Leaving Gmail behind
/ 5 min read
Table of Contents
I have had plans to make myself independent of Google’s services for a while now. It started with getting rid of Facebook. This was an easy choice, since I wasn’t really using it anymore, except as some kind of birthday calendar. The next one to get rid of was Whatsapp, which I haven’t regretted so far. Both were just a matter of deleting an app or an account. Changing your Gmail is a whole other level—or that’s what I thought.
Why no more Google?
There are several reasons why one should use the services of an email-provider, but even more to not stick to Google. For me, two factors were the most important ones:
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It is not for free If the product is free, then probably it is you, who is the product. This is well known, but there is no reason to not put a price-tag on my data.
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It is about control Your email-provider more or less controls all your accounts on any platform or service. If Google someday decided to block my Gmail for any reason, then I would have small to no chance to regain access. Justice would not matter, Google is a private company that decides in its own interest. I would have to play by their rules—no matter what. Therefore, moving away from Gmail also meant moving the game to my own turf.
Going to ProtonMail
Because I do not want to burden myself with a self-hosted solution (yet), I just had to make the decision between several email providers to host my emails. I decided in favour of ProtonMail.1
There are other great service providers and I truly believe it does not really matter which one you pick. One aspect of my decision to go with Proton was that they also offer cloud storage and a calendar solution. This surely comes in handy, as I am also planning on taking all my files away from Dropbox, Onedrive, and GDrive.
Eventually I stopped using Gmail. It took me a while to get through all the steps below. A custom domain already is mine, but this is not actually a requirement.
Migrating away from Gmail—step by step
- Sign up on ProtonMail
- Add paid subscription to your account (optional, but available free storage might not be enough; see pricing)
- Configure Gmail to forward everything to ProtonMail, so Gmail ‘shadows’ ProtonMail
- In case someone does not know my new email-address yet, I will still receive it
- Moreover, it is possible to return to Gmail, if I am not satisfied or regret moving away from Gmail (I won’t, but it feels ‘safer’)
- Use Proton’s Easy Switch to migrate (copy) all existing emails from Gmail to ProtonMail
- Connect custom domain to ProtonMail
- That wizard was a pleasant experience
- I only struggled one time with setting up the MX record properly, because I forgot to add the required full stops at the end of the domains
- Update all accounts and services to send emails to the new email-addresses
- This last step was the most satisfying, albeit the most time-consuming
- It was a good opportunity to delete old and unused accounts
- I simply went through my password manager—entry by entry—and updated (or deleted) every account
It’s not all sunshine and roses
Of course, there are downsides:
- Due to the integration of Gmail and Google calendar, accepted invitations are not synchronised anymore. This feature is still being implemented, but it might be important to know for some.
- Google’s Gmail App feels polished. The ProtonMail App does not give me that feeling yet, even though I would say it is a well implemented app. I do not use my phone often to write emails, anyway. Reading them works perfectly well.
- The (email) web app also feels unfinished at times. For example, it is not possible yet to change the size of inlined images. Currently, I can only inline an image with a fixed size or add it as attachment to an email.
Bottom line
- It feels like true freedom. I am not looking back and only regret not having this done much earlier.
- I know, Proton could block me, just like Google could. But: my accounts are connected to my custom domain. I could move to another third party provider, just by reconfiguring my DNS record or even setting up an email-server at home, if necessary.
- It costs money. However, a free Gmail account also comes with costs. I am tired of giving companies like Google any more power than they already have. They stopped being the good guys a long time ago.