Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

titan · 2017-11-23 20:19:28

martix wrote:

@titan I think that's the same with proton to non proton. How does tutanota work with Thunderbird? Or do you use a different client?

It is online for pc, I just run it in a pinned tab.There is an app for android and ios.

mrneilypops · 2017-11-24 11:28:46

I have a tutanota account but I do not use it.
One reason is no search function.

titan · 2017-11-24 16:49:53

mrneilypops wrote:

I have a tutanota account but I do not use it.
One reason is no search function.

You have search using it on browser ctl+f

Search in app coming soon.

Last edited by titan (2017-11-24 16:50:37)

ratcheer · 2017-11-24 17:05:32

A couple of days ago, I opened a free account with Proton Mail. I'm easing into it, slowly. I made sure to come up with a username that is unrelated to anything about me or usernames I use in other places.

My big problem is how many e-commerce accounts I have that are tied to my Gmail address, at least as their userid. Many of them do not allow changing the primary account id.

Tim

BLizgreat! · 2017-12-25 03:22:42

Been abstaining from this cause seems you/Schwim tend to go through this type of phase every few years or so. Remember a similar theme in #! forum. Not that there's anything wrong with it. Still may as well throw in 2 cents. Just personally don't mind using Google Inc's stuff. Tends towards good quality, lots of features, free but yep, that comes with the understanding that you/we are the product in the scenario.

To me it's mostly reasonable, I mean the no free lunch and nothing's free theme. Still tend to just go ahead and use the resources they provide, habit, convenience ... for whatever reasons. I'm not one of the privacy obsessed nixers of the world though, don't devote much time to worrying about that or learning about it either. Tech security is an entirely different thing in my view, the privacy angle in terms of xyz-organizations monitoring/logging netizens activities online I don't lose any sleep over.

I mean I don't see a major problem in setting up a personal SMTP/mail-server if someone is really concerned, vps's in many cases are dirt cheap if you don't want to do it on your personal systems and local networks. I mean as long as the senders software knows where to send it and the receiving party's software knows how to store it and they can retrieve it when desired ... sky's the limit.

Which the above might be a cool opportunity for whoever, a vps = couple buck$/mnth, you get a private mail-server AND the opportunity to learn remote admin'ing skills to boot. That's a win/win in this topic.

Last edited by BLizgreat! (2017-12-25 03:23:50)

martix · 2017-12-25 17:27:46

BLizgreat! wrote:

Just personally don't mind using Google Inc's stuff.

For me it's really fun to avoid ALL of g*evil Inc's stuff! I mean how on earth would I have discovered something like googol.warriordudimanche.net? Or the add-on Lightbeam? It's the same with e-mails like protonmail, posteo, mailfence, etc.

martix · 2017-12-26 02:04:27

As a sidenote: Somehow mailpile.is was not mentioned yet in this thread. There is v. 1.0.0rc1 available.

BLizgreat! · 2017-12-26 14:34:32

If anyone doesn't want to use their services for any reason, can't see anything wrong with that. It's definitely each persons choice. Esp if you enjoy learning about alternatives.

christopherisnow · 2020-04-19 21:46:47

Hoping to cull some more recent opinions on this evergreen topic...

I too am looking to ween myself off Gmail. The trouble is 15GB of old messages to deal with. Like this chap, I'd prefer to retain the old messages in local searchable form without a giant .mbox file. And I'd like to develop a routine for backing up new emails (locally and/or on the cloud) to avoid clogging both the server of my new non-Gmail account and my laptop.

Related issue: currently my email client is Mailspring, which looks sharp and works reasonably well. But it doesn't do offline IMAP (or any kind of archiving really), so I suspect now might be the moment to take up Mutt in pursuit of greater autonomy and digital hygiene.

schwim · 2020-04-19 22:44:58

I'm still gmail free for all new mail. The old mail is still there but instead of using the service to search, I used Thunderbird to download all the messages(many gigabytes worth) which I can search through when needed. All new mail is routed to my VPS(like it always was) but instead of just forwarding to gmail in the past, it now just acts as a normal IMAP account. When I'm home, I use Thunderbird to access that as well and when traveling, I use Afterlogic Webmail Pro to access the IMAP account, which works great.

