alt Hacker NewsI have more than 20 years of email in my gmail account. How do I even start migrating?
And even if I migrate, I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either.
Does anyone have concrete advice as to how to make the transition?
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That's what I thought as well, until I actually started migrating. I learned a few things:
* You probably don't have that many accounts associated with the email, actually. I have about 50 accounts that I care about enough to move, which took me a morning, but it's doable.
* For the same reason, you probably don't have that many (real human) contacts as well. But I could be very wrong. For me, I still occasionally use Gmail to communicate with a few people (like every two months), but that's infrequent enough that I don't care about how bad Gmail is.
* You probably want to review which services you don't regularly use any more, and if you don't have precious data stored with them (you probably shouldn't), consider closing the account instead of changing the email address, if that's an option for the provider.
* You can of course keep checking the original inbox or do forwarding. My experience is that, very quickly, I only need to occasionally check the old email. I still get a few useful emails here and there, but it's manageable. (Plus emails that remind me I should just delete the account)
You can do it.
> I will need to keep my address alive and forwarding to my new address at least for a few years. So no privacy gains there either.
Ya, there's no way of not letting google know what your new address is, but you're going to be emailing a lot of gmail addresses anyway so there's no way around that, really. But with the forwarding they only know incoming mail.
I switched off gmail 3.5 years ago and all I can say is that it wasn't anywhere near as scary as I thought it would be. I setup an auto-responder that would hound people to update their contacts for me and slowly switched over services I cared about (and closed others!) An important point, though, is that I don't really care about old emails. I do still have access to my gmail account, of course, but I have yet to go back. Surely there is a way to export everything and import it into something searchable, though?
Fastmail migration takes about 20 seconds, and you can use your gmail identity from the Fastmail web app.
Wrote an article[0] on how to migrate away from Gmail a few years back. Hope it helps!
Do you really need for the old emails to be "in an account" to make sense of them? Google lets you just download an archive that can be loaded in a local mail reader.
I was in the same boat as you. I tried Fastmail and they have a really great tool that just did it. I was skeptical but after I tried it was very pleased. Give it a shot.
are you only using the web based version?
A dedicated client like Mozilla's Thunderbird might be helpful for de-cluttering.
Notion Mail also seems like it has potential - ability to group together certain types of mail.
Someone already recommended Google Takeout to back up all your mail, then finding a business email host that can easily import your data
Fastmail provides an easy way to migrate [0]. I setup a label in my Fastmail account that will tag all mail coming in from Gmail. Then you go through that list at your leisure and make the requisite contact with the people or services emailing at the old address. It's really not difficult at all. I've been on Fastmail for ~4 years now, and haven't once considered looking back or regretted it. Good luck.
- Start with takeout
- Setup automatic forwarding
- Then probably just use that old email for searching old emails
This has worked okay for me
I think it depends on what you use your email for.
Basically all email I get is from accounts created on services. Almost never it is an email from a real person.
The ones that matter I have been migrating to Proton (e.g.: bank, utilities, etc).
My gmail address was also almost exactly 20 years old when I migrated two years ago. Here's how I did it:
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1. Register your domain (if you're doing that) and get fastmail set up -- I remember feeling a physical discomfort clicking "register" on fastmail, it felt like such an insanely impossible thing to do.
2. Set up the IMAP link so that anything sent to your gmail gets delivered to fastmail. Doing so also allows you to send email from your gmail address (with valid spf/dkim) if you want to.
3. Import all your old mail using fastmail's import tool, which Just Works.
4. Set up a vacation autoresponder in gmail that responds only to people in your contacts with a note telling them your new address.
5. Set up a label and filter in fastmail for anything that was addressed to your gmail, so you can easily see what is still sending you email on your old address to assist with migrating services.
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It worked a charm. I was completely convinced of it within a week, long before the 30 day free trial ran out. I have been an immensely happy customer since then. Could not imagine going back.