Who of you was able to abandon google?

I gave it a look about a year or so ago, and I do appreciate the simplicity of setup, and it seems to do a whole lot. However, that was back when my server was a no-man’s land of wild shell scripts and rogue python packages. Now everything is nice and cleaned up and running in its own little Docker, so I’m strongly considering trying the Mailcow-Dockerized setup. The Mail-In-A-Box seems Docker support doesn’t seem quite as good. I will report back when I set it up, though. Regardless of which I go with, I’m going to be in a lot of reverse proxy pain, I just know.

By the way, has anyone heard of or used https://www.ecosia.org/ ? Sounds like something one could try.

The biggest thing i’ve done to de-google i guess is run Firefox or Safari exclusively instead of Chrome.

if you’re a chrome user and haven’t tried firefox quantum onwards, give it a shot. Firefox is finally usable again…

The Mail-In-A-Box seems Docker support doesn’t seem quite as good.

Yeah, it’s my biggest complain. Josh seems a bit anti-Docker, and community efforts to add it have had fits of stops and starts.

I’m probably going to have to migrate away from it when Trusty goes EOL, but I get to procrastinate a bit longer.

I’m trying to wean myself off of Google drive at the moment with NextCloud. I think Wendell or Ryan mentioned in a video the idea of using a VPS to forward to a home FreeNAS server. Does anyone know if this was ever fleshed out as an article or video?

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I won’t be the downer on this thread, but I will say that my time in partaking in this taught me a lot. If you’re interested in learning how things work (mail servers, for example) this is a worthwhile experiment. Otherwise, it often leads to frustration and unexpected outages.

Unless you guys are just talking about browsers and search engines.

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Why don’t the people who use Google Drive just switch to MEGA?
Mega has a better desktop client with more OS support.

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Google has cool offers with its google drive thing.

If you have a .edu email address you get free unlimited storage for life.

Since the early 90’s I’ve used probably every search there has been. Back in school they used to have us use ask dot com. Then it was lycos. After that, I migrated to Yahoo. When google was first starting out, I was very anti google. It never gave me search results I wanted, or even were remotely what I was searching for.

Then they got better, and I haven’t looked back since. Well, I use DDG whenever I look up adult themed shit. Or can’t find an answer on Google.

I use chrome because it’s hell of a lot better than IE or Edge.

I tried firefox back in the day, but back then it used so much more resources than IE that it pissed me off. And I’ve refused to use it since. I know that was like 20 years ago, but still. Once you leave an impression with me, I hold a grudge.

I suppose it may be time to start thinking about using Firefox. But I remember hearing that Netflix doesn’t work on Firefox. Or has that changed now? That may be the thing that convinces me to switch. But until then, I"m stuck with Gmail, and chrome. They haven’t done me any wrong. And I don’t put up all that much info about me on the net that I wouldn’t mind other people knowing. And Ads aren’t that big of a deal with me. I do nothing important through Email, or text. You want to get ahold of me? Call me. Or talk to me in person. This world is too full of people who don’t talk enough anyway. I like organic experiences.

Not to mention less secure in most cases. The only exception might be that you’d get the warrant not google.

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Lol I doubt anyone is thinking that far ahead or in that capacity.

No offense, anyone. Carry on toward freedom.

It’s honestly worth its own topic, to any people here talk the talk but leave the back donor wide open.

What are the major points/modes of attack on a mail server? The thing is, unless you’re a target, you’re mostly going to be combating automated scripts and random North Koreans if you’re running your own mail server. Whereas Google is probably target #1 for most hacking groups.

Then use google. Their security staff outnumber yours by 1000, there servers are far more secure than anything most people would make themselves. The fact is if you want a secure mail server your better using one that exists.

You can do it yourself, but the amount of time you’d need to put into it outstrips what you could just pay someone to give you.

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This is true, but I am not a sensible man. I would do it for the sake of science!

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As someone who is in the process of slowly trying to totally abandon Google, I agree. Quite a few headaches, and I haven’t even tried to set up my own email server or anything to that extent. I’d rather give a couple dollars a month to a company who has a decent reputation, like ProtonMail or Sync.com.

The phone is going to be the most difficult part. Google is with me 24/7. Do I get a dumb phone? As someone who’s into tech and wants to get into app development, that’s not really an option. Do I switch to an iPhone and lose basically all personalization and hardware options and hope that Apple isn’t spying one me? Or do I keep Android and knowingly sacrifice my privacy for versatility’s sake?

Even if someone only switched to Firefox instead of Chrome, or DDG instead of Google, I think that’s a step in the right direction. It doesn’t have to be RMS-level hardcore privacy in every aspect, just enough to shift the market enough to make Google rethink their strategy. I’m not implying that you think otherwise, just expanding on my thoughts.

Except that doesn’t really solve the problem, because then Google has my emails. Also, I don’t need Google level security, because I am not a Google level target.

I’ve never noticed an outage, but who knows. Could be regional I guess

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Well you can try to encrypt them via something like OpenPGP. Of course, you can only do that with personal mail that both sides agree to. Other than that, there’s not a whole lot can do to keep your emails from being violated by the all seeing eye.

This is mistaken, any valid email address is an address worth cracking in to.

Just because you think you’re not a target, doesn’t mean that you are not.

Rolling your own; you will have to accept this risk.