News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Gmail tracks the history of things you buy, and it’s hard to delete. Parent comment

Re:Gmail tracks the history of things you buy, and it’s hard... by satysin on Friday May 17, 2019 @03:40PM (#19942843)
A month ago I finally switched away from G Suite to FastMail and have been very happy. I also transferred my domains over to Gandi so I am basically Google free from a services perspective (with the exception of a Google account for YouTube subscriptions).

I have to say FastMail works really well on my Apple devices. iOS and macOS have worked perfectly so far for mail, calendar and contacts.

The only pain point was 'losing' my custom domain Google Account when I cancelled G Suite. Migrating mail, etc. wasn't an issue as FastMail has a pretty solid import tool. However one area that caught me out was export/import of my 800+ YouTube subscriptions (that number shocked me aswell).

Turns out YouTube has no such functionality so I ended up having to hack a semi-automated solution but even that wasn't straight forward as YouTube has limits on how many new subscriptions you can make in a ~6 hour window.

I wish Google had some kind of "convert my G Suite account into a consumer Google Account" function instead the moment you cancel the G Suite plan any accounts simply vanish and you then have to sign up again for a consumer Google Account. Quite the pain in the ass.

Anyway it is nice to be free from Google's core services and I am very impressed with how smooth migrating to FastMail has been. If anyone is thinking of doing the same and wants to know anything specific feel free to drop me an email, info in HN profile.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Gmail tracks the history of things you buy, and it’s hard... by sucrose on Friday May 17, 2019 @05:08PM (#19943584)
I'd be happy to switch away from https://domains.google but I'm loving the free, full Whois privacy protection. According to Gandi's Whois Privacy¹: "excluding your state, country, ... and the name of the company..." from the Whois privacy feature. I need full Whois privacy.

Do you have any other registrar suggestions?

¹: https://docs.gandi.net/en/domain_names/common_operations/who...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Gmail tracks the history of things you buy, and it’s hard... by gurpreetsatwal on Friday May 17, 2019 @09:39PM (#19945068)
Namecheap recently started offering free whois privacy, I'm not sure 100% certain if it's full however. I believe it is
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Gmail tracks the history of things you buy, and it’s hard... by cherrypepsi on Friday May 17, 2019 @11:22PM (#19945387)
I have it! It sets the country to Panama and a generated e-mail which I guess just redirects stuff to my real address? I haven't bothered to check that. It's using whoisguard.com for the garbled email.

The domain is "thelittleshits.net" (I'm absolutely serious, I needed a domain for testing a deployment and couldn't come up with anything)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Gmail tracks the history of things you buy, and it’s hard... by satysin on Friday May 17, 2019 @06:00PM (#19943987)
I admit I don't really pay much attention to my whois privacy outside of my name and direct contact details. I don't have issue with my country being listed for example so I don't have any other suggestions for you sorry.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Gmail tracks the history of things you buy, and it’s hard... by nerdjon on Friday May 17, 2019 @09:45PM (#19945085)
I switched to AWS Route 53. At least for .com addresses it’s $3 more than google domains but gets (I believe) full Whois privacy.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Gmail tracks the history of things you buy, and it’s hard... by OJFord on Friday May 17, 2019 @07:50PM (#19944667)
Not all TLDs allow that anyway.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Gmail tracks the history of things you buy, and it’s hard... by DoctorOW on Friday May 17, 2019 @11:15PM (#19945365)
Cloudflare has full Whois and at-cost domains with their registrar.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Gmail tracks the history of things you buy, and it’s hard... by newscracker on Saturday May 18, 2019 @08:02AM (#19946938)
Cloudflare is still to open up its registration service for new domain registrations. It allows (and has allowed) only transferring domains from another registrar since it launched nearly eight months ago. New registrations elsewhere also have a lock-in period before they can be transferred (usually 90 days I guess).
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Gmail tracks the history of things you buy, and it’s hard... by stOneskull on Saturday May 18, 2019 @09:31PM (#19950824)
Namesilo has free whois privacy
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Gmail tracks the history of things you buy, and it’s hard... by woutr_be on Friday May 17, 2019 @10:48PM (#19945289)
I currently have an old G Suite account with my own domain, the problem you mentioned is the only thing holding me back. All my things (Docs, YouTube, Cloud, Analytics) are currently linked to that domain, if I were to delete it, I would lose everything from the past 5+ years.
[ Parent | on HN ]