Out of curiosity, I gave GSuite trial a try. Setting up is easy. It also connects to my godaddy account and auto magically configure my domain and email such that I can now use my domain to send and receive email.
GSuite actually creates a new Gmail account for you. So, if you have a free personal Gmail account, you need to run some migration tools to migrate all your email to GSuite. That kinda surprise me as I was expecting to be able to easily convert/replace my free personal email to this GSuite easily. If I have to migrate, that means I will have two Inboxes which are duplicates of each other.
Of course it makes sense. One day if I want to stop the subscription, I don’t lost my personal Gmail Inbox. I just lose my GSuite… but still, I wish there’s a way to convert my personal Gmail to GSuite and vice versa… or is there?
I have a couple of free “GSuite” accounts hosting personal domains. (originally Google Apps for Your Domain). Frequently GSuite accounts cannot be used with features that will work with Gmail. AFAIK, Google Home still doesn’t support GSuite Calendars, etc. So I forward mail from my personal domains to my Gmail account and use that as my primary. Since, IMO, unencrypted email is never “private”, I have no problem using a standard Gmail account.
That is really great to know. I have a g suites account for the college I work at and so have no choice there. I’m glad to know there’s at least some protection on that account.
Hi All. Thanks again for this really great thread. A lot of super helpful stuff and I appreciate not being shamed because I want to move my stuff into more privacy secure stuff. I’m really trying to not get paranoid about all the privacy/security stuff, but I’m also trying to be creative and proactive where I can.
As an update, here is what I have done so far:
Created three aliases under iCloud. One for my small coffee roasting business (I’ve shared on here before about that); one for spam and signups, and one that I have my primary gmail account being forwarded to (and in gmail I have those emails being deleted once they are forwarded).
I deleted the gmail account off of my mac under accounts. This has an impact on contacts and calendars, so working through some of that now.
My icloud email was already setup in mail, etc.
Deleted my primary gmail account from sanebox and moved my icloud account to be my second email account there.
Next steps will be to begin downloading data from Google’s takeout but I need to sort out more hard-drive space first (its over 50gb!!).
In addition to what others have said here, FastMail also provides file space you can use for various purposes. For example, a few months ago, I had a short-term need to share some photos with relatives. I simply uploaded the photos to that space and added an index.html page with links to them all. Once I knew the relatives had downloaded all the photos, I deleted the “instant Web site.” Perhaps an edge case, but still kinda cool.
My fastmail use long predates iCloud, or dot mac, or whatever it was back then.
At that the time you could throw up some web pages using your extra email allocation space.
But I keep it because it works well, it’s not (as far as I can tell) harvesting my data, and most importantly, I can use my own domain, and any name I chose, for my business email. The support is good and “how to do it” documentation extensive.
As someone who’s “de-googled” and had the same questions you had, I cannot recommend Fastmail enough. Just a great service that’s worth the money. Also I set my gmail to forward all of my emails at first. Then as I thinned down things and unsubscribed from others, I turned off forwarding and just check gmail every few days. Almost 2 years in and I haven’t missed the switch. Just wish I could switch my family as we all share google calendars. Way more trouble than it’s worth.
This was a huge motivator for me to switch to G Suite.
Custom domain that I can keep forever( remember Apples .me email scandal?)
Advanced server-side email filtering rules
Server side scripts for processing email even further. - scripts.google.com
SMTP for my domain - I run apps in docker and digital ocean that send emails via my G Suite account.
As a youtuber creator, G Suite also integrates will my channel content creation workflows.
It have looked at leaving google , but so far no one matches their features. I’d probably have to self host and write a lot of code to duplicate them.
. Great server-side rules, easy to set up aliases.