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Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

The smart choice would've been to not use Gmail in the first place. The fact that Google doesn't have your best interest in mind is nothing new. The fact that Gmail invades your privacy by reading your emails to show you ads has been in there from day 1.

I'm saying this, because you started with "to be fair...". As if this was a good explanation for the double-standard your parent poster mentioned. You can still fix it, even though it now takes more time than never having used Gmail at all. Complaining about "the effort" just reinforces the double-standard.

Use something like Fastmail. No hassle with setting up your own domain or email server (although you can use a custom domain) and they offer a tool to migrate your email from any IMAP server (and probably from Gmail as well).

Edit: added 2nd paragraph

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> Complaining about "the effort" just reinforces the double-standard.

Another point of view is that this is just the reality. Loads of people are on gmail, and migrating isn't always simple. Pretending it is doesn't make it so, and pointing out that one never should have done it in the first place is a moot point.

As someone with a domain at home and a working email server, I'm still stuck with Gmail as I don't have time to make sure my setup is resilient enough to base my daily emails on...

It's a sad world and we're a very geeky crowd.

> As someone with a domain at home and a working email server

Maintaining your own email server is crazy and not feasible unless you're passionate about email servers.

It's also a false dichotomy. Nobody with any experience and common sense suggests that you should install your own email server. Use FastMail, use Protonmail, use Office 365, heck, use Google's G Suite.

Most such services have import tools that work and the option to work with forwarded emails and external SMTP servers, so migration can be smooth.

Seeing software developers complaining about migration costs makes absolutely no sense.

Just yesterday I migrated a GSuite account to FastMail. I just changed the DNS records and imported the email via FastMail's import tool, which was automatic. And with a @gmail.com address you can just work with forwarding until everybody knows of your new address.

I migrated email addresses several times, including from my old @gmail.com address which now no longer exists. It wasn't a tragedy.

> Maintaining your own email server is crazy and not feasible unless you're passionate about email servers.

Sorry but I think this is FUD and it potentially discouraged people from taking steps to be part of the solution and not the problem.

I’ve run my own mail server for years on a $5/mo Linode VPS, and am not passionate about email servers. It was a little difficult to set up but no more difficult than a lot of weekend projects the smart people on this site undertake. It should not be scary. You can also make the switch gradually by first setting up your MX and forwarding to gmail if you want to take it slow. There’s no reason anyone with a moderate amount of Linux skills and patience can’t host their own Email.

And you have no problems sending mail to Hotmail, and other more stringent mail providers?

The toughest problem I had was for a brief time, Comcast rejected mail sent from my host, but the reject log was sufficient to diagnose the problem. I just needed a fresh IPv6 address.

Thanks, very heartening to hear that this is not a problem!

It's easy to say the smart choice was to avoid it, but I think that's quite a naive comment.

Hindsight is 20/20 and the email landscape is different now than it was then. At the time I got my gmail (back when invites were still a thing) most options available to me were either ISP email or free web email, and gmail was one of the best. Not to mention, I was a lot younger and probably not in a position where paying for email made sense, and certainly not running my own.

For those of us that started many many years ago with gmail and kept it out of an inertia of convenience, now it is difficult to get everything switched off of it.

The difficult part isn't moving emails over. The difficult part is all the accounts and websites online I've signed up on with gmail that I need to switch the email address on. That's going to be a nightmare.

You can keep your Gmail account forever and transition to a new email in a slow pace. By auto forwarding your Gmail to your new account, or if your new email can act like POP or IMAP client to access your old Gmail, this process is painless.

I had a Gmail in the month it was launched and I switched to my own domain (ironically, still in GSuite) in a process that took a few years. Whenever I login into a site with my old email, I would update it to the new one. My current email still connect to my old Gmail over POP3, but it’s mostly empty.

I consider plain text emails to basically be like sending postcards across the internet.

I don't want other people to read them but I'm resigned to the fact that they are.

In that context I'm not all that concerned about Google scanning my email to serve me ads that I'm blocking anyway.

I think people aren’t aware how much information leaks in their emails.

For example your entire online purchasing history is in your email. That is not information that should be public ;-)

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