I just got tired of trying alternative services and figure this way, if the mail goes away, it will be my fault and not because Bob the webmail provider got bought out and shuttered by Apple or Google.

christopherisnow · 2020-04-19 23:37:28

Good to hear @schwim. How do you manage/store all the old emails? Are they all living in local folders that Thunderbird loads directly? That would seem to eat up a lot of space. Do you still use your Gmail account to route any incoming mail, or is it completely deactivated?

schwim · 2020-04-20 01:36:31

The GMail account is still active(I'm an Android user and it gets used for a lot of stuff related to that) but nothing gets routed through it any longer.

As for the storage, the Thunderbird app does use local storage for my GMail history. I have the space so that's not an issue. My active mail account is stored both remotely and locally.

ohnonot · 2020-04-22 10:01:12

Doesn't TB archive old messages? I'm sure it could be configured to

download all messages locally
archive them as soon as the size exceeds 1kB or so
then remove the smtp & imap server details from the account

christopherisnow wrote:

this evergreen topic...

...wilts and withers quickly once you make the change.

christopherisnow · 2020-04-29 17:23:28

Neomutt and mbsync -- esp. when automatically configured by the fabulous mutt-wizard -- seem to be an ideal way to organize and migrate accounts.

I haven't got everything set up yet (on account of mutt's famously steep learning curve), but the promise of some degree of digital hygiene is worth it. I'll post my workflow when finished.

christopherisnow · 2020-05-04 15:58:42

In 20 steps (couldn't do it in 12), here's how I cleaned up a decade of Gmail chaos, backed it up locally, transfered the important bits to a new non-Gmail account, and moved to mutt over the last couple weeks. This is all trial and (a LOT of) error, so please don't take it as a universal tutorial.

1. Install neomutt (I did it in the Buster repos -- on Stretch you have to build it from source) and friends:

sudo apt-get install neomutt isync msmtp pass notmuch abook

2. Install the genial mutt-wizard, which nearly automatically takes care of mail directories, config files, passwords, and mbsync/notmuch/abook integration for what follows.

3. Set up Gmail account and new account (in my case hosted on Dreamhost) with `mw add`.

4. Log onto Gmail through the browser and where possible delete labels. Unfortunately mbsync backs up labels as separate IMAP folders, so a single labeled message gets triplicated locally in INBOX (or Sent or whatever), in a [label] folder, and by default in Archive. (AFAIK Gmail does not duplicate the messages on the server). So if you use a lot of labels, this creates a LOT of redundancy in your local backup. I learned this the hard way.

5. If you intend to keep the Gmail account transitionally, renaming the local folders and syncing them as separate channels in .mbsyncrc may help keep things straight later on. See here.

6. Create a Gmail/migrate label through the browser and copy any messages to it that should go in the new account INBOX. (Since I wanted to copy over my Gmail/Archive directly, which contains a copy of everything, I did not want to transfer all the INBOX or Sent content, rather just a few important recent messages.)

7. In .mbsyncrc add this line *before the MaildirStore line* to throttle mbsync and avoid Gmail's OVERQUOTA error when backing up Gmail.

PipelineDepth 50

Learned this one the hard way too.

8. Back up Gmail:

mbsync -a

9. Copy local Gmail/Archive and /migrate folders to main [new_account] folder.

10. Strip metadata from [new_account]/Archive and /migrate as described here ("Preparing for Upload").

11. Copy messages from [new_account]/migrate into /INBOX and delete /migrate folder.

12. Edit new_account line in .mbsyncrc to prevent uploading 11GB [new-account]/Archive folder to the server:

Pattern * !"Archive"

13. Sync both accounts:

mbsync -a

14. Open neomutt, make sure everything looks peachy in both accounts. Find any unnecessary oversized message attachments in [new-account]/Archive by limiting with `~z [min. size-max. size in bytes]` and delete.

14. Configure search index with `notmuch setup` and `notmuch new`

15. Export Google contacts from webmail as Vcard file and import contacts.vcf into abook.

16. Autoforward incoming Gmail to new address.

17. Back up local Gmail directory as tarball and save to external hard drive.

18. Delete local Gmail directories. Remove relevant bits from muttrc and .mbsyncrc with

mw delete

19. Spend a couple weeks gettings used to neomutt.

20. Enjoy freedom from Gmail and fry Gmail account to taste. In my case, that will involve removing all old messages from the server once I've lived without them a few more weeks and am confident the new setup is working properly. I will probably hang onto the Google account itself indefinitely to retain mailing list subscriptions, my Gmail address-linked non-Gmail services, etc.

