Hi,

I know this is not exactly a pure “degoogle” but as many members of this community are looking for a gmail replacement I would like to recommend an anonymous mail forwarding service like https://addy.io/. I would also like to hear your opinions on this or several similar services.

In case you don’t know what it does here is my short explanation: It is an email forwarding service. So basically you sign up with your (new non gmail) email address. Whenever you sign up for something you would normally use your email you use a new Addy.io mail instead. This works on the fly without having to login to Addy.io beforehand or even having to use a plugin or app. Let’s say I would want to sign up for Lemmy I would just type “lemmy@my_name.addy.io” in the email form. Now all mails to this address get forwarded to my real email address without Lemmy knowing it. I think this has a lot of benefits:

• Additional privacy: the service I sign up to doesn’t know my mail. In case it gets hacked it is more difficult to figure out where else I signed up.
• Phishing and spam protection: Mail from “my bank” to my Lemmy address saying I should change my password. I don’t think so. But now I know they got hacked or sold my data and I can just delete the alias.
• switching mails: let’s say you just degoogled your mail but now it turns out the CEO of the new mail provider is a dick. Switching you mail on all the services and news letters you use again? I don’t think so. Just change one mail in your forwarding service and your good to go