HACKER Q&A
📣 wojtekwojtek

How to migrate out of Gmail and Google Suite?


I am terrified by the stories of people getting lock out of their accounts. I want my family to use email addresses and data, which we truly own. It is just too important to depend on a faceless corporation and their bots.

Could you help me finding the right solutions without spending too much (<1000 USD / year, family of four)?

The ideal lists of the solutions I need, and the alternatives I've seen:

- Email (custom domains)

- Calendar

- Storage

- Photos

- Docs (?)

- VPN would be nice too

I could potentially self-host, but I'm afraid I will make upgrades to rarely and will have more security vulnerabilities that a paid, hosted system.

Fastmail looks interesting for the email part. Proton checks several boxes, but with no family plan, it's very expensive (and doesn't cover Photos or Docs).

  👤 brtkdotse Accepted Answer ✓
I know Microsoft isn’t popular but Office365s family plan is fantastic value for the money. All interactions with Microsoft support have been… scripted but successful.
👤 duiker101
For me, it's been gradual(years), and I do not have everything under one roof.

First thing is moving the email. Buy a domain, buy a FastMail subscription and start using it. Migrate all the main accounts to this new email: gov accounts, main service providers and anyone that might have emailed me in the recent history. This takes a while, but in a week you should cover at least 70% of what you really care about. The rest, I just update as it goes, you can redirect your gmail to a specific FastMail folder and change the stuff as you go.

Calendar I use FastMail too.

Storage and photo took me a while to find as solution I was happy with, but I settled with OneDrive. There are lots of similar solutions, you have to find one that works best for you. For self-hosted Resilio worked very well, and I still use it for backup.

Docs I use LibreOffice in my OneDrive.

👤 codegeek
I think the techies on HN should come up with something like this:

1. Get a custom domain for your emails

2. Backup your google emails

3. Setup your own hosted email server somewhere with ability to receive emails. IMAP etc.

4. To send emails, use an SMTP provider (help with the spam issue)

5. Forward the existing emails from google to this new address (not sure if you can bulk forward)

6. Setup IMAP on the server and make sure you are using a local email client on your desktop that saves emails locally

Will this work ?

👤 mikebos
I migrated out.

- Fastmail for 4 persons (email and calendar) $200

- Dropbox for storage $120

- Adobe Lightroom with cloud storage for easy photo's $120

- Microsoft office abba for office $60

- Mullvad for VPN when needed $60

total = $560

👤 9wzYQbTYsAIc
With Proton, you do get what you pay for, if you are interested in privacy and security.

Also, they provide tooling to help switch.