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Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

(giuliomagnifico.blog)
351 points giuliomagnifico | 3 comments | 22 Aug 25 17:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.634s | 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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mantra2 ◴[22 Aug 25 18:07 UTC] No.44987696[source]▶
What bothered me about Gmail was that it was central to my life and if something were to happen and they locked my account they have zero support.

With that out of the way I feel perfectly happy with FM — no need to go further down the paranoia hole.

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1. kevin_thibedeau ◴[23 Aug 25 00:43 UTC] No.44991792[source]▶
I'm on fastmail with an xyz.dev domain and keep a gmail for legacy purposes. Unfortunately some email validators will reject my short FM address.
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2. qingcharles ◴[23 Aug 25 05:01 UTC] No.44993309[source]▶
Right. Everyone has to keep a Gmail address as backup because of all these edge cases. For one, some domains (like yours) are just rejected. I tried to register an account with a huge corporate SMTP provider recently but they've not updated their allowed gTLD in 10 years and their devs fought me for weeks telling me it was my domain that was wrong, not their system until they finally gave in.

And secondly, many sites, like Reddit, use a Gmail address as some sort of signal of quality. You can avoid a lot of new account bans on Reddit simply by registering with a Gmail instead of your own domain.

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3. mantra2 ◴[23 Aug 25 19:28 UTC] No.44998454[source]▶
Reddit seems to shadow ban anyone, anywhere, anytime these days. No reason needed.