From Protonmail to Migadu
By hernil
The How
If you just want to know the how of migrating away from Proton Mail using the Proton Bridge here is your link.
Story time
A loong time ago I was a part of a student association. We used email extensively for communication using mailing lists and it was awesome. I think I’ll write a short post about proper email etiquete at some point but suffice to say it’s almost impossible to do email well in the age of Outlook, and partly Gmail. Nevertheless I as most other tech-inclined people at the time ended up with Gmail as my email client because of a few creature comforts. Server side filtering rules that worked across devices being the main one.
About five years ago I think I had a feeling of having lost control somewhat of my email. The few actionable emails got quickly lost in a sea of account notifications and marketing. And without that email client being a part of my daily workflow anymore it never got the attention it needed to take back control. Instead I decided to create a new address to start fresh and dedicate to more “serious” things. Moving away from Gmail was to be a concious and clear way to separate the old from the new and thus I ended up with a new address at Protonmail. Note that both the old and new addresses were on custom domains controlled by me.
Present day
The initial spurring of looking for alternatives was due to having to migrate away a domain of mine mostly used by family. It was hosted at a web host here in Norway with which I’ve been mostly happy with throughout the years. However they uped their prices for this particular service (a lot) and I went looking for alternatives.
Moving that domain to Proton would require each user to pay a monthly fee in addition to all users needing to use new applications for their workflow. Not great.
I’ve been with Proton for about five years now and although I like a lot of what they have been doing and support their mission there is a few niggles and annoyances here and there. For example I don’t really care much about pass, drive and least of all the wallet they’re making. I have my own solutions and tools for that. I could just - not use them - which is what I’ve been doing. But at the same time the Android email client took ages to get things like a threaded view so there is a feeling of them spreading themselves thin. They are also going quite hard on being super-ultra-private and secure to the detriment of using standard tooling like exposing email over Imap but nonetheless about 98% of the emails I’m sending are just going to be sent in plain text to someone anyway.
I’m slowly landing on being a fan of their over all mission, without necessarily being a perfect match as their target user group. My conclusion is that that is just fine.
So when my new inbox startet to feel a bit uncontrolled like the old one, in addition to having to look for basic email hosting for other domains. I decided that it was time to reconsider the whole picture. I wanted to break free of the (slightly) walled garden of Protonmail to properly attend the problem. Honestly, I wanted back to my days of Thunderbird on the desktop.
The Where
Migadu
I stumbled upon Migadu pretty randomly, and honestly some of their information and wording was partly why I startet feeling a bit annoyed with some of the Protonmail limitations.
Here is an example from their Pro/Cons page:
[…] We know some email providers automatically encrypt messages as they arrive using users’ public keys. That sounds exciting but in practice it does not really prevent the provider from accessing the mails. It only makes email less usable, less standard and more tied to that provider. What you gain in security you lose in portability and usability, and what we do not want for ourselves, we won’t be offering others either.
Although I’m not going to contest Proton’s claims that they cannot access my email once stored, it is true that there is a trade off there in terms of portability and usability - and it turns out my apetite for compromise has lessened a bit.
I’ll add that their admin page is super functional. No fluff, just everything laid out and available. Creating aliases is a four clicks and two inputs followed by a form submit. Their support is also super responsive - a few hours at most in my experience. And the pricing is good as long as you are not looking into massive amounts of storage.
But most importantly, Migadu does not care how many domains you have, how many addresses you have or how many end users are accessing those email boxes. So I can easily manage my two private domains, my family’s domain and any other that may come up.
What now?
I’ve been with Migadu for about a month with my personal emails. I migrated away from Proton Mail, and I set up Thunderbird on my desktops and K-9 mail (which is going to become Thunderbird for Mobile at some point). There’s still a few things I need to figure out but so far so good.
I’m getting close to migrating my other users (we’re talking less than 5) over as well. I’m just researching a few self hosted web-based email clients before probably settling for the one offered by Migadu.
In conclusion this is a very clean migration. While my moving away from various Google services felt like a relationship turned bad over years, this feels more like just finding out we need different things and ending things amicably. I honestly wish Proton the best in their endevors and I’ll be keeping an eye out on their progress. Not least because I still have about a year of their services already paid for and I’ll get some use of their VPN during that time - and potentially renew it as well.
Feel free to contact me below if you have questions about this process.