Harder Than Expected: Moving Away from Google

There was a time when everything just worked. My email was on Gmail, I searched with Google, and used Google Maps for navigation. It was fast, free and above all: easy. I did not have to think about it.

Until I suddenly did.

What started as a small, almost innocent choice, trying a different search engine, slowly grew into something bigger. I have been using DuckDuckGo as an alternative to Google for years now. At first it felt like a compromise, as if I was giving something up. But honestly, that turned out to be fine. It worked well. More than that, it felt calmer. Less noise, less of a sense that things were happening in the background.

The same was true for maps. Apple Maps and OpenStreetMap turned out to be more than sufficient for my needs. No overload of reviews, no endless layers of commercial features, just a map that does what it is supposed to do. It almost sounds trivial, but that was exactly the realization: many privacy-friendly alternatives to Google are simply good enough.

During that search I also came across collections of alternatives more often, such as opensourcealternative.to and european-alternatives.eu. These are the kinds of sites where you suddenly see how much exists outside the familiar tech giants. It feels a bit like discovering a parallel internet, one where open source and European software play a much bigger role.

A business model that starts to feel off

Still, something keeps nagging.

The more I switched, the stranger the existing model began to feel. Companies pay to be visible within a platform. Users sometimes pay to use that platform at all. And if you then do not want to see ads, you pay again. I understand that money needs to be made, I really do. But the logic feels off. As if you pay for a product, and then pay again to remove its side effects.

That feeling only grew stronger when I started looking more closely at the geopolitical side of things. Many of the services we use every day are controlled by a small number of companies, often outside Europe. That also means your data, however personal it is, can be subject to political decisions you have no influence over. The idea that your digital life depends so heavily on a handful of large players started to feel increasingly uncomfortable.

It is a feeling I recognized from earlier experiences, for example when I temporarily lost access to WhatsApp and realized how fragile our digital reachability actually is (Temporarily Without WhatsApp: How Fragile Our Digital Reachability Is).

My stack is changing, but email remains difficult

By now, my “stack”, essentially the collection of tools and services I use every day, has changed quite a bit. DuckDuckGo for search. Signal for messaging. And more and more open source software for everything else. Not because I have to, but because I can. And because it forces a different way of thinking: less dependent on Big Tech, more insight into what you use.

That dependency becomes especially visible when something breaks, as I described earlier in Digital dependency in emergency situations.

But there is one part I have not figured out yet.

Email.

My email has been running through Gmail for years, connected to my own domain names. It worked perfectly. Free, reliable and everything included: calendar, contacts, synchronization across devices. It is exactly that combination that makes switching so difficult. I am not looking for separate solutions, I am looking for a full alternative to Gmail that fits seamlessly into how I work.

There is also a technical challenge: the reputation of your mail server. When you host your own email, you often share an IP address or a range of addresses with other users. If one of those users misbehaves, for example by sending spam, the entire block can end up on a blacklist. The result is simple and frustrating: your emails do not get delivered. Not because you did something wrong, but because you are “in the wrong neighborhood”.

It is one of those problems you only think about once you are in the middle of it.

At the moment, I am experimenting with Stalwart, a relatively new open source mail server. The first impression is good. Security seems to be taken seriously and the basics work as expected. It feels like a solution built with modern standards in mind, rather than something that has been patched together over years.

But as is often the case with these kinds of projects, the documentation leaves something to be desired. Things are just slightly off, steps are unclear, and you quickly spend more time on it than you planned. That might also be the price you pay when you choose more control and less dependency.

Going back no longer feels like an option

And yet, I keep going.

Because this process, however cumbersome at times, gives me something I increasingly missed with standard solutions: control. Insight. The sense that I know where my data is and what happens to it. That does not mean everything is perfect, or that it always becomes easier. Quite the opposite.

But going back no longer feels like an option.

Maybe that is the real shift. Not that everything has to be better than what I had, but that I am more consciously choosing what I want to depend on. And what I do not.