagining the nightmare that would happen if I got locked out of my Gmail account (10 years of accounts) We think the things we've built up over the years are important, but really they're just digital sandcastles. The only account you have online that matters is your bank account. When everything else goes, it turns out it doesn't affect you in the future. You just create new accounts and move on.

p1esk 5y ago
The only account you have online that matters is your bank account Can’t you just visit your bank office in person and reset it? Or if they can’t do it, just withdrew all the funds and create a new account?
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  Oh sure, you can recover your account or create a new one in person. I imagine online banks have similar avenues

ehsankia 5y ago

I'm not sure what the situation described above has to do with Gmail and migrating off of it. OP was storing hundreds of videos, probably against Youtube ToS, to run their business. Pretty sure unlisted videos can't run ads either, so they were basically using Youtube as a free hosting service for their business.

laserlight 5y ago
According To OP, YouTube noticed them about cyber bullying, not ToS violation because of hosting many unlisted videos.
unclekev 5y ago
The common thread that they are trying to raise awareness about is that Google at any time, for any reason, can lock you out of your account with no way for you to actually find out why or what's happened. Yes it's probally against YouTube's ToS to get people to pay for content in unlisted videos, but the terms of service doesn't explicitly talk about using YouTube to host paid-for content - it is covered in a border statement though in their ToS [0] But they should still at least be able to talk to a real human about it and get told the actual reason "Your account was terminated for commercial use of unlisted videos" instead of automated email bot responses/Or have been given some warning "This is against our ToS, your account will be terminated in 7 days" [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/38348285?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/38348285?hl=en
kitd 5y ago
1. Why would hundreds of unlisted videos be against the ToS? 2. OP didn't say the videos contained ads. And why can't unlisted videos contain ads anyway? 3. YT weren't complaining about ads anyway. It was "cyberbullying" in one video.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  > Why would hundreds of unlisted videos be against the ToS? It's most likely against ToS if you use said videos in a commercial way. Youtube isn't your companies private video hosting service. > OP didn't say the videos contained ads. No, but they were used to run their business. So it was commercial in nature. > And why can't unlisted videos contain ads anyway? Mostly a quirk of how Youtube works. > And why can't unlisted videos contain ads anyway? Looks like I was wrong about this one, sorry. It does seem like unlisted videos can indeed run ads. That being said, it still seems like a bad idea to run company crucial part of your business off of a free ad-based service.

matfile 5y ago

burntoutfire 5y ago

I'm not sure if Google can kill Gmail. If any major competitor takes over, they could mine emails for ad value, which would give them a large edge.

runeks 5y ago
Perhaps, but they can kill individual accounts.

runeks 5y ago

The simplest solution to this I can think of is to use a mail app on your laptop that syncs with your Gmail. That way you will always have a local copy of your emails.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]