Switching away from Gmail is the hardest part of leaving Google's consumer apps. Documents and photos are annoying to move, but your email address is attached to everything: bank accounts, online logins, newsletters, and every person who has your address saved. Change it carelessly and you lose access to services you forgot about, plus mail from people who keep writing to the old account.
This post is part of a series on moving off American software.
The good news is that Europe has several established email providers, some focused on encryption, some on plain dependable mailboxes. The realistic caveat is that migration takes an afternoon of fiddling, and the provider you choose changes how easy the exit door is later. Here are six worth knowing, and what the move actually involves.
Encrypted-first: Proton Mail and Tuta Mail
Proton Mail is a Swiss service with end-to-end encryption, protected by strong Swiss privacy laws. It was founded by scientists at CERN with the goal of protecting user privacy, and its servers are located in Switzerland. Because the data is end-to-end encrypted, Proton itself has no way of reading your mail. It is free to start, ad-free, and designed to work without surveillance, ads or tracking.
Tuta Mail is a German provider focused on security and privacy. Emails, calendar entries and contacts are all end-to-end encrypted, which means not even Tuta can read them — data is decrypted only on your device. The trade-off is deliberate: only Tuta's own clients can retrieve your mail or edit your calendar. Apps exist for the browser, iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and Linux, so you are covered on every platform, but you are inside Tuta's world.
Traditional mailboxes: Posteo, Runbox, Mailfence, Mailo
Posteo is a German service without advertising, focused on sustainability and security. It offers webmail, calendar with CalDAV and contacts with CardDAV. It does not support custom domains, which makes it better suited to private users than to businesses.
Runbox is a Norwegian provider focused on privacy and sustainability. The company behind it is majority owned by employees and board members, so there is no outside shareholder pulling the direction.
Mailfence is a Belgian provider headquartered in Brussels, with a strong focus on privacy and full GDPR compliance. Beyond email it bundles an integrated suite: calendars over CalDAV, contacts over CardDAV, encrypted document storage over WebDAV, and group collaboration tools.
Mailo is a French provider offering webmail, calendar with CalDAV and contacts with CardDAV.
Your address is your identity
The biggest migration risk is not the data — it is the address. Old correspondents keep writing to Gmail, and services you forgot about keep sending password resets there. Two things soften this:
- Choose a provider that supports a custom domain. With your own domain, the provider becomes swappable and the address stays yours no matter where you host it. Mailbox allows custom domains on its bigger plans, and the Dutch provider Soverin only offers mail with your own domain precisely so you stay in control of your identity and reduce vendor lock-in.
- Keep the old Gmail account alive for a while as a forwarding and safety-net mailbox, and check it occasionally before you close it.
If you are starting from scratch, buying the domain at the same time as the mailbox simplifies things — the Swiss provider Infomaniak, for example, is both an email host (kMail) and a domain registrar on the same platform.
Import and export
Moving mail is a two-way problem: you want to bring years of history with you, and you want the option to leave again. Check both directions before committing. Can the provider import your existing mail? Can you export everything later in a standard format? Providers built on open standards — IMAP for mail, CalDAV and CardDAV for calendar and contacts — keep the exit door wide. That is also the honest way to read Tuta's encryption: it is a genuine privacy gain, but it binds you to Tuta's clients. Some people will accept that trade for the security; others will prefer Posteo or Mailo, where any standards-compliant app works.
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