I migrated away from my main email, it wasn't a Google mail but it was on the providers domain.

First I signed up with Proton Mail and added my own domain, they fit the bill for me, YMMV.

Then I did a search in my password manager and went through those accounts.

Then I just let the old account sit there for a year. Each time I got an email from something I cared about I'd log in and change mail.

It's been a year now, and I'm about to terminate the old account. All I get there now is occasional spam.

I really dreaded this, but all in all quite painless. And next time it should be easier since I now own the email domain.

edit: Forgot to mention I use Thunderbird, so old email I archived to local folders. That's part if why I ended with Proton, their IMAP bridge allows me to keep using Thunderbird.

I started doing this a while ago, but made the mistake of buying a .io domain. With the future of that domain uncertain, I’ve been rolling that back, not back to Gmail, but to the underlying Proton account for the moment.

I’ve also had some bad experiences with rates being raised on domains. That still ends up feeling like a risk to me, as the problem of domain squatters has not been solved, and the “solution” being employed seems to be continued rate hikes and exorbitant pricing for “premium” domains. It makes buying a domain for email not seem worth it… or at least not without its own long-term risks.

My current project has been trying to reduce my footprint, by deleting old and unused accounts, so any future migrations will be easier. I’ve found with many sites, this is easier said than done. For example, I deleted my Venmo account at least 2 months ago, yet I just got an email from them yesterday about reviewing privacy settings. Did they delete my account? They sure didn’t delete all my data if I continue to get emails. I’m betting they just set a ‘delete’ flag in the database. The lack of accountability and transparency on these things is really bad.

I exported all my email with Google Takeout, and Claude Code was able to write me a threaded email viewer local web app with basic search (chained ripgrep) in about 10 minutes, for any time I need to search archived emails.

One thing I've not seen mentioned when people talk about moving to an owned domain is what happens when you don't own it anymore?

There are a million services that assume that if you have access to the email content you are the account holder. Google claims they don't recycle email addresses, but if you lose your domain, the next owner has access to all emails from that point forward.

If something happens and you're unable to renew your domain, are your next of kin out of luck?