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Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

(giuliomagnifico.blog)
351 points giuliomagnifico | 2 comments | 22 Aug 25 17:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.402s | source
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TranquilMarmot ◴[22 Aug 25 18:30 UTC] 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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mbrochh ◴[24 Aug 25 04:02 UTC] No.45001272[source]▶
Great effort! For photos I can highly recommend Ente. Fully E2E encrypted. Works on all systems, syncs reliably, has great on-device AI stuff to build a vector database of your images, has very good UI/UX and is reasonably priced. Once I had all my 20k+ photos uploaded into Ente, I was finally able to delete all my photos from iCloud and cancel my iCloud subscription.
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1. physicles ◴[24 Aug 25 14:35 UTC] No.45004575[source]▶
I’m trying to choose between Ente and Immich. What helped you make your choice?
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2. mbrochh ◴[03 Sep 25 02:26 UTC] No.45111661[source]▶
Not sure I have a satisfying answer. I didn't do too much research and did not compare all available options. Isn't Immich self-hosted? That rules it out for me, can't be bothered to run my own servers, I just want to pay a fair amount of money and get peace of mind in return.