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Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

(giuliomagnifico.blog)
351 points giuliomagnifico | 1 comments | 22 Aug 25 17:41 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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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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1. 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.