this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Man how the hell are we supposed to degoogle so fast. I literally only became aware that they sucked like 2 years after them being cool for most of my life. Getting rid of gmail is going to be tough. There literally isn't a service the equal of YouTube or Gmail.
at my work, one person decided to start an email group to connect everyone for after hours activities....
only 2 people out of 20 were non gmail accounts
Snowden was in 2013, bro.
Use a client for video content like Grayjay (gets rid of the ads too).
Look at Tuta Mail or Proton Mail as viable privacy focused alternatives.
They have been evil for over 20 years. What are you on about?
There are many email providers. Like… thousands. Personally, I use Zoho.
Email might actually be one of the easiest to move off of, thankfully!
There's plenty of stuff out there, both free and paid. You can even use your own domain if you have an extra $15 or so a year. A lot of the paid options let you use your domain with them (and then if you ever need to change providers, you can keep your email address). And you can use both webmail and actual mail apps.
Youtube though... yeah, there aren't really any good alternatives for that.
-- Frost
tutamail.com. tuta.com. No phone required. No email required. No forced 2 factor authorization that is an excuse to grab your personal information to sell it. Never again on any of the tech email companies. Never again. I never agreed to give them my phone, they forced me to years after the fact when I needed to get in there suddenly.
What?
Google, yahoo, aol, et al, will, for your own safety, because they are concerned about your security, make you hand over your phone number that they are allowed to use for commercial purposes in their TOS. You are welcome!
That's a form of 2 factor auth, but that's not what all 2 factor auth is. There are many services that use 2fA time based tokens, or other methods. Any service that uses your phone number for 2FA is actively making the security on your account worse.
getting rid of gmail was actually the easiest part for me.
Google drive and maps was the hardest.
And I had replaced maps pretty well until magicearth decided to implode
What happened to magicearth? I haven't used it much, just one of the google alternatives in my "maps" folder.
They went "freemium" while breaking the app and hiding most useful features behind the paywall.
And I cannot stress enough how much they broke the app. It used to be so smooth and no nonsense. Now it's just unsafe to use.
There are alternatives to Gmail. I'd probably list out such services as Yahoo/AOL (I personally use the AT&T branded version of this service) and Hotmail (now known as Outlook.com), but instead I'll just tell you that you can enter a query like "free email provider" in your web search provider of choice and find several perfectly viable options. NOTE: whoever downvoted this needs to learn how to read and to understand that the comment I'm replying to is asking for "the equal of [...] Gmail" which does NOT mean a "good email provider". these options are selected to be corporate and abusive, much like Gmail.
Those are all awful, none of the corporate tech companies are better they are all garbage. If they force you to give them a phone number, they do not deserve your business.
you do realize he was asking for something "the equal of [...] Gmail", not a good email provider like disroot.org? if you didn't and assumed he was asking for a good email provider based on the other replies... then I'm surprised at you