Yes. I’ve said this before, but I’ll admit that laziness kept me using gmail via my Google Apps account. That an convenience, somewhat. For a little while, I kept getting weird errors trying to send stuff via my hosting plan, but I’ve since sorted it out.

I also found an external email service that I like and enjoy, with all the requisite security things that are desirable from an email service (and free too!). This is the email offered by riseup.net who I generally think do a lot of super cool stuff as well.

Their downside? They offer a vanishingly small amount of space for email. Which, yes, is good and in keeping with their philosophy but can be somewhat tough to navigate¹. I’m managing this by setting up a archival mailbox with my domain hosting where I’ll save emails after reading them. This should hopefully deal with any spam concerns since the email will be a nonsense one that no one knows and I don’t use for signing up to services.

Doing this largely because, well, I hate the ads (yes, I use adblock and that isn’t the point). And I really really don’t like the creeping G+ issue. I deleted my G+ account because of the real names thing and I hate that they are pushing G+ into everything. There are other Google services that I can’t really do without, at the moment, like Calendar or Docs since they are used by my colleagues. But I don’t need the email. So.

For migration… there isn’t any fast or easy way to do it. Most tutorials basically just say to use Thunderbird, or some kind of email client, and transfer the emails via imap. Sadly… this really is the best way. But one does not need to use Thunderbird.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done a mass email migration (a while back I consolidated a few accounts into one archival account so I could close them). I found Thunderbird to behave strangely when trying to move large amounts of emails at a time (as in: it would freeze or crash).

I mentioned in the above post that I’ve really taken to the old school Pine email client. This time around, I’m using Pine to shift around the emails and it is working much better and more reliably. Also, considerably faster while also keeping me apprised of the progress. It has already meant that instead of spending forever transferring emails, I’ve managed to migrate all the emails from my main personal account. In about half a day (I was also doing sorting and weeding).