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Brief Review of Migrating from Gmail and Outlook.com to Proton

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I have been listening to Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, and Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine, so I’m extra paranoid these days.

I’m moving my work to Proton and Cryptpad.fr.

This document describes how well it’s going.

What’s migrating?

  • Email
  • Contacts
  • Files
  • Calendar

Email

Protonmail has built-in importers for Gmail and Outlook.com (the online email aka Hotmail, not the client for Exchange Server). Both worked perfectly and labeled each message so I could identify messages from each import.

You can then set up forwarding in each of the services, to send the message to your Proton account.

To use Thunderbird, I installed the Proton Mail Bridge, a Linux application that bridges between a Thunderbird and Protonmail, presenting an IMAP and SMTP server to Thunderbird.

I installed the Protonmail mobile app, and it works okay. The web app also works on mobile.

I don’t know how to migrate filters, but it’s not like I could move those around before, so it’s not a knock against Protonmaill.

Contacts

Protonmail also copies the contacts from Gmail and Outlook.com.

If you’re using the Proton Mail Bridge, it does not synchronize contacts. So saving any contacts via Thunderbird won’t work.

Contacts are part of the Proton Mail mobile app, and the Proton Mail web app, so you can save your contacts through that.

Files

The files are pretty rudimentary. It comes with support to back up photos from your phone, but I haven’t used that.

I tried to share some folders to the public, and it worked well. It seems a little simpler than Google Drive.

The Files web app will show previews or play media, but there’s some size limit that I hit a few times.

I downloaded old files from Google Drive, and deleted them. I found that many files were shared with me, and I started to download and delete these as well.

Calendar

Calendar importation was a little complicated and confusing. Basically, you need to find the shared ICS file, which is one of the many ways to publish your calendar on Google Calendar.

The sync interval seems long, making it hard to alter your calendar, and see it reflected in Proton Calendar.

The Proton Calendar mobile app is pretty good, but seems less featureful than Google Calendar.

I went and deleted much of the future events in Google.

Conclusion

Overall, the importation process was smooth.

The mobile and web apps work okay for me. I’m not a power user.