I’m currently on a quest to regain my digital privacy. I personally evaluate my current progress on that matter as middling. My main grief and real thorn in my side is my mailbox. Writing that corporations are bad and we should value our privacy more, while using Gmail mailbox smells like hypocrisy. In my defense, I can only said, that I’m fully aware of this fact, and for long time I’ve been planning to do something with this. This mailbox actually predates my awareness about value of privacy by almost decade. At that point I even had account on Facebook.
But changing mailbox provider is not so easy.
I’ve managed to move my contacts, calendars and files from Google suite and Dropbox to self-hosted Nextcloud instance.
I’ve had old notebook – Lenovo IdeaPad S100. Not much of powerhorse, but it is quite low power. For simple server with my personal git and Nextcloud, I deemed it good enough. By the way, I’m currently hosting my Gemini capsule on it. It doesn’t have perfect uptime (power grid here is a little unreliable), but again, it is good enough for my purposes.
After fiddling with this setup for some time, I can say that my user experience is satisfactory. At this point, I would not even consider returning to Google suite and Dropbox.
Installing LineageOS on my smartphone, and replacing most of apps, I’ve used with ones available on F-Droid was quite easy (there weren’t many of them).
But e-mail is a whole different story.
Considering that remembering all online services, I’ve ever used is impossible, and “I’ve forgotten password” button is invaluable for me, completely deleting Gmail account is daunting task. So, I’ve had an idea: Why not leave Gmail as is, and use it as spam-facing mailbox, while having other mailbox for private conversations? I will only provide this address to people I know without ever posting it publicly or using it for creating accounts. This idea has been seemed sane. My current e-mail leaked many times according to Have I Been Pwned site, and at this point I would be amazed, if there still is some spamlist, which doesn’t have it. So, I was close to create account on other mailbox provider such as ProtonMail or Tutanota, but immediately stopped, when I realized that nobody will ever use my private e-mail. My family usually use phone. For work related matter, I was provided with separate e-mail address. So, basically rest of my e-mail traffic should be considered as spam-facing.
But I’m still thinking about it.
This is only a mirror of my Gemini capsule available here: