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Comment by r00fus | Hacker News Reader

It's really bothering when the account just also happens to be your core email service so suddenly you have no way of recovering other accounts.

Moving off Gmail is likely impossible for most non-technical folks.

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There is nothing in the slightest bit technical about opening an email account with protonmail, or fastmail or any number of other much less invasive email services. A protonmail et al account could even be called easier to open since Google lately asks for quite a bit in exchange for the "privilege" of having one of their email addresses. Gmail also constantly screws around with security blocks for blah blah reason that require backup email or phone verification gymnastics if you do any number of tiny things "wrong", like say, trying to log in from a new country.

There are plenty email providers out there. Free and paid. It should not be a problem for anyone to switch. Moving off of Gmail doesn't mean to self host. It is a bit of work to tell anyone about your new address, but that's it.

What about the hundreds of other accounts that use your gmail as either the 2FA target or password reset?

For a non-technical user (like my mom), this is a herculean task.

There's no need to delete the old gmail account, just use the new account for anything new, and change the mail address to the new one for the few frequent and useful accounts.

Over time, the old gmail account will lose its importance, and there'll be no real risk if Google decides to ban it.

If you need a password reset do it and use the reminder to change the email. If your mom signed up for hundreds of accounts she should be saavy enough to handle the account update.

Changing upwards of 200 logins to use a new email address may be troublesome. Do you keep a list?

There's another catch, many services use the email address as an immutable identifier that cannot be changed. For some that doesn't matter, but at the very least it is a lot of time/effort.

A lot of those can be solved by contacting the support of that service. Services that don't allow you to change emails are usually on the smaller side and so you might actually get a response.

When I switched away from Gmail, I used my password manager to track the logins I needed to change. Then, just monitored the Gmail inbox for anything I missed.

Unlike sibling commenters, I used to not use a password manager. (But do now!)

I just keep the old GMail for now, and whenever I receive a valid email there, I visit the sender website to update it.

This depends on you remembering your "low-volume important accounts" like government websites you visit once a year, but otherwise, I would not cry if my imgur account got lost or something eventually.

Would be nice for companies to maintain a standard account management API which password managers could call. Imagine buttons on your password manager: "Set All Emails..." and "Randomize All Passwords..." I didn't find any such standard after a quick search.

Edit: Looks like LastPass does it with a screen scraper https://support.logmeininc.com/lastpass/help/how-do-i-update...

First, I saved every login on Bitwarden and then used that to visit every website and changed login email info there and re-saved on Bitwarden.

The effort is only one time or one day at max. And the rewards are worth the time.

Yes, my password manager

True, they do have a "grip on people". I use gmail for my private email and I use Google Photos and Google disk for storage through a paid family account. I am considering a move to an European email and storage provider to avoid the almost moralistic TOS many US providers have to avoid liability issues, I just haven't decided which I should go for. It will come with a loss of convenience and that irritates me. The way Google have gotten me hooked to their walled garden.

Another benefit you get from using gmail is that it's do much simpler to give someone your email address. You just need to get the part before the @ correct, they won't misspell the Gmail.com. I moved much of my email to Fastmail with my own domain. However, when I rented a car earlier this week I gave them my Gmail address because it's just so much less painful especially since the clerk and I could barely understand each other with nearby noise and masks and plexi glass between us. Happens all the time.

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