The next part of Dawn Treader, my digital sovereignty project, is email and calendar. I have for many years had this via Google Workspace. This is effectively Gmail with my own domain, and since I started using it back when it was Google Apps for small businesses, I have had it for free ever since then.
When it comes to email, I have two things I recommend to people: The first is to never use your work email for private things, because it is a hassle when you want to move jobs, and it makes things hard for IT administrators trying to respect your privacy and keep the company safe at the same time. Trust me – I’ve had that job, I’ve seen things I didn’t want to see.
The second piece of advice applies to people in the tech industry, and that is to have your own domain. Moving email is easy when you have your own domain, all you have to do is update the relevant DNS records and all the mail sent to your current email address will start flowing to your new provider.
Requirements
That being said, my requirements for replacing Google Workspace were a bit more than just being able to receive emails at the same address as before:
- I wanted a similar experience to Gmail’s automatic sorting of mails into primary, advertising, social and forums.
- I have fallen into the habit of using my email as a document archive that I can search through when I need to find something. For me, this archive stretches back to 2009, and I would like to have it all imported. I have deleted about 40 000 largely unread emails from the non-primary inboxes in preparation for the move, but I still had 19 456 emails in my primary inbox (all read!).
- Having the calendar well-integrated with my email is very useful.
- The calendar needs to be sharable (specifically with my wife).
In addition to email and calendar, my Google Workspace also provides Google Drive, Google Photos and the login I use for my Android phone. Replacing Drive and Photos are an upcoming part of Dawn Treader, but since I still will have an Android phone I may not be able to decommission the Google Workspace account completely. Emptying it out of content and keeping it alive will probably be more privacy-minded than closing it down and replacing my Android login with a regular ad-supported Gmail account.
The contenders
Now, for email in the simplest sense, there are thousands of alternatives. In fact, I have a generous amount of email accounts included in my web hosting plan for this website. But for calendars there is surprisingly little to choose from, even if you were not specifically looking only inside Europe.
I identified two potential providers for my needs: a hosted NextCloud service (like Tab.Digital in Latvia/Sweden) or Proton Mail (Switzerland). NextCloud is a full business suite of software for businesses, while Proton Mail is a more consumer oriented privacy-minded Gmail replacement.
While they both checked all the boxes in my requirement matrix, I felt that Proton Mail was probably easier to set up as a single user and has a stronger focus on Gmail-equivalent features. They also have a “Easy Switch” feature designed to make the transition from Gmail as easy as possible.
Pedantry alert: Switzerland is not a member of the EU or the EEA, so it is not actually covered by the GDPR. But they adopted a new Federal Act on Data Protection that was intentionally designed to be compatible with the GDPR, and the EU has made an adequacy decision as per article 45 of the GDPR stating that data can flow freely to Switzerland. As an aside, article 45 is also the legal basis for allowing data transfers to the USA with the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, which seems to be on a more shaky footing than before.
So I took the plunge! As expected, setting up a new account and all the needed DNS records for the email was straight-forward, with an easy wizard and lots of documentation. It’s still pretty nerve wracking when you are waiting for DNS records to propagate and you hope you haven’t made any silly errors causing emails to disappear in transit. One good tip is to prepare some days before by reducing your old DNS record’s Time-To-Live values to something like ten minutes, so that you don’t have to wait up to a day for the entire internet to catch up with every change.
Of course, make sure your new records also have a short Time-To-Live initially in case you do like me and forget to add a period to the end of your MX records, meaning mails get sent to protonmail.ch.robpvn.net instead of protonmail.ch. So I may have lost about ten minutes of email in the switchover, oh well! To be a nice internet citizen and save servers constantly having to recheck your records you can set a longer TTL later.
The Easy Switch feature was also really easy to use – you have to authorize Proton as an application with access to your Gmail, calendar and contacts, and then it just starts the import. It takes a few hours, but runs in the background quietly adding emails to your inbox one by one.
The Android apps also seem very polished and easily connected to the new account. One minor quibble is that the calendar widget takes up more space than the old Google Calendar widget, so I have to rearrange my home screen and lose all sorts of muscle memory. I will also have to spend some time tweaking labeling, sorting and that kind of thing to get back to the workflow I’m used to, but all in all I am very happy with the transition experience.
