I’ve seen a lot of people on Lemmy singing the praises of proton mail and I’ve been considering making the switch. I was hoping those of you who use it might be able to give me a sense of the difficulty (or ease) of migrating my current setup to it.
Please keep things simple if you can. I’m not a very tech savvy person and don’t understand a lot of the lingo and shorthand about this stuff.
Right now I have a single gmail inbox where I am forwarding several different accounts to it, some from gmail, others from different hosts. I really like this centralized setup, and I have it configured so I can also reply from any of these forwarded email addresses as well (it also automatically replies from whichever email the sender sent to).
Would any of this be hard or impossible to replicate in proton mail? My goal would be to slowly move away from gmail, but it will be a slow transition and I would need my current email addresses to forward to the new inbox as I do so.
Thanks for any insight.
You can receive but can’t reply from those addresses in Proton because of the way encryption works. Don’t use Proton if you want to keep sending from any other email address.
Edit: frankly, I wouldn’t bother switching unless you plan on using a custom domain for all your email needs. I’m a firm believer in using your own domain, because that way you can switch providers without needing to change your email address — you always own it, because you own the domain.
That’s a great callout and a very important feature to me. Do you use anything other than gmail? To be honest the encryption isn’t the main selling point for me, I would just like to de-google where I can these days.
Do you use anything other than gmail?
I set my Gmail to forward to Proton when I switched, and gradually replaced the address in all my accounts and told friends and family to no longer use it. It took about a year but now everything goes to my custom domain. You don’t need Proton to do any of that, though. If you want to still reply from your Gmail and don’t care about encryption, Fastmail may be a better fit (although IMO it’s less of a good value compared to all the extras you get with Proton Unlimited)
Either way, I really can’t recommend a custom domain enough. I actually used Fastmail for a year before switching to Proton and it was completely painless thanks to the domain.
Thanks for the info. You’ve given me some things I need to consider.
Did you see the video or is this a lucky coincidence? I refer to the video uploaded today: “I Used Proton Mail for 6 Months - Is it Good?” (18:37 min.) by The Linux Cast, watch on YouTube or Invidious on Dec 10, 2024
He explains a bit his experience and talks about switching from Gmail to Proton Mail. So you might be interested into watching.
No actually, thanks for passing that along!
Saving because I want to know, too. I’ve been putting it off because I don’t know how hard it’s going to be to migrate all the logins and shit that use my Gmail account.
Would any of this be hard or impossible to replicate in proton mail
you can replicate that with a paid proton account by creating a new @ for every gmail forward you had but you have to ditch all those gmail accounts. You would have, like you want, a central protonMail account with it’s satellites.
Would any of this be hard or impossible to replicate in proton mail?
AFAIK you can keep using the forwards to Proton, but in the free version you are unable to reply from them. I have unlimited and I have several addresses set up this way but I am unsure of the limit.
It’s not a free vs paid feature. You simply cannot send or reply with a non-profit domain that you don’t own. This feature has already been requested several times on the uservoice site
- https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/284483-proton-mail/suggestions/31264327-send-as-from-external-address-add-support-for-e
- https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/284483-proton-mail/suggestions/46229314-add-support-for-gmail-accounts-external-mail-acco
- https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/284483-proton-mail/suggestions/48450218-adding-imap-pop-and-smtp-support-for-other-email-p
- https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/284483-proton-mail/suggestions/32525668-smtp-out-to-allow-for-support-of-mail-forwarding-s
- https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/284483-proton-mail/suggestions/48817334-use-custom-email-address-via-smtp
- https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/284483-proton-mail/suggestions/47422739-abilitare-configurazione-smtp
and on the Reddit forum
- https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1ewc5i1/can_pm_send_as_without_changing_the_domain/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1evg1ez/is_it_possible_to_send_mail_as_from_gmail_using/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/nw94m0/send_as_function_shows_as_sent_from_another/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/m23u81/feature_request_send_as_subaddress/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/gyl9r8/sending_as_the_direction_from_which_i_redirected/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/bmv41w/feature_request_a_good_reason_send_as_a/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/mrw81k/is_is_possible_to_use_pm_to_sendrecieve_as_an/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/7krs6w/send_mail_as_feature_for_protonmail_exists/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/8yzy04/is_it_possible_to_send_mail_as_in_protonmail/
Can you clarify what you mean by a nonprofit domain? The places I would need to forward right now are a few gmail addresses, a domain I own, and a couple zoho addresses (though those also use a custom domain, not sure if that changes things).
auto-correct typo. Meant to say non-proton domain (like protonmail.com, proton.me, etc). You can forward the @gmail.com addresses to your Proton mailbox, but there is no way for your to send as those gmail.com addresses from your Proton mailbox in the same way you can send as non gmail.com addresses from your gmail mailbox. You can send as an address from a domain that you own and configure all the DNS records for Proton to handle.
I see, thanks for the info
