How digitally independent are you?
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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I don’t think Thunderbird is a direct alternative to Gmail. The best alternative is to own your own domain name and use your own email server, but that’s really impractical for most people. At the very least, owning your own domain name that you use for your email is way better than relying on a service that locks you in with their own domain name.
It’s not super easy to set that up, but it’s easier than most people probably think it is. A service with imap support will let you take all your old email with you if you switch providers.
My own email service, Port87, doesn’t have custom domain support or imap, but I’m working to add both of those features. Any service you use should have both of those if you want to be independent.
I've never hosted anything outside my home. Aren't there services that are basically 3rd party Docker hosts for which you could run some kind of email container? Preferably not one of the big three, otherwise why leave Gmail?
Specifically email is not difficult to host because of the technical burdens but because of the black and whitelisting of the big players. Often your server IP address happens to be put on a black list without your fault and then you can write an email to Microsoft or Google and say 'pretty please remove my IP address from your blacklist' and they just don't answer because they're swamped with requests like that and they need to check each one manually or something and then suddenly you can't email to 80% of the email addresses in the world for months.
Spot on! This is what got me to stop trying to self-host email. I would even get my IP address removed from blocklists only to find Google not updating with the removal and my IP being blocked from interacting with Gmail 🤦