Move your mail to a server you own — with your archive intact, your own domain on the front, and nobody above you who can decide you are done.
Privacy in the abstract is not usually what tips it. These are.
An automated system flags something. The account closes. Fifteen years of correspondence goes with it — and so does every service that used that address to sign in, because the reset email now has nowhere to land.
There is no phone number to call. The appeal is a form, and the reply is a form letter. People this has happened to describe it as being erased.
On your own server there is no flag to trip, because there is nobody above you.
Not a person — a model. The setting appeared already switched on, described in an update to terms you did not read, and it will be more useful next year than it was last year.
You can turn it off, this time, until the next reorganisation of the settings page.
Joinery ships an AI assistant too — running on your hardware, only if you install it, and structurally unable to send encrypted content off your server.
The thing that keeps most people on Gmail is not Gmail. It is the address — and the hundreds of accounts, contacts and forms attached to it.
So do the painful bit exactly once, and do it in the direction that ends the problem: move to a domain you own. Once your address is at your own domain, it stops belonging to whoever runs your mail. Change providers, change servers, change countries — the address comes with you, and you never do this again.
A domain costs about a tenth of what you would pay a hosted privacy provider each month, and it is the single highest-leverage thing you can do about email.
Switching is real work. Here is the checklist, honestly, rather than a promise that it is effortless.
Register the domain you want to be reachable at, before anything else. Everything downstream depends on it, and it is the step people regret rushing.
Self-install, deploy on Linode, or pay $39.99 to have it done. Setup walks you through the mail provider and prints the exact DNS records to add.
Ask Google for a Takeout export. Import the mbox for mail, the vCards for contacts, the .ics files for calendars. Nothing is left behind and nothing needs retyping.
Do not close it. Set it to forward to your new address and leave it running for six months or a year. This removes every deadline from the rest of the process.
Do not try to change hundreds of accounts in one weekend. Change each one the next time you happen to log in. Start with the handful that matter: bank, phone, domain registrar, password manager.
When months pass without anything important arriving there, you are done — and you never repeat this, because the address is yours now.
You have read the post. Somebody ran their own mail server, fought spam filters for two years, and threw in the towel. They were right, and it is the correct objection to raise.
Here is why it does not apply. Joinery does not send from your server’s IP address. Outbound mail goes through an established provider — Mailgun, Amazon SES, or any SMTP smarthost you already trust — with SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured for you during setup.
Your mail lives on your server. Your archive is yours. Only the last hop is borrowed, and it is borrowed from someone whose entire business is getting mail delivered. This is precisely the arrangement experienced self-hosters recommend to each other: your MX, their SMTP.
The part you own is the part worth owning. The part that is a reputation grind, you skip.
Not yet. Joinery does not serve IMAP, so third-party mail clients cannot connect. You read your mail in the webmail client or the Joinery apps for phone and desktop. If your working life runs through a specific desktop client, this is a genuine blocker and you should wait.
Also not yet. You import your Google calendar as .ics, use the web calendar and the Joinery apps, and publish feeds outward for anything that reads a calendar URL. Pointing your phone’s built-in calendar app at your own server is not something Joinery does today.
No. Gmail’s filtering is trained on a corpus nobody else has. Joinery’s filtering is decent and getting better, and if flawless spam handling matters to you more than ownership does, that is a legitimate reason to stay.
Export everything and go. Your mail exports as standard mail files, contacts as vCards, calendars as .ics. You kept Gmail running during the transition, so there is nothing to undo — and if you self-hosted, you have not paid us anything to get back.
A small VPS and a domain. The software is free for personal use, the optional install service is $39.99 once, and there is no subscription to us at any point. If you deploy on Linode from a link on this site, Linode pays us a referral fee — that is one of the ways Joinery is funded, and it costs you nothing extra.
Free to self-host. $39.99 if you would rather we did the setup.