I am in the process of figuring out which things are still tied to my old Google email address (I have been forwarding my emails from it for the last year and changing each account to unique aliases as I find them) so I can finally delete it for good.
I’m working towards doing this. It’ll take a bit of setting up though
The other day I tried making a google account for an assignment my prof wanted (bro wanted presentation to be specifically on google slides and video uploaded on youtube). Google now required you to have a physical smartphone to make an account, you have to press a button that sends some kind of api that sends google an sms from your phone.
So I just told my friend to upload it for me
Bullshit
That’s some bullshit. Google Classroom should be included by the district if they want you to use Google apps.
He’s a techbro kind of guy
Without the pay…
Yep. A failed tech bro
This would be me if only there was some way to easily determine where I have used my @gmail address in the past 20 years. I have already set up another address that I own myself and have moved a bunch of stuff over, but I don’t want to lose access to the rest of my accounts tied to my Gmail address.
Although I suppose I could go through my Keepass and list all logins that use my gmail, then chip away at that…
You can setup a rule in Gmail, and tag them when they get to your new inbox. Use Gmail to add a junk CC, or something if the new provider doesn’t have strong automation capabilities.
Then use the tags to go back and change the email on file (if necessary).
After a year if they haven’t contacted you then they obviously aren’t that important.
I found a lot of emails but I didn’t find a lot of emails I cared about enough to update when I did this.
This is a great idea.
I’m using Thunderbird with IMAP to my own email server for my new email, but I can totally see something like that working to make the transition work. Thanks!
That’s a smart way of going about it. I threw caution to the wind because I stopped using my Google account for services years ago. We’ll see how that affects things in the future.
Gmail might have an autoforward thing
It does, but that still means Google has access to all my accounts related email until I move everything over. I suppose it’s a good backstop though, thanks for the tip :-)
Setup a rule in Gmail, and then tag them when they get to your new inbox. Use Gmail to add a junk CC, or something if the new provider cannot do this.
Then use the tags to go back and change the email on file (if necessary).
After a year if they haven’t contacted you then they obviously aren’t that important.
Obligatory joke that feels too real:
The fact that it’s on YouTube enhances the joke, I feel
I had to install a redirect add-on while I held my breath.
All for-profit prisons already have these features, lol.
I see it as fate. I switched credit cards and wanted to register my new one on Meta but their system would not let me enter a Canadian postal code. My solution is to let the account expire in April (due to non-account payment because the credit card on file no longer exists) and sell my Quest 3s, otherwise they would have had me for another year. My days of troubleshooting or trying to get around bad design are over. Life is too short and VR, while fun, isn’t fun enough for me to make the time sacrifices required to keep going. The bloom is off of the VR rose.
I have a quest 3 but I’m not paying meta a dime for anything beyond the headset. It’s much cheaper to buy games on Steam if that setup works for you. There are also apps like apprenticeVR that basically let you download and install any APK for games to play then directly on the headset.
Recently apprenticeVR gave me some issues reaching the servers, but it looks like there are some forks made recently to provide a fix until the main project incorporates something:
have been deleted
recover
🙄
At least write “is scheduled to be deleted” to make the lie not as obvious.
I assume that the account is not usable after this. So it is a logical delete and the physical delete is scheduled. I don’t know what would be a better way to phrase it, that would not confuse the users.
I am not trying to defend google, I just had similar UX issues at work.
Correct. Google is banking on users getting withdrawl and crawling back. They all do the same thing, like Meta products. They give you 30 days before deletion because they know most people are addicted and will recover their accounts.
It’s like how most people call moving a file into the trash can “deleting.” It is deleted (in a sense), but you can still recover it if you want before the trash can gets emptied.
Or like how even you can actually delet a file from the disk but still be able to recover it before the disk space is overwritten by other files. I’m not saying that this is what Google does when you recover a freshly deleted account (most likely not), but what I’m trying to say with these two examples is that being able to be recovered is not a contradiction with having been deleted
Also I don’t get why you take problem with this. It’s not like it’s another loop to jump through to get to delete the account?
Could still be actually deleted, but there’s backups. Technically true.
If you can recover my Data then my Data is NOT deleted.
Just a copy of it, yes.
I mean technically deletion just means to allow the computer to overwrite the data but until this happens it can be recovered.
If it was deleted then how could you recover it
It gets deleted after some time. There is some time to recover it before it will be deleted actually.
So they’re lying
My children’s schools and after-school extracurricular clubs (including ones offered by the local police department) still are held hostage by Alphabet, forcing me to also maintain an account with them. But… I don’t need to use it for anything else.
What are the gmail replacement options?
I use mailbox.org, and it’s been good. I used tutanota for a while, but the fact that I couldn’t use any email clients (they have their own now I’ve heard) made me switch. It’s also why I didn’t go with Proton, since you have to pay the $10/mo plan (I think) to do it with them.
Any small-to-medium paid email hoster. Because if not paid, you are the product. And large ones usually want both, your money and your data/advertising.
I use proton and it’s been solid
Proton and Privateemail through Namecheap.
Congratulations. I have mine still active for 2 years for email forwarding…I think I should have caught all residual services by now and switched the email adress for them. Photos are transferred to selfhosted Immich, Files on nextcloud and Filen. Maybe I should find some time for the final deletion then?
‘removed from public access, but retained for our own or for legal purposes’
That’s something to do while we still can, Instagram doesn’t let me delete my own account :/ Tried reaching the support multiple times, I’ve been completely ignored
i used an instagram scraper tool with an account, at some point they suspended the account and required my ID. I obviously refused and just let it rot, at some point they deleted my account.
After how much time? I was banned because of using third party client, I did the kyc process at the time because I wanted to delete the account but still I could not access…
It’s been years for me and they didn’t delete it yet.
I used instaloader to scrape about 5 profiles (my friends, ofc i have their permission) every day (was it called story? the 24h expiring thing). occasionally the token(?) saved in instaloader would expire and display their warning saying there was “Suspicious activity” or something, so i setup a simple script to run firefox to login and extract cookies from it every time. Had that running for some weeks and it was permabanned
You might get better results by going outside their channels and using legal options. Like not through the courts, but I think some jurisdictions have a law that you data must be deleted if a request is sent in writing or something like that. You might also be able to request they send you all the data they have (though this might cost money because they print it and mail it). I remember someone did that with their Tinder data for some article about how shitty Tinder is, though it depends on where you live.
Your data has been “deleted”.
So what are you going to use?
I was using Nextcloud with OnlyOffice for a while, but since then, this is the setup:
- YouTube --> Invidious/Odysee/PeerTube
- Authenticator --> Stratum
- Google Passwords --> Vaultwarden
- Gmail/Calendar/Tasks --> Privateemail (through domain host)
- Google Drive --> Syncthing/SFTPGo (webdav implementation handles phone backups, too)
- Play Store --> Aurora and F-Droid
- Google Search --> SearXNG
- Google Home --> HomeAssistant
- Google Photos --> Immich
- Google Books --> Kavita
- Android Messages --> KDE Connect
- Google Maps --> Organic Maps or Magic Earth
- Google Meet --> Element
- Google Pay --> PayPal
- Google Voice --> Session
- YouTube Music --> gonic
Thank you friend.
