I have this bad feeling daily that for whatever reason I loose access to my gmail. Don’t think of anything shady but simply I just loose it. There is a very small chance to it but still. You can read the stories that people uploaded their family photos to google drive and the algorithm marks their kids photos CP and they loose their account. Or maybe your email is used to spam or anything similar. There is no way to talk to google support, it is an endless loop of help pages. I just can’t live with this. I know billions of people do, but I cannot. My email address is registered to hundreds of websites including government and banking sites. You could literally destroy me financially or other ways by just gaining login to my gmail. Google could cause me HUGE problems by locking me out. I decided to start transitioning to an email with my own domain. I have the doimain, I have the email client setup. So what do you do with your existing stuff? Most websites dont even let you change the email. I have to take appointment in government offices to change my email. It seems like a giant task.
Have anyone took this leap?
I transitioned e-mail address twice. What has worked for me is doing it slowly. Keep the old address around: from time to time you’ll get emails from services you did not even remember being subscribed to. Also, if you don’t use a password manager, now it’s the perfect time to start. I suggest Bitwaden
You’re using a password manager right? Just iterate through the entries in your password manager updating.
Can vouch for this method, I did something similar and just updated my email on services in order of my entries in password manager.
Start by changing your most important services to your new email, and set your gmail to forward everything to your new email. From then, sign up to new sites with your new email and change emails of old accounts if you have time, it’s not a huge rush.
As long as you set up the email forwarding, you’ve done most of the important work right there.
You can also auto-label anything in your new account based on From: in the header to indicate that it got forwarded from the old account. This way you will know what you still need to switch over.
Yeah I have them auto go into an “old email” folder rather than clutter my inbox especially if it’s forwarding crap newsletters/spam etc. I was very liberal with my old email…
Less of a leap and more of a careful crawl. Use nee email for new services, and deactivate old accounts if possible. I have yet to selfhost email, but for hosted options proton and tutanota are better than gmail for easily. The issue with selfhosting email is that it is easy to get blacklisted iirc.
Never had gmail, I used my ancient hotmail to signup for a google account.
did it years ago. created several new email addresses for different purposes with one main new personal one. I set up a forwarding to that main address from Google while I transitioned online accounts to the new email addresses. now I use Google only for YouTube and my phone but the Google mailbox is pretty much defunct, occasionally I get an email but that is still being forwarded to my new main one
Before you change your accounts over to your new email, use email aliases like anonaddy or simplelogin for your online accounts.
Most websites don’t let you change the email? Just create a new account then.
You have to make some sacrifices to get away from having your entire identity online tied to Google. Be willing to have some downsides to get upsides.
