What can I expect migrating my gmail setup to proton mail? (lemmy.today)

submitted 1 week ago by Paradachshund@lemmy.today to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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I've seen a lot of people on Lemmy singing the praises of proton mail and I've been considering making the switch. I was hoping those of you who use it might be able to give me a sense of the difficulty (or ease) of migrating my current setup to it.

Please keep things simple if you can. I'm not a very tech savvy person and don't understand a lot of the lingo and shorthand about this stuff.

Right now I have a single gmail inbox where I am forwarding several different accounts to it, some from gmail, others from different hosts. I really like this centralized setup, and I have it configured so I can also reply from any of these forwarded email addresses as well (it also automatically replies from whichever email the sender sent to).

Would any of this be hard or impossible to replicate in proton mail? My goal would be to slowly move away from gmail, but it will be a slow transition and I would need my current email addresses to forward to the new inbox as I do so.

Thanks for any insight.

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[-] cygnus@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

You can receive but can't reply from those addresses in Proton because of the way encryption works. Don't use Proton if you want to keep sending from any other email address.

Edit: frankly, I wouldn't bother switching unless you plan on using a custom domain for all your email needs. I'm a firm believer in using your own domain, because that way you can switch providers without needing to change your email address — you always own it, because you own the domain.

[-] Paradachshund@lemmy.today 4 points 1 week ago

That's a great callout and a very important feature to me. Do you use anything other than gmail? To be honest the encryption isn't the main selling point for me, I would just like to de-google where I can these days.

[-] cygnus@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Do you use anything other than gmail?

I set my Gmail to forward to Proton when I switched, and gradually replaced the address in all my accounts and told friends and family to no longer use it. It took about a year but now everything goes to my custom domain. You don't need Proton to do any of that, though. If you want to still reply from your Gmail and don't care about encryption, Fastmail may be a better fit (although IMO it's less of a good value compared to all the extras you get with Proton Unlimited)

Either way, I really can't recommend a custom domain enough. I actually used Fastmail for a year before switching to Proton and it was completely painless thanks to the domain.