This is just for my primary email account, which is used mostly for receiving newsletters and such. I have various others I use for various other things, but they get little in the way of messages. They mostly just sit idle in Thunderbird, just the way I like it!
My recent(ish) email history:
- After years of using my ISP email, I switched to Gmail back when it was still in beta (to be fair, it was in beta for a very long time). The oldest messages are from June, 2005–nearly 20 years ago! This was so long ago that Google did not yet have a reputation for killing off apps, nor was it known for being an ad monopolist harvesting the data of its user base in order to serve them “personalized” ads and engaging in lots of other questionable shenanigans. I keep the account active, because there’s over 22,000 messages in it and some of it might, possibly, be useful. I do a periodic export of the data.
- When I decided to move from Gmail, I went to HEY. HEY was kind of goofy, didn’t integrate well with other apps, but did some neat things with email. I also liked the UI. But the leadership of its parent company revealed themselves (as I’ve noted before) to be Musk-supporting tech bros, and I had no interest in sending them my money. I cancelled my yearly subscription and moved again, to…
- Outlook! I already had a sporadically-used Outlook account, so the move was easy in the sense that the account was already there. Over time, I moved over the various newsletters and things. More recently, it has been revealed that Microsoft, intent to be a kind of Google Jr. when it comes to data harvesting and advertising, “shares” your email with literally hundreds of “partners”. So, just as bad as Google. Maybe worse!
- After sampling both Fastmail and Proton Mail, I opted to pay for a year of Proton and see how it goes.
Now begins the task of moving the bulk of my mail over to Proton. I suspect my approach will be to do this very gradually, to minimize the drudgery. I’ll report more on actually using Proton Mail soon. So far, the UI is pretty clean, but it is mostly just email, not really trying to break no ground. But it doesn’t share my data with anyone (unless they’re not telling, which would make me sad).
