How to free your email from the clutches of Google (Gmail) or Microsoft (Outlook)

One of the first steps for anyone setting out to reduce their dependence on Big Tech is moving their email away from Google or Microsoft.

The process itself isn’t particularly complex. The problem is cultural. The dominance of these two services — Gmail and Hotmail/Outlook — has eroded our understanding of one of the oldest internet technologies we still use, and one that remains important.

Email is decentralized, meaning different service providers talk to each other. To take part, you need one of these providers and a domain — the part after the @ in name@domain.com.

Gmail and Hotmail/Outlook bundle these two pieces together and offer them through a simple sign-up form. Both hide all the abstractions and settings involved. It’s very convenient! Not coincidentally, it’s the kind of convenience that ties you to a single provider.

Outside of that, the ideal scenario is to have your own domain and pick whichever provider suits you best. A domain usually runs around USD 10–15 a year. Once you’ve secured one, the second step is choosing a provider.

Two weeks ago I switched the provider for my email — both for this Manual and for my personal email/website. Until then I’d been using iCloud+, the same subscription that gives you extra storage for your iPhone photos in Apple’s cloud.

iCloud+ is ridiculously cheap, starting at USD 0.99/month for 50 GB of storage, but it’s somewhat limited. The worst thing about iCloud+ is that separate addresses all land in the same inbox for each person. Not to mention that swapping Google or Microsoft for Apple is six of one, half a dozen of the other, right?

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My first choice was a calculated risk, since I’d never used it before: Purelymail. “Bring your domain and users; we’ll handle the rest,” says the service’s website. Hey, that’s exactly what I want!

A nice thing about Purelymail is its pricing. Many providers charge per seat, or inbox. In other words, every email address you add increases your bill. Purelymail charges a flat price (USD 10/year) for unlimited inboxes. If your usage goes beyond the resources provisioned for each account, they kindly ask you to pay for the extra. For a regular person, it’s hard to hit those limits.

I signed up and started migrating my email. I use a free, very simple and capable service called Imapsync. Just enter the credentials for your old and new providers, and wait. If you prefer, there’s a local, command-line version.

(“Put your credentials into this weird website” isn’t advice I usually give. I trusted Imapsync because it’s the tool recommended by Migadu, which I’ll talk about below.)

(And another aside: when you sign up with an email provider, it will give you a set of “DNS records” that must be copied, exactly, into your domain’s management panel. These are what connect the inbox to the domain you bought. It’s trivial, since it’s all copy and paste. You just need to pay attention to choose the correct record types and copy everything without mistakes.)

While migrating my messages from iCloud+ to Purelymail, I ran into the first problem: the new provider was slow. Migrating my mailboxes, which together added up to more than 70 thousand messages, was painful. (That’s a lot, right?)

Another problem, the one that made me give up on Purelymail, is its basic support for CalDAV, the calendar protocol. Their implementation doesn’t support invitations, a feature I use often. There’s an unofficial self-hosted application, Purelymail Calendar, that fills that gap, but… come on… it’s one more thing to maintain, and completely foreign to the standard flow of sending and receiving invitations.

I gave up. Purelymail works well for small, low-volume inboxes, I think. And for people who don’t use calendar invitations. Things work! They just didn’t work for my use case. After that discovery, I migrated again, this time to Migadu.

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We’d already been using Migadu at Célere, my small studio, for a few months. The pitch is similar to Purelymail’s: bring your domain and users and start using it. And with a CalDAV implementation that supports invitations!

Once again I turned to Imapsync to transfer my email from Purelymail to Migadu. I exported my calendar to an *.ics file and my contacts to a *.vcf — uncommon formats, but standards that Thunderbird and other apps read just fine.

One downside of Migadu is its web tools. There’s a simple webmail and, as far as I know, no web access to calendars or contacts. Purelymail uses a much more complete third-party solution for its webmail, Roundcube. Either way, the ideal is to use dedicated apps, like the aforementioned Thunderbird.

Oh, right: since I was in this email provider tour, I switched the email app I use on my computer. Out went Apple’s trio (Mail, Calendar and Reminders); in came Thunderbird, which handles all three. Along the way, I organized my email archives by year and moved them to my local drive, lightening the load on the email provider. (Maybe I’ll write more about Thunderbird in another post.)

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I’m happy with Migadu. The “Micro” plan costs USD 19/year and, although the limits seem tight, I’ve yet to hit them.

I really like the philosophy behind both of these services. Migadu has a long “drawbacks list” covering everything to expect (or not) from the service. One of the items is “not chasing the ‘cool’ factor”:

Unicorns, fairies and investors. None here. We do not have cash to burn. We do not talk about “scaling” but rather serving better. We are careful about the features we bring in or take out and stay very loyal to our users.

It’s one of the few places where I’m confident that the service I use and trust today will still be there tomorrow, with no unnecessary changes or new features to “improve my user experience.” AI? Hahaha… I don’t think so. I wish I had more things like this in my digital life.