Edit: if this post does not meet the general quality standards of Tildes, I absolutely understand and apologize. Likewise if I should have posted this in a different subsection - ~misc or ~talk maybe?

So, recently I've been annoyed by this new thing in Gmail (and yes, I should be transitioning away from Google services) where this field pops up at the top of my email list called 'Happening Soon'. It mostly has shipping / tracking notifications saying 'hey, this thing with a tracking number is arriving tomorrow'.

I've been annoyed by it because there wasn't an easy way to disable this 'feature' and that perceived loss of agency (and reminding me that my Gmail account isn't really 'mine') was frustration inducing.

So I googled it (I recognize the irony here) - "disable "happening soon" gmail" - and found a Gmail help / community post with a bunch of people expressing the same desire to not have this forced upon them: https://support.google.com/mail/thread/346511942/how-to-disable-happening-soon-for-those-who-see-it-on-gmail-inbox-which-is-related-to-an-amazon-pu?hl=en but while plenty of people shared my frustration, I wasn't finding definitive answers on how to properly disable it.

So I decided to poke around inside of settings. There actually was a section for smart tracking reminders but that was not enabled. Then I saw a rather vague 'Smart Features' that was enabled that I didn't remember seeing before. I disabled that, Gmail had to restart, and then those notifications were gone.

I wanted to share this how-to with all the other people who posted to that Gmail support thread. I simply replied with "To disable this on desktop, go into settings and disable 'Smart Features'. That seems to fix it."

Suddenly I understood why no one else had posted the fix. My post was flagged instantly for 'content policy violations'. Specifically it said "Failed to post. Content violates Community Policy."

Yes, helping other Gmail users figure out how to turn off experimental 'features' we never asked for violates their policy of, I presume, being able to experiment on their userbase. Arg. That ticked me off.

Hey there Tildes, hopefully someone could help me with this. I'm having problems importing all my emails I exported from ProtonMail into macOS Mail app/iCloud.

Recently decided to move my custom domain email addresses to iCloud so I could just use the built-in Mail app on my Mac and iPhone. I backed up all of my emails with ProtonMail's own export tool. It exported every email (or maybe email thread?) as a .eml file and .json file (metadata I believe). After exporting, I switch the domain names over to iCloud. It was pretty easy. I guess I assumed all of my emails would somehow come with me? Seems silly thinking about it now. But I have a backup of all my emails!

All seemed fine until I tried to import them into macOS Mail. Mail wants a mailbox format (.mbox I believe), but I only have .eml files. It let me select all of the .eml files and import them anyway but it's taking about 10 seconds or more per email and I have like ~17,000 emails. ChatGPT says thats 47 hours 13 minutes 20 seconds. It's also freezing the mail app during this insane import process. It would be great if I didn't have to wait that long and that's assuming something doesn't go wrong/the app crashes.

No, I don't need all of those emails (I actually deleted about 10,000 over the past month) but now I'm kind of screwed. I guess for security reasons, when you delete the domain from ProtonMail, it deletes all the emails (as far as I can tell, at least). I'm mentioning this because I was thinking I could have tried to find a way to export it in .mbox format or even delete more emails but it's too late for that.

The way the emails were exported, the filenames are jumbles of letters and numbers so I cant even use Finder to search for specific emails when I need them. I can open each individual email in Mail, so it's not like the files are encrypted, I don't think.

One thing I thought of -- I once used Mail with ProtonBridge that would allow you to use ProtonMail with the Mail app, but still use Proton servers and it synced all my emails with my computer. I disabled that account some time ago (didn't delete it or remove it completely from the list of accounts, just unchecked it). Do you think that directory of emails is still on my computer somewhere? And would it be useable in my situation?

I do realize this is completely of my own doing and should have been more thoughtful but I'm here now and would love any help y'all could give. Thanks everyone!

Edit_1: Oh no... I found the directory for Mail in Application Support and it looks like the Mail importer is making a mailbox for every single email. I tried importing these emails earlier today and it looks like it might have imported everything? Here's a screenshot. 🪦

I wonder if I could try and import them into another app and then export in a better format? Thunderbird? Ugh, I really do need a lot of these emails…

Edit_2: So the export tool mentioned above has a restore feature so currently trying that. It will just import these emails back into ProtonMail and I’ll have to figure out the export part again. Hopefully this works!

Ok so I have a Google account for an organization. But when I have that account logged in on my phone some of the security restrictions impact all accounts on my phone. I have a pixel 7a with Android 16 if it matters.

I would love to have access to this gmail account, with notifications, on my phone without forwarding the emails to one of my personal accounts. Any way to do that within the Gmail app itself, or if I need a different app, any recommendations?

In my perfect world I'd have OneDrive access too, but I can use a browser window there if needed.

