I’ve had my GMail account for what must be almost 20 years now, and it’s pretty ingrained in my life. My mortgage info comes via GMail, my bank statements come via GMail, my health insurance comes via GMail, etc.
Thinking about migrating honestly seems like an insurmountable task. I have no idea where to begin. How the hell do I go about untangling GMail services from my life.
I’ve potentially been looking to move to Proton for email, but any other suggestions (preferably European based) would be welcome.
His do you eat a whale? One bite at a time.
I was the same as you. Got Gmail way back when. I’ve left pretty much all google services at this point except YouTube.
For me, mail and cal were the easiest things to switch switched to mailbox.org. I tried Proton first, and i like using Proton quite a bit, but opted for Mailbox because my my wife (who wants to keep Gmail for personal) can get IMAP for mailbox and her remaining google in a single app. Proton is more polished, but Mailbox suited our need better. Tuta is good too.
Switching away from Google docs and Photos was harder. I used google docs extensively, and it was harder to find a good replacement. Same for photos which used since it was Picasa. I opted for self hosted for those (Paperless-ngx, nextcloud, and immich). I like paperless a lot. Its tons better than google drive for static docs. Immich is pretty promising, and has some great tools. But you do sacrifice a bit of polish and simplicity. Still worth it for me.
Price of self hosting is probably a wash compared to paid storage as long as you ignore the cost of your labor to learn and set it all up.
I recently started using Ente as a Google Photos replacement and it been great so far. Its e2ee with any ML done fully local. The devs seem like they care about the right things and have a good plan to keep building out more features.
Yeah. I’ve heard good things about Ente. For me, I was at a storage tier where i was over 100gb of docs & photos, and between 1 & 2TB when you include video. Most hosted services get kinda pricey at those storage tiers.
I didn’t really set out to self host, but since in needed to solve for docs, photos, and videos, I just went with self hosting. I’m happy with it, just acknowledging that it’s not for everyone