Last edited by christopherisnow (2020-05-04 16:09:45)

MsMattie · 2020-06-08 20:36:39

Linux Thunderbird is something you may want to look into. Since you have cpanel running on a shared hosting or server environment, Thunderbird is pretty easy to set up. I started messing with it a few months ago when I needed to do a bit of mass emailing.

I'm kind of in the same thought-scape as you as far as finding gmail, outlook.com etc distasteful with their ability to spy and monitor every thing in those emails for years-on-end. But I haven't switched to Thunderbird for my main email account.

Two possible disadvantages:

* I use it only on Linux desktops. That is fine for me because I never use a mobile phone for anything important, including my primary email. Only for secondary email that is of not much importance should those android devices get a security breach.

* Secondly, I'm not sure how to deal with the inevitable spam that would be coming in while using Thunderbird for a primary email account. Outlook.com or gmail can mostly handle spam. Thunderbird alone I think does absolutely nothing in that regard. The spam will just come flowing in, unchecked.

Last edited by MsMattie (2020-06-08 20:41:34)

johnraff · 2020-06-09 03:08:37

Thunderbird has quite good spam filtering in my experience, but it has to be trained. Every time you mark a mail as spam it learns a bit better what to look for. You can also add your own custom mail filters to catch any patterns that you often get. I get very little spam these days. I expect my ISPs are doing some basic filtering too, but I haven't done any server-level tweaking myself.

Jimbo_G · 2020-06-09 08:29:21

For my own email I'm with @nobody on full-service hosting. For work stuff, I struggled for several years using Thunderbird (on a Windows machine) and have finally switched to Outlook and it really is... just better overall.

There seem to be a lot of bugs and minor annoyances with Thunderbird that have never been fixed, I don't know why, but it's depressing to look for solutions online and find people with exactly the same problem as me back in 2011. Long-term I can't see there being much of a future for this kind of email client.

ohnonot · 2020-06-10 06:56:00

MsMattie wrote:

inevitable spam

I guess that's the price one pays for using gmail in the first place.
OTOH, shouldn't googlemail already handle spam in a rather too-enthusiastic manner?

Colonel Panic · 2023-05-15 19:42:51

Like a couple of other people in this thread, I've now opened a Protonmail account although I didn't take any trouble to not use my real name. Maybe I should have done, but we'll see how it goes.

In case anyone's interested in why;

I was getting a lot of trouble with Fastmail trying to connect me to CardDAV facilities, whatever they are, and then telling me I couldn't have them unless I upgraded my account. When I complained about this, the Fastmail service agents told me to change my password and it would stop - well it did, but it also locked me out my account in Thunderbird much of the time.

I expect there's a fix in Thunderbird somewhere but in the meantime I need an e-mail account that just works without any hassle or problems, and Protonmail appears to be one. There is also no longer any free account option in Fastmail, whereas Protonmail does have one (and it was the one I signed up for) and it also looks very secure, which is a bonus.

I might have a look at Tutanota too.

Last edited by Colonel Panic (2024-01-02 13:19:11)

#21 2017-11-23 20:19:28

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#22 2017-11-24 11:28:46

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#23 2017-11-24 16:49:53

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#24 2017-11-24 17:05:32

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#25 2017-12-25 03:22:42

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#26 2017-12-25 17:27:46

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#27 2017-12-26 02:04:27

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#28 2017-12-26 14:34:32

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#29 2020-04-19 21:46:47

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#30 2020-04-19 22:44:58

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#31 2020-04-19 23:37:28

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#32 2020-04-20 01:36:31

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#33 2020-04-22 10:01:12

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#34 2020-04-29 17:23:28

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#35 2020-05-04 15:58:42

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#36 2020-06-08 20:36:39

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#37 2020-06-09 03:08:37

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#38 2020-06-09 08:29:21

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#39 2020-06-10 06:56:00

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

#40 2023-05-15 19:42:51

Re: Moving away from gmail and hoping for thoughts

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