I have been migrating one of my smaller email accounts away from Google for the last few months. It isn’t a lot of work, but I have been taking my time in moving all of accounts I could find to use a different email address. Although Proton has come under scrutiny for handing over user data that should have be encrypted, I decided to stick with Protonmail for now. I have a paid account, so it is better to use what I have paid for. I have also created an email account with murena.io but I would be wary of swtiching to any .io domains since usage of it will change soon.

I cleaned up about 15 or so years of emails and attachments, which surprisingly was less than 1GB of storage. If you have more than that, I would recommend saving all email data on a drive or some type of external storage solution. This should of course be done after your accounts are pointing to the new email address.

The Easy

Switching email address for all accounts and services was straightforward. Half of the time I could just update the referenced email or username in the settings.

Moving the drive data was also straightforward. If you are on a Chromebook or something with limited storage, you can change the Download location to an external or a mounted drive. I didn’t have too much to download, so I had no problems with using the default downloads directory.

The Not So Easy

I have installed DuckDuckGo and Brave to use for watching videos on YouTube and have not had to deal with ads for over 2 years. That being said, I have not found a comfortable alternative for the Google Playstore since I have migrated from an iPhone to Samsung. The “in progress” workaround is to download APKPure, but most official apps are only available in the Playstore or Apple Store.

Contacts

One very big and important reason that I have not been able to completely detach from Google completely is because the contacts that are saved to my account can be exported and imported to another service but Android does not support importing or syncing from the new service(s).

I have tried Proton Contacts and Tutamail Contacts, and while both offer encrpytion neither include auto-sync features for Android. I will continue looking for a solution even though I think it’s pain.

Maps

I know that submitting Google reviews isn’t common everyone, but I like to share pictures of cool places I visit and good food that I eat. I do not yet know what app to use, maybe Yelp would be a good choice. I don’t want to loose the digital trail of stops I’ve made over the years. I know that I can export the map data to another app, but will I be able to share all my reviews?

Downloading maps for offline travel is also a very important feature that I have not yet explored, but I do not know where to start.

My attachment to maps could be the start of a new project that I start and never finish.

State of Things

I have 3 different mail apps on my phone and I will get it down to 1 or 2 excluding Gmail. What alternative(s) will be in place are still unknown.

I do not enjoy data collection or sales without my permission or benefit. I will continue looking for solutions that do not cost hundreds of dollars or require special software.

Upcoming

I have deployed a new application on another domain and I will share the setup of that. I have the main page protected with Tinyauth and proxied using Caddy. It is focused on curating information and sharing it using cloud storage on a very small environment (1CPU/1GB RAM).