I officially switched over from Gmail this week for my personal email and I am SO EXCITED! 🤩 I have used Gmail as my only email address since 2010 – aka the last 16 years 😳
Despite the longevity of my relationship with Gmail, it was actually quite easy to switch.
I’m sharing my process, experience, time spent switching, tips & other tidbits I learned along the way so you can have a guide when making your own switch.
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I have researched a lot of alternatives for email and productivity suites, but the best option is the one that works for your needs. So, to narrow down my choices and select a new email & productivity suite provider, I followed my evaluation process. I shared below for you to use as well!
What are you needs? List out your must-haves and your nice-to-haves.
Compare your needs versus each platform’s key features. You may have to sign-up to experience the full features if the specifics you’re looking for are not listed on their website.
Select a platform & test. Once selected, do a test run of some of the features you need before fully committing. It’s better to learn quickly if something doesn’t work like you thought it would then after you’ve already shifted everything over.
Start the switching process (if needed). Once you’ve tested out your new account a bit and are feeling good, start the switching process.
TIP: I recommend not deleting your Gmail account right away to ensure you don’t miss any important emails.
Email/Calendar
Easy shift from current Gmail account, including email forwarding.
The idea of switching my email address on every account I have is mind-boggling. To avoid missing anything, I want to keep forwarding active for at least 2-3 months.
Needs to have an integrated calendar that can accept Gmail or iCal invitations so I can easily add invites and don’t run into compatibility issues.
I have ADHD and use my calendar for millions of reminders and to keep myself on track. A calendar is essential.
Mobile app for email and calendar.
Drive: I don’t really use my personal Gmail drive for documents too often, so I don’t have a ton of needs here beyond having cloud drive storage as a feature with the account.
Photo Storage: This is a BIG one. I have 20 years of photos from Facebook and Google Photos that I’ve been wanting to organize into one place for YEARS.
I want to use a Photo Storage option that’s built for photos and has a nice interface, not just a general cloud storage solution.
Encrypted, ideally end-to-end
Easy organization when uploading
Because moving where photos are stored is a Herculean task, I want to choose an option that has longevity and is unlikely to do something stupid and make me want to move off of them in the future.
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Proton: It has been incredibly easy for me to switch to Proton from Gmail. With their Easy Switch tool, you can import your older emails, forward new ones to your Proton account, and transfer your calendar events.
What I’m using it for: Email, Calendar, Drive
Rationale: Since I have been using my Gmail account for so long, I wanted something that easily transferred the info from my Gmail account and had a forwarding option. Basically, I didn’t want to have to change my email everywhere I had a login, and this was a blend of both worlds.
Cons: Since my emails are still being routed through Gmail before being forwarded to Proton, it means Google still has access to my email data. But, with this new setup Google wouldn’t be able to track my email engagement data (i.e. opens, clicks, moving emails between tab types, etc) which is a win. My goal is to eventually delete as much as I can from my Gmail account or delete it entirely, and switch over important logins and notifications to the new account.
Time Spent Switching: I didn’t actually time myself unfortunately, but I would estimate it took between 20-30 minutes to switch. Most of that is downloading and installing the mobile apps once I created my account and set up Easy Switch.
If you’re using the free version of Proton, you can only import up to 500MB – 1 GB of data.
This meant that I couldn’t shift my entire 16 year Gmail history into Proton, which would have been sort of nice as an archive if I did end up deleting my Gmail account, or at least deleting all old emails so Google didn’t have access to them anymore. However, with that limitation I still was able to transfer over all of the emails within the last year and a half which more than covered what I needed.
Tip: If you delete a lot of your promotion-type emails in Gmail before transferring, it helps reduce the clutter in your new inbox and reduces the amount of data to transfer.
If you’re using the free version of Proton, you can only create three folders for organization.
BUT – if you used Easy Switch with your Gmail account, all of your labels are transferred over so it’s still organized.
The Easy Switch process needs to be completed separately for email and calendar. Here’s a link to the calendar instructions.
I panicked a bit when I went into my calendar after switching my email and I didn’t see anything, but you just need to go into settings and add your Gmail calendar there as well.
Tip: I had integrated my calendar in my browser, but it wasn’t showing up in my calendar mobile app. When I logged out and back in of the mobile app, the Gmail calendar appointments were now showing.
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Cryptee: So far, transferring photos on Cryptee has been great.
Rationale: I chose Cryptee because it had similar features to Ente, but I like the interface design more which was important to me in a photo storage app. Cryptee is also financially stable and does not seem to be interested in a buyout from a larger company, which was important to me because I did not want to do this very long photo transfer process again. I will admit, predicting the future of Cryptee based on what they’ve shared and frankly ~vibes~ is not necessarily a forecast. The future of any company no matter the size is always unpredictable, and I think Ente is still a good option.
Cons: With any end-to-end encrypted solution, you can’t transfer files through the cloud, you have to download them and reupload them. While this is a process, it also gives me a chance to review my archives of photos from Facebook & Google and only keep what I actually want so my new Cryptee archive will be (mostly) free of junk. Cryptee is also about $10 more expensive per month than Ente for the level of storage I will likely need, but I’m okay with that for now.
Time Spent Switching: This will really depend on the amount of photos you want to move. I have 30-40 Facebook albums, and 16 years of Google photos that I want to put all in one place. For Facebook albums, I had exported them from my account and that process is relatively simple, will likely take me between 4-6 hours in total. For Google Photos, I have a ton of junk in there so it’ll be a bigger task to go through what I want to actually keep that I’ll keep chipping away at.
I will admit, the way I’m doing it I’m still not completely free of Gmail. But I am happy that I’ve taken the first step in this process, because just sending & interacting with emails in Gmail was making me paranoid with what they could be tracking.
My dream is to have a fresh email account (likely Tuta when their Drive option moves out of Beta later this year) that I only use for things I really want to pay attention to. But, I don’t know exactly what those things are yet because I really only use my personal email for orders, notifications, accounts, etc. and not correspondence with friends and family. My other concern is that having two emails would end up being more work than what I want for my personal email. So that’s more of a Phase 2 🙂
As I continue to update accounts & logins with my new email and my dependence on Gmail lessens, I will either delete data from my Gmail account and/or delete my entire account. One day I’ll be fully free, and so will you!
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