[yeleti]

My life is locked into one gmail account. All my notifications, passwords, bank statements, invoices, to and fro emails from exes, etc. etc. come to this gmail account. I have to rewind too much of my time to go to every place that uses my gmail account and change it. I can't do it. I'm locked in for life.

[taneq]

And now think what would happen to you if your Gmail account was locked. No recourse, no response except form mails saying "your account is banned because it's banned." No way to recover any other account using it as recovery mail. No way to access your records or email history. Maybe locked out of your phone too. You're boned.

That's what made me extract myself from Gmail. I created my new email address and forwarded my Gmail account to it, and then for every email coming to the Gmail address I updated the sender with my new address. It took me about six months before all my important mail was using my new address, but it actually wasn't that hard and I feel hugely less vulnerable to Google's whims.

Edit: At the same time I also started using a proper password manager, making me again much less vulnerable to losing an email account because I no longer rely on resetting passwords to get into my multifarious online accounts.

[kkarakk]

If your account is banned do your auto reply(canned responses) stop working? Coz that would be a proper stop gap to tell important people(job offers/contact requests for eg) to your website/email you actually use etc.

[eridius]

If your account is banned how would you even set up an auto-reply to tell people about your new email?

[creatornator]

Presumably it would be set up before-hand? If you preferred the other email, you might deprecate the gmail account and set up an auto-reply for all traffic to update contact information. It would require giving up gmail early. The question would be if auto-reply keeps working after being banned

[gonvaled]

Your solution is (was?) to use your own email address (with your own domain) with email forwarding to your gmail address. This way you do not make your gmail address public, and can move frontends easily.

This does not solve the fact that your email archive is in gmail though.

[reificator]

I would assume that your archived emails would be available for download via IMAP. Is that not the case?

[sneak]

Not if your account is locked. You need to back them up periodically manually while you still can.

The program to do this is called offlineimap.

[shstalwart]

It's really not that hard. I'd used gmail since early 2000s and it took me one long afternoon a couple years ago to switch basically everything to fastmail. Probably helped that everything I cared about was already a record in keepass though.

[qiqitori]

Don't put all your eggs in the same basket.

I have my bank statements in an email account by a provider that is unlikely to ban people for questionable and unrelated offenses.

(You can totally get banned from Google's entire platform if you do something wrong on the Play store after e.g. being pressured to do so by your employer.)

Most of my private email communication (which has dwindled to a tiny number of messages per month) is on GMail.

I've also got a couple other addresses in addition to that. I also have email addresses on my own domain, but I don't know if I'm going to keep that domain forever, as it costs a lot of money.

[anoncake]

> You can totally get banned from Google's entire platform if you do something wrong on the Play store after e.g. being pressured to do so by your employer.

Devil's advocate: that possibility strengthens your position when your employer tries to pressure you to do something neither you nor Google find acceptable.

[kevinflo]

I was just as entrenched but am about a year into a gradual transition. Signed up with another email provider with an address @ a domain I own, transferred my entire mail history, forwarded all incoming gmail emails to new provider, updated all public facing contact @s to new address, switched mostly to open source email clients, all new accounts are made @ the new address, old ones stay @ the old one. It's not perfect and it's not trivial but it's 100% worth it.

[inapis]

For once. Get a domain and a paid mail account with fast mail/Zoho/gsuite. Slowly transition to the new inbox by moving over the emails. It will take sometime, possibly months, and you might never be able to close the gmail inbox but it will be fine. You’ll never need to do such a transition in life again.

[veb]

I have a cochlear implant, I'm probably locked into Med-El for life! :-) But as far as I know, they're not yet spying on people via my cyborg ear.

[tjr225]

I did it and it was worth it. I still dip into the gmail occasionally to see if I missed anything but it is essentially a spam email at this point.

[sametmax]

It took me 3 years and a few annoying lock outs and it was years ago. 2019 is probably even harder.