this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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You don't have to delete your Gmail account right away. Keep it around to search the history if you need to. You can set up an auto-forward rule in Gmail to forward all email to your new address, then you can reply from your new address. You can take it a step further and include a please note my email address has changed in your signature. Just like moving away from Google, moving away from Gmail can be done in baby steps.
Email has a special header for this called "Reply-To" which is respected by pretty much every client. When anyone replies to your mail they won't even realize it's to another address than they received the mail from.
Also you don't need to keep it for search history. Download all your mail with imap to some proper mail client and you can move it to a new provider if you really want to.
Yeah this is what I did over a couple of years. Move things over slowly as much as you be bothered... do the accounts and people you use the most first. Eventually you'll only have junk going to your Google address and you'll be happy to see it go.
Some (most?) email providers will have tools to help you move from Gmail and keep contacts etc.
It's like 20 bux a month for your own web hosting...it's idiot proof with a little bit of effort and I only get advertising spam I signed up for and forgot to uncheck. But that all goes to [email protected] so I don't have to see them