Moving away from Gmail
Back around 2007 I moved from self-hosting the email for Vec.com and moved to Google. They were offering to provide email (and other stuff) with their Google Apps for Your Domain at the time. And it was free.
Of course any time you don’t know what the product is, the product is you. Over the past over 15 years Google dropped the “Don’t Be Evil” part of their mission statement.
All of this was making me quite uncomfortable.
There was also the other aspect of Gmail that I originally really liked: tagging over categories. The underlying way that Gmail works is by adding tags to a message. The UI then presents this as a set of pseudo directories that hold messages. So, in effect, a message can live in multiple places at once. Once you remove all the tags, it moves to “archive,” which is where all untagged messages reside.
Another boon was their great categorization that would auto-tag messages as promotions, social, updates, and forums.
Well, the issue is that it’s something that made emails really easy for me to ignore. Once you get past a few hundred emails, it’s something that I wasn’t able to really overcome. It’s good enough to ignore — but that essentially forced me to ignore them. Hundreds of mailing lists that would constantly send me mail that would sort dutifully into “promotions” where they just built up endlessly.
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A couple of weeks ago I decided to open up an account on Microsoft’s offering. There’s always friction with change. It took me a few attempts until I was able to figure out how to transfer literally everything off of Google. At first I tried a couple of ways with my computer doing the heavy lifting — but that was a recipe for failure. Eventually I found the Exchange admin pages and was able to fire off a job with the servers talking to each other. It took the better part of a day, but everything came over just fine.
Then it was time to move over En’s mail as well. The second time is always a lot easier.
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The last hurdle is turning off the old service. There’s a lot of “no going back” in that decision. I also had a fear that closing my GSuite account would have other ramifications to other parts of my Google account. I still have my YouTube premium and whatnot that I want to use.
Thankfully nothing bad happened.
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Starting on day three of my adventure, I’ve gone to bed with inbox zero.
I’ve not been able to do that for years.
I think it’s just that I get along more with the organizational style that comes with a more traditional folder-based structure instead of the tagging-driven way that Gmail wants you to use.