October 2022

Making Email Swapping Suck Less

How I moved from GMail to Proton

There are a myriad of reasons why you may want to leave GMail or Outlook. The constant data harvesting, the sporadic UI/feature changes, not wanting to support an unregulated tech giant, or you just want something new! Whatever your reason, brava.

Unfortunately, swapping emails is incredibly cumbersome. You have to manage the history of newsletters, online accounts, and personal relationships all centered around this form of contact. However, there is a way to go about this without dreading opening your computer. It is iterative and will go at whatever pace you are comfortable with.

Let’s Get Started

I highly recommend switching to a privacy-centric email service like Proton or Tutanota. I personally use Proton for the reasons listed here. The short of it is: modern UI (aesthetics are very important to me); feature-competitive calendar, and suite of software (email aliases, calendar, encrypted drive, and VPN). There is no feature that GMail has that I miss.

Step 1: Create an Account

1. Follow those steps and play around with the new client!

Step 2: Iterative Migration

1. Every time you receive an email on your original account:
2. Assess whether or not you wanted this email in the first place.
3. If no, unsubscribe//delete the account//report as spam/phishing
4. If yes, do one of the following:
5. Unsubscribe/Re-subscribe on your new email address
6. Change the email address of the account
7. Delete the account and create a new one with the new email

The goal is to not only steadily migrate over to a new email account, but to also audit your email inbox. If you put in the work now, you will be grateful! The closer your inch to 100% of emails being useful, the less wasted time you will have and the more positive relationship to this particular piece of communication tech you will have.

Step 3: Setting Up Filters

Depending on what your email address is for, you probably have a series of recurring emails. Newsletters, receipts, recurring payments, etc. These can bog down your inbox, so I recommend setting up an aggressive filtering process.

I would be wary of just creating filters and then filling them up on the fly. I personally scrolled through my existing log of emails and failed or useless folders. I noticed that the vast majority of my emails fell into two categories: newsletters and receipts (recurring bills and online purchase receipts). Once I added these to the filter feature on Proton, it cleaned up my inbox substantially.

I also use: tracking (packages), travel, account information, and resources (saving newsletters/emails I found useful). For these, I just manually sort on-the-fly.

Bonus: Email Aliases

One of the major problems with the internet right now is how often data leaks and breaches happen (curious if you have been affected? Check here). A second major issue is with data harvesters and aggregators. The latter specifically collect and merge data from multiple sources. Enter, aliases.

An email alias is like a P.O. Box, but for your email.

Instead of a service emailing you directly, they email a different service which obscures your identity. I personally use SimpleLogin. I create a new alias for every service I use, this allows me to:

1. Further secure my identity.
2. I can dispose of the email alias should it get compromised in a breach.
3. If I start getting spam sent to one of my aliases, I can dispose of it without contaminating the rest of my email inbox/without having to switch to another email address.
4. If a service has a difficult or opaque process to close an account/unsubscribe, then you can dispose of the email as well.

Alright, I think that’s it! Hope this was helpful.

Psssst. They also have pretty cheap phone number proxies! I use Burner 🙂