I’ve been working on moving away from Google for a while now. I have a lot of reasons, but the primary one is that I don’t like the feel of being a product rather than a consumer. I want to be in control of my own data, and how it is used and disseminated. With Google in control of it, I never really felt I had that, and it was only getting worse with time.

Anyway, 2015 has been a good year for making good on this resolution:

  • I moved to using DuckDuckGo a few weeks ago
  • About a week ago, I migrated my blog’s data to Jekyll (which you’re reading, right now).
  • Most recently, after getting annoyed at Google once again, I finally got annoyed enough to take the last, most drastic step: email, calendaring and contacts.

I was on my second email account with Google. My original one was a Gmail account, created back in 2005 or so (I don’t even remember anymore). I stopped using that one in fan of using my own GApps account with my own domain (shared amongst other people in my family) in 2011 or something like that.

My migration plan went something like this:

  • Sign up for FastMail (business tier, partly because we’re using it as a family, and partly because I actually have my own business, and partly because I want to support FastMail)
  • Start FastMail’s IMAP import
  • Clean up the imported stuff (my email has a long-going reputation for being a junkyard where important things go to die)
  • Export ICS/VCard for my calendar & contact data out of Google and import them into FastMail
  • Delete everything out of my GMail account

All of this went pretty painlessly, and so far, I’m very happy with the switch. I’ve found one pretty serious bug with FM’s iOS client which I need to report, but aside from that, smooth sailing. I look forward to writing my own JMAP client, when FastMail’s servers support it.

At this point, I’ve still got the Google account open (but now, dataless) so that I can keep G+. That (and occasional recreational YouTube video watching) are the only things I still have Google in my life for, and it feels pretty good.