I have changed my email more than once, just as part of customizing my online identity and all that.

and that obviously required me to login into any accounts I had and updating the email associated with them.

the most common workflow I have found is
login -> navigate to settings page -> edit the email field to the new email -> go to the inbox for the new email -> click confirm on confirmation email

then you can go to that website and do the forgot password, provide your email and change the password and get complete control.

I have always found that workflow weird cause it's the most prevalent one I have come across and seems so susceptible to tampering.

if someone leaves their laptop unattended for 3-4 minutes in public while visiting a bathroom (which happened often in the library of my university), there was nothing preventing me from going to their Facebook or whatever account they had open on their computer, changing the email to my own email and then clicking confirm on my inbox once I am back at my desk.

and most people don't have 2FA so that would effectively give me control of their account.
Hell, my university once had a potential data breach and they were 99.999% sure the data was not actually accessed by a malicious actor but still sent a mass email saying that they were advising everyone to change their passwords. a classmate of mine in the software systems program's attitude was basically "oh well, who cares?" and I just facepalmed internally.

there are maybe 3 websites I have come across that instead first send a confirmation email to your current inbox and after you confirm on that, then you get a confirmation email on the new email inbox. which isn't perfect but I feel like it's a bit more sensical and the best you can do without involving 2FA.

even then, that's also susceptible to the situation I described above if the user is always logged into their email.

I find it odd that websites don't prompt for a password as part of the email update process (or better yet 2FA with an app as even prompting for a password isn't a guarantee if the user has the password manager as an extension in their browser and they recently unlocked it before leaving their session unattended) to ensure that email changes are always done by the account owner.

Hello everyone! I have been currently debating switching email providers. I have been with Proton for a few years now (free user), but I have become increasingly disappointed. Firstly, I am not exactly a fan of the “we have apps for everything” model, particularly the integration of a password manager is just strange and the crypto wallet feels a bit nauseating, as I have my reservations about cryptocurrency. Consolidating all of my services in a company such as Proton feels misguided if the goal is to avoid walled gardens from the tech giants. There are also some other more recent things that have come up in relation to Proton that just make me question the legitimacy of Proton's “guiding moral imperative” as a privacy focussed company.

Moving on from that, I have mostly settled on two options due to their

• low cost
• generally adequate security (I understand email's limitations on this front, I just want something to be secure enough)
• transparency reports
• location of operation

The main thing I am struggling with here are the pros and cons between the two platforms.

Posteo seems to be less ideal of an email provider because they do not support ARC and lack a good DMARC policy. BUT they claim to support encryption with their calendars, but does this even matter if you are accessing the calendars with CalDAV (which I do not beliece is an E2EE connection)?

I think I trust Mailbox.org more when it comes to security, but I think their contacts / calendar situation is somewhat worse, and their French translation seems … lacking in spots (not that it matters to me much, but still is somewhat jarring for me).

I could just ignore the contacts/calendar problem, and use something like EteSync, but that would become just another thing to pay for, and another app to operate (if I need to use the WebDav bridge).

Any feedback on this would be greatly appreciated, I am really hoping this inspires some interesting conversations! And of course, feel free to tell me about better options if I have overlooked something. Have a lovely day :)

Alright, time to ask for help. I designed a website for my cousin using Wordpress, hosted via BlueHost. It's 99% done.

The problem: she'd originally registered her domain through wordpress.com. She also has an email through that, which she accesses via Google Workplace. We've transferred the domain, but the nameservers are still registered to wordpress.com. I've found the guides for transferring nameservers on BlueHost and wordpress.com, but this is a step above what I've dealt with in the past.

My main concern and frustration are the email. She's already using it for work, and I want to make sure there's no downtime, but I... honestly have no idea how it's even set up, right now. Or how this would work when transferring hosts entirely. Attempts to search it haven't been too helpful for me.

So my questions: How will changing nameservers impact the email? Would updating them potentially just... break her email entirely? Need her to set up the email separately? And if she does, can it be kept through Google Workplace/Gmail since that's what she's already using? Is it fine to leave it as-is? I assume not but her wordpress.com account shows that it expires in 2027, so...?

Just, please help.

Unless I'm missing something in my search queries, Google ain't coming up with anything. I'm trying to look for samples of printouts from emails (hosts are irrelevant) made in the early 2000's. It's for a novel project. While I have a vague idea of what kind of layout is needed, it's one thing to guess, and another to actually see it. Any leads?

Today is my last day at work and my boss wants me to BCC anyone I have ever sent an email to announce my departure.

I have tried exporting all my sent messages and trimming the list by advanced sorting out the duplicate email addresses in excel, but messages with multiple recipients are plentiful and need to have the emails separated into individual cells at the very least.

