this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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All this enshittification lately really inspires me to de-google.
You don't have to look at reducing your Google use as a monumental effort. You can slowly transfer, minimise the number of services you use.
Simple - Switch your default search provider to Duck Duck Go.
Easy - Switch to Firefox
Mid - export your documents from Google Drive
Complex - Transfer your primary email to another provider.
I've always had an aversion to corporate anything so I'm already part way there. Use DDG half the time, Firefox user since it was called Firebird!. I really just need to drop Gmail and use DDG or others full time. I'm finding parting with gmail difficult and scary though as over a decade of history and old friends that may know that address as my only contact.
You don't have to delete your Gmail account right away. Keep it around to search the history if you need to. You can set up an auto-forward rule in Gmail to forward all email to your new address, then you can reply from your new address. You can take it a step further and include a please note my email address has changed in your signature. Just like moving away from Google, moving away from Gmail can be done in baby steps.
Email has a special header for this called "Reply-To" which is respected by pretty much every client. When anyone replies to your mail they won't even realize it's to another address than they received the mail from.
Also you don't need to keep it for search history. Download all your mail with imap to some proper mail client and you can move it to a new provider if you really want to.
Yeah this is what I did over a couple of years. Move things over slowly as much as you be bothered... do the accounts and people you use the most first. Eventually you'll only have junk going to your Google address and you'll be happy to see it go.
Some (most?) email providers will have tools to help you move from Gmail and keep contacts etc.
Oh this is a great half-way step.