I watch a lot of YouTube videos. So much, that it starts to annoy me, how much of my free time I’m wasting by watching (admittedly very interesting) clips of a broad range of content creators.
Logging out of my Google account helped a little bit to keep my addiction at bay, as it appears to prevent the YouTube algorithm, which normally greets me with a broad set of perfectly selected videos from recognizing me. But then again I use Google to log in to one service or another, so it became annoying to log in and back out again all the time. At one point I decided to delete my YouTube history, which resulted in a very bad prediction of what videos I might like. This helped for a short amount of time, but the algorithm quickly returned to its merciless precision after a few days.
Today I decided, that its time to leave Google behind completely. My Google Mail account was used only for online shopping anyways, so I figured why not use a more privacy respecting service instead. Self-hosting was not an option for me, as I only have a residential IP address on my Raspberry Pi and also I heard that hosting a mail server is a huge pain.
A New Mail Account
So I created an account at the Berlin based service mailbox.org. They offer emails plus some cloud stuff like an office suite, storage etc., although I don’t think I’ll use any of the additional services (oh, they offer an XMPP account as well :P). The service is not free as in free beer as it costs 1€ per month, but that’s a fair price in my opinion. All in all it appears to be a good replacement for all the Google stuff.
As a next step, I went through the long list of all the websites and shops that I have accounts on, scouting for those services that are registered on my Google Mail address. All those mail settings had to be changed to the new account.
Mail Extensions
Bonus Tipp: Mailbox.org has support for so called Mail Extensions (or Plus Extensions, I’m not really sure how they are called). This means that you can create a folder in your inbox, lets say “fsfe”. Now you can change your mail address of your FSFE account to “username+fsfe@mailbox.org”. Mails from the FSFE will still go to your “username@mailbox.org” mail account, but they are automatically sorted into the fsfe inbox. This is useful not only to sort mails by sender, but also to find out, which of the many services you use messed up and leaked your mail address to those nasty spammers, so you can avoid that service in the future.
This trick also works for Google Mail by the way.
Deleting (most) the Google Services
The last step logically would be to finally delete my Google account. However, I’m not entirely sure if I really changed all the important services over to the new account, so I’ll keep it for a short period of time (a month or so) to see if any more important mails arrive.
However, I discovered that under the section “Delete Services or Account” you can see a list of all the services which are connected with your Google account. It is possible to partially delete those services, so I went ahead and deleted most of it, except Google Mail.
Additional Bonus Tipp: I use NewPipe on my phone, which is a free libre replacement for the YouTube app. It has a neat feature which lets you import your subscriptions from your YouTube account. That way I can still follow some of the creators, but in a more manual way (as I have to open the app on my phone, which I don’t often do). In my eyes, this is a good compromise 🙂
I’m looking forward to go fully Google-free soon. I de-googled my phone ages ago, but for some reason I still held on to my Google account. This will be sorted out soon though!
De-Googling your Phone?
By the way, if you are looking to de-google your phone, Mike Kuketz has a great series of blog posts about that topic (in German though):
Happy Hacking!
2 responses to “Another Step to a Google-free Life”
@vanitasvitae Why mailbox.org?
I’ve heard some good things about them and I could not check, if Tutanota, Posteo and co. support Mail Extensions. Mailbox.org listed this feature in their FAQs.