Don’t use Gmail.

I found an article about migrating away from Gmail this week. I was struck by how painful it is to move away. Login and contact details all over the place.
I’ve never used Gmail. I run my own mail server(s). Always have. I still have all my email archived from 1996 days. Recently I’ve been tinkering with a few mail server configs and I realised, this stuff has become pretty complex.
I’d really like more people to use distributed, self hosted email systems, but we have some problems:
- Things like Gmail are very easy, convenient and free
- People are trapped in free email services – it’s very hard to migrate away
- Self hosted email can be complex, and not free (costs maybe 5 USD/m in virtual server hosting)
Why I don’t use Gmail:
- I can avoid it. I find it fun to maintain my own email services.
- I hate web based email services. Give me IMAP mail clients and mutt.
- The advertising business model behind free email can only have bad incentives – I don’t like the idea of surveillance capitalism
- I really don’t like the idea of some big evil empire having easy access to a large part of the communications in my life
- I would find it scary to not be in control of my logins details around the web
- The potential effort involved in migrating scares me – and the more you use it, the more you dig a hole for yourself
- Email is a network, if one person in the network hosts their email in a compromised place, it impacts the rest of the network – I don’t want to be that guy.
Don’t use Gmail.
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ps. if you find this topic interesting, let me know and I’ll write a post about how to host your own email services.
Asb!! Ons website hugoflear.com is af en nie Google of Daddygo wat hulle hosting doen kan ons domain opspoor nie
Yeah please, publish! I have some free time and Private is definitely the way to go .
You’ll see from my email address why :|
Thanks mate
(-:
Ok, let me make some notes and write it up.