I know changing e-mail providers is one of the main privacy recommendations, and for good reason. But one of the things that maybe stops people from making the jump is actually making sure they do everything properly.
As it stands, I’m not exactly sure of what this process would entail. Am I supposed to backup all e-mails? Ask google to delete my data (EU thing), do I move to the new provider slowly? Things like this.
Have any thorough guides been written on this before?
Cheers.
Set your old provider to forward incoming emails to your new address without retaining a copy. Then export your emails and import them to the new provider. Then, you can delete the emails from your old account. The instructions for how to do this vary by provider, but should be very searchable. Proton has a tool called easy switch which is supposed to help.
Once you have this setup, you can gradually start migrating services to send messages to your new address directly. If an old contact messages your old address, you can simply reply with the new address to let them know you have a new email.
Right. In that case, Google would know What my new e-mail is, though. Right? Wouldn’t it be better to slowly migrate? These are the kinds of questions I have in mind and hoped someone already answered on some guide.
I suppose so. If you’re worried about that, you can always forward it to an alias address.
That… May actually be a great idea. I’ll consider doing it that way.
You’d need to login to every site and service then change account owner to your new address. If you never deleted old past mail, searching inbox for keyword like “welcome” or “verify” is a great way to show all onboarding mail from sites and services welcoming you to their platform.
Visit them 1 by 1, login, change email address. Its also a good time for decluttering by deleting junk accounts. Instead of changing to just 1 address, risking it leak and inviting spam i’d say change to an alias provider instead or your own custom domain to make your future life easier when migrating again. Theres simplelogin, addy.io, ddg duck.com or if you’re on ios, apple hide-my-email. Later on when you want to migrate again you don’t need to manually login to each site 1 by 1, just login to the alias provider panel and change your routed inbox address. Just 1-2 click and you’ve migrated.
Set a forwarding rule from your old address to your new one. Let it forward for at least a year in case you missed any important accounts in the earlier migration process. After a year or two you can just delete the old email account.
If you want to still keep old emails from the old provider, and assuming old and new provider both support imap, imapsync is superb for that.
Yeah, Simplelogin is a big part of my strategy. Pretty much all logins that aren’t that important and don´t know my identity go through Simplelogin. But I still want to use a custom e-mail for professional reasons, as well as for all other accounts that know my identity (e.g. Amazon, government stuff). This makes it easier for me to migrate to a different platform is my current e-mail provider starts sucking.
I have a third e-mail hosted in Proton which is just for my banks and 2FAs, and that one is just a regular @proton.me e-mail.