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Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

(giuliomagnifico.blog)
351 points giuliomagnifico | 4 comments | 22 Aug 25 17:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.325s | source
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mantra2 ◴[22 Aug 25 18:02 UTC] No.44987637[source]▶
I started the get itchy about so much of my life sitting on Google about 5 years ago, so I decided to take the leap to Fastmail and haven’t looked back.

Didn’t need to do anything special for the migration. The in house importer they offer pulled over 80GB in a day and I was set from there.

Fastmail isn’t going to give you end to end encryption - but - I think just shedding a major Google service is a massive win privacy-wise.

I remember briefly looking into Proton but the search was awful.

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ryandrake ◴[22 Aug 25 18:05 UTC] No.44987678[source]▶
This solves the "dependence on Gmail" problem (which is definitely a worthy problem to solve) but not the general "dependence on a particular mail provider" problem. The next step in this walk-down-the-risk-chain is self-hosting on a VPS, where you're now just dependent on your VPS provider, and the next step could be self-hosting on your own metal, where you're now just dependent on your ISP. Happy trails!
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lawn ◴[22 Aug 25 18:08 UTC] No.44987704[source]▶
Which is why you should buy your own domain so you can easily move to another provider.

And backup your emails of course.

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1. tsimionescu ◴[22 Aug 25 18:13 UTC] No.44987775[source]▶
I wonder how many more people have lost access to their DNS than to their email account. When you lease a domain (you can't buy domains), you have to periodically renew your lease - this is much more likely to be a problem than typical mail accounts. And if you lose your domain, and someone buys it, they now get all of your email - a much worse situation than Google locking out of your account. And there is no chance to appeal - again much worse than even Google's terrible user help.
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2. cosmic_cheese ◴[22 Aug 25 21:54 UTC] No.44990322[source]▶
It’s not been a problem for me. The registrars I use are pretty vocal about expiring payment credentials, and if I were really worried they allow stacking multiple methods to fall back on, some of which have their own fallbacks (like PayPal). In theory paying for longer periods in one go could help, but ironically that might make it worse since you’re more likely to forget about a renewal happening 5 or 10 years from now than you are one that recurs every year.
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3. mxuribe ◴[22 Aug 25 22:15 UTC] No.44990521[source]▶
I have zero data to justify my assumption...but i assume less people lose their domain vs folks who lose access to their email. That being said, fully agreed that managing one's domain name - especially the one tied to your mail email address - is so critically important to protect. Big brand domain name leasers, er, um, i mean registrars (BTW, agreed with you on only being able to *lease* domains) tend to offer extra account protection like multi-factor authentication, which should be the bare minimum that is used. At some point, if someone is managing LOTS of domain names, i get that it can be a burden...but for low number of domains (or even just 1 or 2 domains for a family), i think focusing on good security and keeping on payment aspects is not so tough...and helps immensely from getting negatively impacted.
4. daydream ◴[24 Aug 25 01:00 UTC] No.45000349[source]▶
You can always register the domain for 10 years, and then just keep renewing it every year so you always maintain 9 to 10 years of future paid registration.

Like you, this hasn’t been a problem for me.