Hi I'm trying to de google my life as much as possible, please tell me about secure emails, also, no clue if you can help me with this but, I have made every account I own using gmail... is there a way to transfer that information onto a different one, or am I doomed to start over...
Feel free to ignore the second part if you don't know
Hi!
Ok, so secure email. I'll start with that makes email non secure.
Basically, gmail and most other major mainstream email providers (outlook, yahoo, etc) can (and do) read the contents of your emails, so they can use that information to advertise. Personally I think that's creepy and invasive.
So to have a secure/private email provider, they would need to know as little as possible about the contents of your emails while still being able to deliver them correctly. At first you might think 'ah, so just find a provider that says they don't read your emails!' and that would be a good start, but what then happens if they get bought or their policy changes or their database gets hacked, or they get a request from a government who may or may not be friendly to your ideology?
That's why what you want is a provider that can't, like technologically, mathematically cannot possibly read the contents of your emails. That means even if an attacker got their hands on the entire database they wouldn't have a single word of the content of your emails. To achieve that you need an encrypted email provider. They store your messages encrypted such that only your account can decrypt them.
Obviously if the other recipient of your email is still using google then google can still see it, encrypted mail works better the more people use it, so your move will improve things, and anyone you can bring with you makes it that much better.
In terms of specific providers to use, I have a strong personal preference for Proton, they do a VPN, encrypted email, encrypted calendar, and encrypted cloud storage (like google drive). I can't recommend them enough, and for average personal email use their free tier is well and truly al the functionality you need.
As for the second part of your question: moving your accounts away from your old email will vary for every account you want to move. All you'll need to do on most accounts is open up your profile settings and change the email listed, then probably go through a 'confirm your email' process like you would have when you signed up. Then your account will continue on just as it was, but the associated email will be your new one. Each one will likely take only a few minutes, but if you have 10s or 100s of accounts across the web then it starts to get a little time consuming. What I can recommend is doing the obvious ones first, and then just keeping an eye out in your day to day web surfing for accounts you haven't swapped over yet. Do them when you come across them, and you'll get through all the things you use in an average month in about a month.
(While you're doing that it's a great chance to get all your login details into a password manager and make the passwords strong and unique, if you haven't already done that! I use and recommend bitwarden but there are plenty of decent options out there)
You will find some sites are hard or even impossible to change the email on. There are a lot of reasons for that, most of them related to bad or lazy design choices on the part of the site developers. If it's something you really care about then it might be worth contacting support for the site to see if you can change it over, if not, some things will have to start over, that's unfortunately just how it is.
Hope that helps!
