Originally I wanted to start this series talking about email providers, as it felt like a great place to start as a lot of our online identity is tied to our email addresss and the trackers embedded in our emails. However, when I started my own journey with this as a first step, I quickly realised changing your email address does require a more significant amount of effort than some of the other steps in this guide, for that reason.

Reasons to make a change

It might be simple, maybe you created your email address (or someone else did for you) when you were much younger or during a certain period in your life and it just doesn’t fit you anymore.

Maybe you want to split out your email accounts to have one for personal communications and one for shopping/marketing emails/spam.

Another good reason is for privacy purposes. It’s also worth considering what your email service does with the content of your emails. Some services, may use the content of your emails for personalisation, generative AI development and services, and product improvement purposes by opting you (and your personal data) in automatically. There are ways to turn off many these features, but why are they turned on and opted-in by default? Plus, any marketing or newsletters you are subscribed to normally contain trackers which also follow you around the web, and track your activity in relation to their content and the websites you visit.

Changing email providers

As this is a process, I recommend creating your new email address and maintaining at least your old primary email address until you’re comfortable everything you need is moved over to the new email address.

Before I even got started, I created a list of all the websites and services I knew I’d need to update my email address for, starting with those that I use often and then as I utilise a password manager I started to have a look at what other services I may need to update that I don’t use as often! I turned the list into a checklist and would check off each item as I updated it. If you also follow this step, you’ll likely find you’re signed up to a lot more than you think in this process, which leads me to my next point.

As with many of the steps in this overall process it gave me the opportunity to reflect on what services, newsletters, and marketing I am signed up to and whether I find them genuinely useful and rewarding.

• For email newsletters or marketing, you can choose whether to sign up with your new email address, or just let them stop when you stop using your previous address. If you want to take it a step further, you can always unsubscribe depending on how many you are signed up to.
• For those apps or services which I decided were not important enough to update, I did go through and close the accounts, again to minimise the amount of my data out there in services that I may forget about and could potentially be a part of a data breach later. Yes it did take some time, yes I did realise how many services make it difficult to close your account, and I would say this is one of the more painful steps of the process. So I listed these out as well, and slowly tackled them over time.

Privacy-preserving email providers

If you’re not happy with the amount of personal data your email services are slurping up, here are a couple of well-known options to consider:

• Tuta, an encrypted email provider who believes in fighting surveillance capitalism, has a number of email plans starting from free. They do not have plans to embed AI into their produccts, and have a focus on both privacy and security.

• Proton Mail, is another encrypted email provider with a focus on user privacy. Similar to Tuta, they also have various plan tiers starting with free. However, if you are staunchly anti-AI, Proton has built their own AI chatbot, Lumo. The chatbot is said to be private and encrypted, so likely better when it comes to privacy than other AI bots, but the point still stands re: it’s still utilising AI. However, I don’t see anything about it having access to your actual email content, unless you consent for Lumo to have access, unlike some other more mainstream email providers.

Wrapping up

For now I have still kept my old primary email account open, just in case there’s something I’ve forgotten to transfer, but for everything new I am utilising the new, privacy-focused email account. Once I am more confident that I’ve captured all of the critical bits, then I’ll likely close that account for good and may shed one small tear while deleting the account (or may feel like Beavis does below.)

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