Really owning your email

In all of my talk over the years about owning your website with WordPress and owning your notes with Obsidian, I’m well-aware that I had a big hole in that philosophy when it came to my email. It was all in Gmail, where I have zero actual ownership of my account.

The problem is that taking ownership of your email can be really hard. Using WordPress and Obsidian can be tricky in some cases, but really owning your email can be much more difficult. However, a recent conversation with Sanjay Parekh showed me that I was looking at it all wrong.

The two parts of email

I always saw it as “my email”. One thing. One service. My email account.

That’s sort of true, but Sanjay explained that when it comes to ownership and control, there are really two pieces.

• Your address
• Your emails

They certainly are related, but there is a big difference. While I save pretty much all of my old emails, it’s access to the address itself that is far more valuable, and I had never really considered those two separate pieces before.

As I first shared nearly 15 years ago, the goal of using email is to mine the content out of each message and move on.

Add the event to your calendar. Download the file. Do the task. Answer the question.

When you’re done, the email should essentially be an empty husk. I still save it “just in case”, and I certainly search through my email for reference quite a bit, but in theory they’ve all been mined.

On the flip side, future access to that address is critical. People need to reach me. I need to reset my passwords. I need to do dual-factor authentication at times.

Losing access to my old messages would be awful. Losing access to the address itself would be critical.

Just set up a new address

With that in mind, I was no longer as worried about losing my old messages. Granted, I’ll do my very best to keep access to all of them forever, but my primary concern about ownership should be about the address itself and not the historical messages. In my case specifically, I don’t ultimately control gmail.com, so my future is in Google’s hands there, but I have full control of mickmel.com.

With that in mind, I signed up for a paid Proton Mail account and created mickey@mickmel.com. Creating an address with a custom domain is a paid feature with Proton, but it’s only like $3.99/mo. Proton Mail is well-regarded for their privacy and should be a solid solution for years to come.

This leads to a much more secure future.

• If things change with Proton Mail, I’ll move my address. I can likely bring my messages with me, but I’m 100% sure I can bring my address with me.
• If things change with Google (or they ban my account or anything else that would remove my access), my Gmail account is toast and I’m in big trouble.

Moving around thousands of historical messages isn’t easy, but keeping access to an address on a custom domain isn’t too bad. I’ll focus there, and be confident that I have much more solid control over the part of email that really matters most — the address.

Gmail –> Proton

The other nice thing is that Proton makes it very easy to forward your Gmail account over to your new account with them. It was something I planned to do anyhow, but they did it almost automatically. Now I can live in Proton mail with my new mickey@mickmel.com address, but still get all of my Gmail forwarded over there and very slowly begin switching over.

They also have a tool to import all of your historical Gmail messages over, which I’ll likely do soon.

Whether or not this is a better day-to-day solution remains to be seen, but it’s undoubtedly putting me in a more secure position for the future and finally giving me a bit more actual ownership of the email address that I rely on so much.