alt Hacker NewsSo many seem to have made a similar move. But the one thing holding me back: starting with a new email address.
My email address is not just for email. It's so firmly embedded in my digital life, it's hard to think how to remove it. It's my identity. I use "login with Google" in most places where it's available. It's my backup recovery for my MFA authenticator. It's my github alias.
So what is the strategy everyone follows to start with a custom domain? Do people use redirection? Is that effective? What happens when an email is redirected from Gmail to my new host, and I want to keep replying without the recipients thinking I've changed email? If you do that, is it even worth switching, given you have to keep your Gmail account?
That is the more interesting part of these stories to me than which host people move to.
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I did this. I just had to resign myself to it being an ongoing process.
I did NOT do forwarding. It was the easiest way to identify what's still associated with the old address.
It was not a clean break. I still have the old account, and occasionally it turns out something is still contacting me at it. That's ok... 99.9% free and clear is better than 0%.
Getting people to stop emailing my old address was annoying. But also, there were fewer people than I thought that still email instead of messaging. Email is mostly account stuff.
I decoupled. When selecting a new service I intentionally did NOT look for, or use, ten services at one provider. Provider stickiness was what makes the process painful to begin with.
Some accounts will not let you change addresses, ever. For those I just bit the bullet and deleted old accounts and made new ones (like ecobee).
The IdP thing wasn't a huge deal, but I don't do a ton of that anyway.
I also moved to a better password manager, and that helped keep track of what I had moved.
I did some takeout process stuff. Aside from the opportunity to clean up and reimport contacts, I don't think I ever used most of it. Most things were just less important than I thought they would be.
Rip the band-aid. You don't own your email, which means all the things you're worried about could at any moment be lost anyway.
Buy a domain, own the MX records, send your emails where-ever you want. Then just try live your life, and anytime you log into something, try swap it over to your new domain.
Keep your gmail, keep it as the backup email. Just reduce your risk.
I set up a redirection and tried to change my gmail address with the new one in all the important places I could (took a couple hours; now and then I notice a new one I should change). I also still have my gmail address set up in my mail client so I can answer from gmail if I need to, but that never happened in more than a year. For everyone that actually knows me I gave them the new address when it came up.
Same here. What worries me most is what if Google just decide for whatever reason to close my email account down. I've already had several Youtube accounts closed for (in my opinion) spurious reasons. The appeals process is a joke. I can live without Youtube, but I can't easily get myself out of the gmail hole I've dug over the last 2 decades.
Just make a new one and start using it for new things. Move things over piecemeal. You don't have to close your old account.