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Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

(giuliomagnifico.blog)
351 points giuliomagnifico | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.418s | source
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TranquilMarmot ◴[] No.44988014[source]
I spent the past month "de-Googling" my life after I saw a notice in my Gmail inbox that it was 20 years old. I took a step back and realized just how invested into the Google ecosystem I was. Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Maps, Keep, Photos, YouTube, FitBit, Android. Basically my entire digital life. My goal was more diversifying than security/privacy, but security/privacy is a really nice bonus.

I ended up going with Proton because they had a good solution for mail, calendar, and drive which I was looking to replace. I set up my custom domain to point to it and have my Gmail forwarding to it - any time I get an email to the old Gmail address I go change it on the website or delete the account altogether.

For Google Docs / Keep, I switched over to Obsidian and pay for the sync there. It's a great replacement for my main use case of Docs / Keep which is just a dumping ground for ideas.

For Google Photos, I now self-host Immich in Hetzner on a VPS with a 1TB storage box mounted via SSHFS. I use Tailscale to connect to it. It took a few days to use Google Takeout + immich-go to upload all the photos (~300GB of data) but it's working really well now. Only costs $10/mo for the VPS and 1TB of storage.

Android I think I'll be stuck on - I have a Pixel 8 Pro that technically supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there. Next time I need a new phone I'll take a serious look at Fairphone but I think the Pixel 8 Pro should last a few more years.

My FitBit Versa is really old and starting to die - I ordered one of the new Pebble watches and am patiently waiting for it to ship!

YouTube I'm stuck on because that's where the content is. I have yet to find a suitable replacement for Google Maps - OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.

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sunshinekitty ◴[] No.44990278[source]
Haha almost identical experience but self hosting immich with off site backups. Wild how difficult it is to change your email with certain websites! Several months later still fighting with various sites.

I have an iphone so I use Apple maps and an icloud based obsidian vault, and that is all that is tied to Apple which feels fine for now.

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1. palata ◴[] No.44990411[source]
There is CoMaps on iOS that is open source and is based on OpenStreetMap. Highly recommended.