The Digital Independence Day presented at the 39C3 has motivated me to start some of my long-postponed projects. I decided to start with the most painful but also most important one: Getting rid of my dependence on Gmail.
My personal Gmail address is used by a great many services, so changing it involves a lot of pain. Therefore, it was important to me to choose a solution that eliminates the need for such a migration forever.
Personal Domain
The first component is a personal domain: In my case, I chose ture.dev. By using a domain I own myself, I am free to use whatever mail provider I want without having to change my e-mail. Personally, I chose do.de as my registrar but this has more sentimental reasons. I am no expert here and most choices should be fine as you can migrate your registration to other providers down the road.
Mail Provider
Once the domain is ready, the choice of provider is next. I have not done thorough auditing myself, but relied more on the opinions of reputable institutions. Self-hosting seemed cool; however, I decided not to run my truly critical stuff myself. For the same reason I don’t self-host my Nextcloud anymore. I landed at Proton Mail as I found their strong encryption features intruiging. There are some nice articles weighing the ups and downs of different providers as Proton is definitely not the universally best choice. Here are some German articles:
Because I own my domain, migrating away from Proton for whatever reason is no problem anymore. On the technical side, there is some configuration to be done before the mailing works, but Proton has a really good guide and (imo) UI/UX so it was really simple.
Subaddressing
A feature I stumbled across a few years ago is subaddressing. Let’s say your mail is [email protected]. When your provider supports subaddressing, you can freely add any text to the address with + like this: [email protected]. Without further configuration, all mail will be delivered to the original address.
I use this as a strategy to attribute data leaks to services: [email protected] will help to attribute the sudden spike in dubious spam to the sexshop you have registered at recently. In Proton this worked out of the box.
Migration Strategy
I decided to be lazy and only migrate high-volume services like amazon.com (I know…) and otto.de for now. This is to de-risk the project a little in case I should discover issues, but also because of the volume of services.
Then, once I receive an e-mail on my Gmail account, I will migrate that service as well. I will save the quiet rest for a rainy day…
My e-mail account involves so much personal and sensitive data that it is really a good feeling to be away from Google. They can draw so many conclusions about me through my e-mails that it surely must be their most valuable product after search.
