I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible

Re:I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible by stcredzero on Friday August 14, 2020 @10:45AM (#24158565)

Here's a place to start. Just get another email account. A paid one, where you are not the product, but actually the customer. Then, every time you run into an account in your normal activities, you switch that email over. If you like, go through your password vault every day, and switch over one additional account you see there. If you keep doing this, and most of your daily business is switched over to the new account, rather painlessly.

Your old gmail account will linger, but soon, it will be relegated to spam and near-spam.

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Re:I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible by brazzy on Friday August 14, 2020 @10:49AM (#24158624)

Better yet: get your own domain and use it for your primary email and simply have it forwarded, so if your email hoster becomes a problem for whatever reason, you can switch easily.

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Re:I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible by Silhouette on Friday August 14, 2020 @11:18AM (#24159018)

As an added bonus, you can then easily create a unique email address for each service you deal with. Then you can do things like guaranteeing mail from important sources doesn't accidentally end up in your junk mail folder, or guaranteeing mail from a business that thinks spamming is OK because you once bought something from them does.

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Re:I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible by _fat_santa on Friday August 14, 2020 @10:54AM (#24158684)

I made the switch from an @gmail to @mydomain.com a few years back. It's been freaking fantastic. While you do have to pay for it, switching email providers has been next to seamless.

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Re:I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible by StavrosK on Friday August 14, 2020 @12:06PM (#24159707)

Same here, I thought it would take months but it actually took minutes. I set Fastmail to connect through IMAP to Gmail, it got everything in a few minutes, I pointed the domain to it and I was done! I couldn't believe it was that easy.

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Re:I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible by SwiftyBug on Friday August 14, 2020 @12:13PM (#24159787)

I can't wait for HEY to implement custom domains so I can ditch gmail for good.

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Re:I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible by detaro on Friday August 14, 2020 @12:15PM (#24159809)

Curious, why does it take HEY to replace gmail? What's the killer aspects those two have others don't?

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Re:I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible by 101101001010 on Friday August 14, 2020 @12:51PM (#24160216)

(Not parent author) I believe what makes HEY compelling to some email users is that it is opinionated about what email workflow should be like and fits the bill for many.

While a similar way of using email can be achieved in other mail clients [0] the simplicity of having such features by default it's by itself a good reason.

Some features that are non-trivial to emulate in other email clients are:

- Grouping emails with different subjects etc to the same

- Adding private notes is some emails

- Clipping specific parts

- Some UI specific features (Focus & Reply etc.)

[0] https://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-...

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Re:I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible by SwiftyBug on Wednesday August 19, 2020 @04:57PM (#24216340)

Not to mention the blocking of spy pixel tracking out of the box and the screener.

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Re:I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible by fredthomsen on Friday August 14, 2020 @11:12AM (#24158944)

and the paid providers actually have customer service

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Re:I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible by techsupporter on Friday August 14, 2020 @01:35PM (#24160768)

Not only do they have customer service if things go wrong, they have customer service to take random requests.

I've submitted four "hi this is just a feature request, no action needed" tickets to FastMail over the four years I've been a customer. Every time, a person who appeared to have a clue (based on their responses) replied to me with at least confirmation of "sure, we'll think about it, might be a heavy lift" and they did two of them.

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Re:I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible by jamil7 on Friday August 14, 2020 @10:48AM (#24158612)

I did this, my gmail account has become a convenient burner account. I initially intended to eventually phase it out but it's great for giving out to crappy websites.

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Re:I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible by michaelcampbell on Friday August 14, 2020 @11:00AM (#24158779)

reading/writing mail is the easy part. Switching the 10's/100's/more? accounts that use email as your username, with no manner to switch that other than starting a new account from scratch (which for medical, financial, etc. accounts is way more than a nuisance) is where a lot of pain will lie.

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Re:I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible by drdeadringer on Friday August 14, 2020 @11:14AM (#24158971)

Oddly enough, I have a few accounts where my login ID is an obsolete email address of mine. Can't change anything about that. However, I was able to log in [with the obsolete email ID] and update my email contact information.

So I have a few Frankenstein's Monster accounts where I log in with something obsolete but get contacted to a current email address.

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Re:I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible by Silhouette on Friday August 14, 2020 @11:16AM (#24158983)

Switching the 10's/100's/more? accounts that use email as your username, with no manner to switch that other than starting a new account from scratch

That's crazy. People change email address sometimes. Surely no major service actually does this?

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