Why I’m leaving gmail today without hurting!

I think today is the day I’ll remove all past email from my gmail account, remove the accounts it also checks and remove the automatic forwards from my self-hosted email. All the reasons I had for this setup are long gone:

When I travel, I no longer look at my email on a device not owned by me, because I have it with me on my phone.

I have my own machine running my complete email archive and I can access it from anywhere in the world.

I can have the most complex passwords (I do and I don’t know any of them anymore) now, because I’m using a password manager.

I have other ways of sending larger attachments now, if I really need to
at all. For my work delivery is usually several hundred MB or even some GB large, so attachments never where a viable option.

Now all that should happen is, that my whole network of family, friends and colleagues move to using PGP. The open version, not the one that Zimmermann sold.

And we still need real alternatives to Google search. I wish there was a way of sharing YACY installations and indexing setups other than renting and maintaining my own server. This should be done with a smallish circle of close friends, to make sure the indexed pages stay relevant. Of course the filter bubble is a big big problem here to sort out! Needs a couple of good journalists in the group!

There is now only one reason to still use gmail occasionally for sending mail: Email sent from gmail rarely ever ends up in a spam folder on first time communication partners. This, by the way, means that google is paying the racketeers at the whitelist maintaining industry rather well in order for them not to consider mail coming from google servers to be spam. So initial contact will have to be done using gmail. Luckily I can put a message in the signature to steer to the regular address.

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