I’ve had a gmail account since 2007, when I got an invite from someone I met at a university Open day. At the time it was the bee’s knees, dog’s bollocks and cat’s….elbows?It was hard to get into, it had way more storage than anything else, and it was fresh, and new, and exciting. There were people using it as a filesystem (before dropbox, I think).<\/p>\n
I’ve long ranted and raved about how I no longer trust Google. I haven’t done for some time, but their services have become so ubiquitous that it’s hard to actually take the plunge.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I’ve been gradually updating my contact information and contact records on a variety of services to my new Fastmail address. I have a choice here: I can use my own, self-hosted email address (using this domain), or I can use Fastmail.<\/p>\n
In the long run, I want everything to be on the self-hosted address, and then I can make the choice to either continue to run it myself, which is a bit of a ball-ache, or I can direct the MX record to some company like Fastmail and get them to do it for me. This is a paid service, but then it has to be – Google only run gmail for free because it’s so profitable to harvest user data and to basically be the only option for email that most people have even heard of.<\/p>\n
While moving services, I noticed that I have a lot of accounts for basically the same thing. Game Store accounts. Every fucking gaming company has one.<\/p>\n
List of GAMING services I’ve had to move<\/p>\n
Now that I’ve done this, I need to decide just how long I should leave my old gmail account open for. My “human” contacts already know to use my new address, which I’ve had on this domain for a few years now. I’ve left an out-of-office auto-responder on for a few weeks now, for contacts only. Just in case anyone forgets.<\/p>\n
I suppose I’ll let it run for another month, then kill it?<\/p>\n
It’s not strange that I am apprehensive about this. After all, this email address has been the keystone of my digital life for more than 10 years now. Practically every service I have ever used has required an email address as part of sign up, and this has been the only one I’ve used for non-financial stuff. It’s also been the case that so many fluff type things have required an email, and the resulting spam has just been unbearable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve had a gmail account since 2007, when I got an invite from someone I met at a university Open day. At the time it was the bee’s knees, dog’s bollocks and cat’s….elbows?It was hard to get into, it had way more storage than anything else, and it was fresh,… Continue reading