Yeah, I removed Chrome precisely because it kept re-adding its crap to the login sequence. It really drove home the notion that Google will not respect any boundary or privacy - your machine is their machine, your data is their data, and screw you if you don't agree.
Now I live in Firefox and it's just as good as Chrome, at least for my needs. I've dropped pretty much all Google stuff except for GMail, mostly out of laziness (I would have to update hundreds of accounts).
>> I've dropped pretty much all Google stuff except for GMail, mostly out of laziness (I would have to update hundreds of accounts).
I held off for two years moving away from GMail for this reason. A year ago I decided to pull the plug anyway, and it turned out to be much less annoying than expected. My strategy was as follows: first enable a forward from GMail to your new mail address, then directly migrate the ~10 vital/daily accounts, then just leave the rest pointing to the GMail account. After that, change each remaining account immediately (no exceptions) the moment I either log in to it, or receive an e-mail from it that refers to the GMail address.
It took me about two months migrating away from GMail, and as a bonus I was able to identify quite a few old login I didn't really have a use for anymore, so I closed them.
For regular mail I put an auto-reply in GMail that says I don't use it anymore and the address will be closed at some point in the future. But honestly, I don't think anyone ever saw it as nobody sends regular email anymore these days. All in all the process was pretty painless, and I feel very happy about ditching the last Google service I was still using (except the rare Google query of DDG fails to return useful results)
Not OP, but for personal email I've noticed the utility of email has gone down and down for me the past few years. I've got more spam/junk, 90% of my other traffic is automated bills and newsletters I get, etc, and an ever dwindling amount of friends keeping in touch via email. There seemed to be a progression from email->fb->whatsapp,snap,IG,etc-> .....?/i'm too old to keep up with the lastest communication these days. Most of my social convos have regressed 15 yrs and are again mostly just texting, even for photo sharing....
Now email in professional life is a different story, and is 100% mandatory, but that's all in the enterprisy outlook world...
WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. The only personal emails I receive nowadays are from my parents, and people travelling abroad without reliable internet connections.
I've been thinking about migrating away from GMail for a while now. Are you self hosting your email now, or are you using a provider like ProtonMail? Just curious
not GP either, but I did the same and migrated to Fastmail. The transition was extremely smooth, and at least for now gmail allows you to set up integration (either forwarding rule or remote retrieval through IMAP) to forward you old e-mail to fastmail. I have it set up to auto tag all incoming gmail mail and move it into a folder that I check occasionally to see if anything interesting came through.
One amazing advantage to using fastmail (or really any real e-mail provider) is that it is trivial to set it up to use your own domain for e-mail, and to do catchall addresses for your domain. I use this feature heavily, using the general strategy of giving every service a different e-mail address. In this way I can sort by incoming to field, and block out anyone who sends spam using rules acting on the to field. This does an amazing job of sorting out things like mailing lists that keep re-adding you or that are worth monitoring but aren't worthy of showing up in my inbox.
>> Are you self hosting your email now, or are you using a provider like ProtonMail?
I switched to FastMail, and and added an MX record for the domain I already had to alias the mail adres to that domain. So now I could easily switch to some other e-mail provider at any time in the future. But I’ve been totally happy with FastMail so far.
I did consider self-hosting but decided it’s just too much of a hassle to get decent spam filtering and security set up.
My 2 cents. Use your own domain. It’s really cheap and now you own your email address and can move it to another provider whenever you like.
Setting it up in Fastmail is super easy if your halfway computer literate. It literally says what DNS records you need to creat.
Importing your Gmail emails is even easier: log into Gmail from within the Fastmail options. Grant access. Now it’ll import all your mail in the background.
> Yeah, I removed Chrome precisely because it kept re-adding its crap to the login sequence.
This, and forced auto-updates were exactly what finally led me to entirely removing Chrome from all my systems.
> (I would have to update hundreds of accounts).
I actually have been doing this for the past couple months. It wasn't too bad, just time consuming. I took the opportunity to request account closures for every account that I don't expect to use in the future.
> Yeah, I removed Chrome precisely because it kept re-adding its crap to the login sequence. It really drove home the notion that Google will not respect any boundary or privacy - your machine is their machine, your data is their data, and screw you if you don't agree.
Exactly this. Chrome was never my main browser, but though it's useful for testing web dev I just nuked it from the system once I realised it kept trying to find new ways around my deactivation and / or removal of keystone. That was several years back.
iCloud mail + the default Apple Mail app has worked fine enough for me for a decade.
What does Gmail offer that you can't get on other services? (honest question)
Gmail's mandatory phone number requirement upon registration and inability to get unique aliases (iCloud allows 3, so you can have 4 addresses per account at a time, and without the "baseaddress+" prefix which self-defeats the point of an alias) turns me off right at the start.
> Gmail's mandatory phone number requirement upon registration
It's not always mandatory. I don't know what the heuristics are, but I've managed to create a couple new Google accounts (non-gmail, for dev purposes) during the past couple weeks without them being tied to a phone number.
Now I live in Firefox and it's just as good as Chrome, at least for my needs. I've dropped pretty much all Google stuff except for GMail, mostly out of laziness (I would have to update hundreds of accounts).