Concentration and centralization (was Free software during wartime)

Posted Mar 24, 2023 11:57 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
In reply to: Concentration and centralization (was Free software during wartime) by Cyberax
Parent article: Free software during wartime

You can change MX records sure, but how easy is it to switch? Can you retrieve mail archives from Google, migrate them to a new provider? How about individual users' addressbooks, filter settings, etc?

Concentration and centralization (was Free software during wartime)

Posted Mar 24, 2023 14:59 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Actually, as part of Google's "Don't be evil" (and yes I know it's no longer an official policy), Google actually make it pretty easy to get your stuff out. Not necessarily in a format that useful elsewhere, but that's down to elsewhere not having tooling to import it.

And harking back to WordPerfect :-) that's actually a very good strategy. By making it easy for people to move data both in and out, the net flow tends to be very much in rather than out.

Cheers,
Wol

Concentration and centralization (was Free software during wartime)

Posted Mar 24, 2023 17:30 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> You can change MX records sure, but how easy is it to switch? Can you retrieve mail archives from Google, migrate them to a new provider? How about individual users' addressbooks, filter settings, etc?

Google supports IMAP, so you can just download all the emails and then import them back. There's an API to retrieve contacts and calendars.

I have not looked at exporting the filter settings, but you'll probably need to redo them anyway.

Concentration and centralization (was Free software during wartime)

Posted Mar 27, 2023 12:36 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

If you must use Google, which I don't recommend, then the correct way is to simply have it relay to your actual mail server that you control. Similarly for outbound mail, use your own mail server and configure Google's outbound server as a smarthost.

That way, if you need to leave Google for whatever reason, all your email is in your possession. I'd use any third-party email service in the manner I've just described---it gives some level of control over your own email.