this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
2351 points (99.9% liked)
Privacy
32165 readers
236 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I've always had an aversion to corporate anything so I'm already part way there. Use DDG half the time, Firefox user since it was called Firebird!. I really just need to drop Gmail and use DDG or others full time. I'm finding parting with gmail difficult and scary though as over a decade of history and old friends that may know that address as my only contact.
You don't have to delete your Gmail account right away. Keep it around to search the history if you need to. You can set up an auto-forward rule in Gmail to forward all email to your new address, then you can reply from your new address. You can take it a step further and include a please note my email address has changed in your signature. Just like moving away from Google, moving away from Gmail can be done in baby steps.
Email has a special header for this called "Reply-To" which is respected by pretty much every client. When anyone replies to your mail they won't even realize it's to another address than they received the mail from.
Also you don't need to keep it for search history. Download all your mail with imap to some proper mail client and you can move it to a new provider if you really want to.
Yeah this is what I did over a couple of years. Move things over slowly as much as you be bothered... do the accounts and people you use the most first. Eventually you'll only have junk going to your Google address and you'll be happy to see it go.
Some (most?) email providers will have tools to help you move from Gmail and keep contacts etc.
Oh this is a great half-way step.
It's like 20 bux a month for your own web hosting...it's idiot proof with a little bit of effort and I only get advertising spam I signed up for and forgot to uncheck. But that all goes to bills@mydomain.com so I don't have to see them