On using anything other than Gmail (And big tech email services)

[haruhism]

Hello everynyan!

We're all tech nerds here so! I assume most, if not all of you, have degoogled/abandoned big tech emails and switched to some other type of email provider, yes? If you haven't it's okay. Pets you.

Back when i first degoogled off of gmail and hopped onto another provider, i picked this one called fedora.email (WHICH BY THE WAY. I JUST CHECKED AND IT'S GOING DOWN NEXT YEAR?) and it was finnicky but got the job done i suppose. Kept getting flagged as spam by more mainstream providers and went down a lot...
Eventually i hopped to disroot because like, fedora.email went down all the time; was a lot of the time flagged as spam; didn't have a lot of features like blocking and such; and like, back when i was still using it as my main, i emailed the government and they found the service so suspicious they blocked my IP adress LMAOOOOOO. I can't blame them. Imagine receiving an email from someone whose adress is literally called fedora email. That's weird.

As previously mentioned, i use disroot.org, which is like. So much better. Though it's donation based and can go down at any moment if they don't get enough funds :3 The price of being indie....

Only reason i didn't instantly hop onto protonmail is because my friend at the time was like 'Don't??? They're not private???' which turned out to be misinfo but that's an entire can of worms i won't open ;3

But the point of this thread was like, supposed to be about how it is navigating life using anything other than Gmail, ok? I really, really, like learning about new services nyaaaa.
Do you self host? Do you use some really niche service that's always on the verge of shutting down? Do you just use a company/school one? Curiosity world....

Personally, life's pretty normal except it's embarassing to be asked my email and having to be all like 'Heyyy, so, i use some niche stuff... i'll type it out for you haha. Ha.'
People tend to be like 'Whoa, i've never heard of that. Are you sure that's a real adress?' nyaaaaa. It's become less embarassing since switching to disroot. Anytime i gave out my fedora adress i'd get so embarassed like 'Yeah. Uh. Yeah! Fedora email. Ha. Ha.'

So yeah, nya! How's your life since hopping off Gmail? Or any big tech email services? Nya!

And. Don't outright post your adresses lol.

[NovaSquirrel]

I got email free with my domain name from the domain registrar I was using (Gandi) so I used that, and it worked like anything else except that I had a very cool @novasquirrel.com email address. Then Gandi got acquired, and the new owners got greedy and started charging $60/year for email and jacking up the prices for domains. So now I'm using MXroute - because with Black Friday deals (which seem to be usable at any point in the year?? And stick around as a permanent discount if you sign up with those prices?) I could get what I was getting at effectively $5/year, or over twice the storage I had for $10/year.

So far my experience with both of these has been the same as using anything else, but with no ads, and with more control (for instance, I can change how the spam filter works); I can use Thunderbird like normal, and I get a web client like normal (multiple choices of web client, actually). I don't have issues with my emails getting treated as spam. And here's a very cool part about having your email address be at your own domain: If the email hosting company does something you don't like or starts charging wacky prices, you can move while keeping your email address, and while keeping all of your emails. It took about an hour to migrate all of my emails over and then that was that.

I was a little bit intimidated by MXroute's setup process, but I was able to find a guide pretty easily that walked me through it. When it comes to hosting in general, it seems like paying even a small amount of money tends to get you drastically better service than something free, and also that you can choose to deal with the initial setup being a little more difficult in exchange for the service being a lot cheaper post-setup.

[haruhism]

If the email hosting company does something you don't like or starts charging wacky prices, you can move while keeping your email address, and while keeping all of your emails. It took about an hour to migrate all of my emails over and then that was that.

THAT'S A BANGER OMFGGGGGGG. I've moved emails so many times even before ditching big tech that i've lost so much stuff it's insane. If only that practice was possible for literally everything else....