I have this bad feeling daily that for whatever reason I loose access to my gmail. Don’t think of anything shady but simply I just loose it. There is a very small chance to it but still. You can read the stories that people uploaded their family photos to google drive and the algorithm marks their kids photos CP and they loose their account. Or maybe your email is used to spam or anything similar. There is no way to talk to google support, it is an endless loop of help pages. I just can’t live with this. I know billions of people do, but I cannot. My email address is registered to hundreds of websites including government and banking sites. You could literally destroy me financially or other ways by just gaining login to my gmail. Google could cause me HUGE problems by locking me out. I decided to start transitioning to an email with my own domain. I have the doimain, I have the email client setup. So what do you do with your existing stuff? Most websites dont even let you change the email. I have to take appointment in government offices to change my email. It seems like a giant task.
Have anyone took this leap?
Just a little at a time. Most sites let you change your email. As you get a message from a site move it to your other email.
You’re using a password manager right? Just iterate through the entries in your password manager updating.
The email I use for random website sign-up’s is an ancient hotmail account that I only check when I’m expecting a specific email. It’s like thousands of spam messages.
The more important things using my actual email are comparatively small.
Yes I do. Although many sites simply wont let you change it. I will still have to try and change as many as I can
Could you give me an example of a mainstream website that doesn’t let you update your email?
I think it might be difficult if you used oauth to create the account. In most cases your account will just continue to be tied to that oauth provider.
Less of a leap and more of a careful crawl. Use nee email for new services, and deactivate old accounts if possible. I have yet to selfhost email, but for hosted options proton and tutanota are better than gmail for easily. The issue with selfhosting email is that it is easy to get blacklisted iirc.
So first off, not sure if you’re in a different country or something, but I live in the US, and basically every website, Government or not, has a way to easily change your email address.
I’ve run into one or two that I had to call to confirm, but still, it was pretty painless.
Second, gmail allows you to automatically forward your emails to a different email address. While you’re going through the process of changing your primary email on different websites, set up a universal forwarding rule on gmail to send all emails to your new address.
Third, for actually transitioning your emails, sit down and write a list out of all your services that are tied to your email starting with most critical first. This would be banking, auto bill payments for utilities, car payments, credit cards, phone/internet payments, investment logins, etc.
Basically, the sites that if you lost access to or couldn’t auto pay with, you would be screwed or at risk of late payments.
Getting all of those down should be pretty quick because there shouldn’t be that many unless you have a ton of different loans, banks, and investment portfollios.
Getting those taken care of will take your stress down significantly. Then move on to important, but not critical, this could be your streaming services, other subscriptions like news sites or newsletters, important apps or services you pay for.
Then tier three is everything else. Stuff that doesn’t really matter that much.
This is what I did and now I’m completely off Gmail/Outlook and onto Protonmail and love it.
Last thing to remember is to download anything in your email that might be important. Just force the rule to run through your whole inbox and it will forward all your old emails to your new address. This will likely take many hours to fully sync, but eventually all email records will be moved over to your new email address.
I just finished this as well with Proton and SimpleLogin. Tier 1 get my actual Proton address. Tier 2 gets an alias address. Tier 3 gets closed as needed or an alias address.
Use your own domain for the migration. That means if you ever move again you won’t have to do this again. You can just point the domain at a new email service.
