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this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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For me it’s gmail. I’ve disconnected from everything else, but I have WAY TOO MANY things connected to and through my gmail account.
If it's any comfort I've spent about a year getting away from Gmail and I can report it is in fact doable.
Finding another email service and using a domain of my own with it was the easy part. The hard part was painstakingly replacing my address everywhere I was using it with new addresses.
Way more doable than YouTube, which I don't foresee being replicated any time soon.
You can also forward emails from your old Gmail to your new email as a bridge to ensure you don't miss anything.
I would not forward anything from GMail to another email provider. Google is intrusive. They have no reason to know anything about my new email address. But I'm overreacting and that's okay.
Damn now I want to make a third, super-secret email address that I re-forward to. Darn that blasted nosey goog
Just use an alias, it's anyway a good idea to find a provider that lets you create unique aliases for each account.
This is how I do it. I may never stop actually having that gmail account in use due to the number of accounts tied to it, but I at least can use other services going forward without losing tons of stuff.
Facts. GMail took me about 4 months or so, just incrementally logging in and checking every service and subscription I have attached to GMail, logging into that account and changing the email address to my new email address. It's a tedious task but worth it. Google is far too intrusive, imo.
Just start. I made another email a few years ago and just started using it for new accounts, moving others over when I thought of it...
Slowly but surely my Gmail has become a ghost town that receives mostly just spam, and the odd password reset link for accounts I haven't bothered updating.
Sure it's not a 100% but it's a lot, and it's a little bit less of myself getting to google
Its pretty easy to just redirect Gmail‘s messages to a new account. Some providers even allow you to import previous emails. My switch to Protonmail was incredibly smooth.
https://proton.me/easyswitch
During Covid, I did some digital cleaning. It took me around a month (from couple of minutes, up to few hours each day) to clean up my gmail inbox. I had a gmail label where I placed all the emails received from any site where I created an account. I went one by one to each of them and either changed the login (to a non gmail address), or deleted an account (if I wasn't using it anymore).
Now I use another email provider, and i pay for it. I use gmail for situations/accounts where i suspect that my email address could be spammed. Right now, my whole google space usage is around 50 mb. I stopped using google drive, I don't use google search, I still use YouTube and pay to have no ads - because I just like YouTube.
It's possible to disconnect oneself from Google services as much as one wants. Still, I continue to use an android phone (I like iOS, but it's still too limited in comparison to Android).
I've been there, now it's been over two years where I'm pretty much Gmail free. It's hard but it's worth it.