I also tried the .NK2 file route. I downloaded the MFCMAPI program to find my hidden autofill contact file, but it can only be exported as an .xml or .msg file and I don't know how to handle those files properly to get the data I need.

Does anyone here have a solution to automatically add every autofill contact on Outlook as BCC recipients for a final email?

EDIT: I found a solution that worked for both of us. I emailed the clients I remember as the most important and set up an automated reply to handle those I forgot to message.

I'm not talking about the unsubscribe button that is at the bottom of an email that takes you to the sender's website to unsubscribe. I'm talking about the button that occasionally shows up in outlook or apple mail that is delivered by the application.

I have clicked unsubscribe using the built in unsubscribe button in outlook and apple mail, only to receive more junk mail from that origin later that day. These buttons don't seem to do anything. What are they doing behind the scenes that is supposed to be getting you off mailing lists?

I've seen a lot of posts about email providers, but what about email clients?

What email client have you been using? What makes it work better for you than the default client? Does it have any notable features that you didn't know you needed?

Hello, as the title says: someone registered their phone subscription using my email. It doesn't make sense as I (obviously) never permitted this stranger to use my email for their subscription.

I say stranger but I now know their first name, their last name, their billing address, and their phone number by now. It's crazy.

I would just like the emails to stop coming! I know I could just make a filter to forward everything from this domain to spam but is there a way to actually make the phone company to stop sending me things?

The emails are coming from a language that I don't know how to speak (so calling customer service is not an option here).

I tried using the "forget password" option but for some reason that's not arriving to me. Probably it's pinging their phone first to verify that it was them who initiated it.

The best customer service I can find is by WhatsApp but it's a robot that always asks the stranger to verify that it's them.

I have self-hosted my email for many years, but am finally encountering some straws that may be breaking the camel's back. A few email providers are now rejecting my server's mail, Microsoft in particular (@hotmail, @outlook). (In case you're wondering, I already set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc. and none of that is the issue.) Self-hosting was fine, and the technical admin work was never really an issue. I'm just tired of the external factors that are beyond my control, like belonging to an IP range that is scored badly by some random blocklist company.

So, I'm now shopping for a good email provider. Privacy and security are important to me, and I am more than willing to pay for email, so all the usual "free" email providers are out of the question. (Update) Also, client access (IMAP, SMTP) is a must.

For now, I am eyeing

• Fastmail Standard plan @ 5 USD / mo
• Proton Unlimited plan @ 10 USD / mo

Proton is looking to be my choice among those two, as I like the replyable email aliases feature. 16 times the storage doesn't hurt, either.

Any other recommendations in the same vein as these two, and in the same price range?

I run into this sometimes (but not often) in my professional life. Instead of signing off their email with their full name, or first name, they simply put the first letter of their name.

Example of ending of email :

Best Regards,
A

I'm trying to sense if I'm off base with this, but I find it pompous. To me, it suggests the sender believes they hold a position of importance. They claim a single letter as their own, ahead of everyone else. Or it suggests the sender believes they are so busy/productive, they choose to save time by not spelling out their full name. Pah.

Thoughts?

This is more focused towards those that use custom domains for their email. My current plan is up at Zoho for my team in a month, and even though I've used them for the past few years its been hit-or-miss (especially when using third-party apps or programs).

Who do you use? Who do you not trust? Who would you never go back to?

Sidenote: I hope this might eventually kick off a ~privacy group, one day.

I’m currently using ProtonMail, I’ve been with them since Indiegogo. I know calendar’s supposed to come out in beta this month, but I’m honestly fed up with the speed of their development and the quality of apps, and I think it’s too expensive.

I need custom domain support, and calendar. Nothing fancy.
Self-hosting email is out of the question in 2019.

What are you guys using for email these days?

I have followed numerous discussions on here lately regarding extracting oneself from being Google-reliant, and they've all deeply resonated with me. For years now I've been slowly migrating numerous Google-bound things over to my own self-hosted alternatives. I've moved my storage, contacts, documents, and some (but sadly not all) of my calendars to home solutions, fairly easily too.

But the biggest hurdle I've been facing this whole time, the one I've been putting off the longest, is the act of figuring out how to get almost twenty years of mail archive and history on my primary account away from Google and into a space where I can access it separately. I have been steadily changing the main email on my more active external accounts to a self-hosted one, and now only seeing a shrinking handful of lesser-used services still attached to the old gmail. But that history is too precious to me, and I still find multiple occasions where I need/want to reference some communications from long ago.

I've tried searching the web for options, but so far all combinations of my queries are either really elementary "here's how to set up a new email" crap, or else aimed at moving from one Gmail account to another Gmail account. I've been thinking that the simplest approach might be just to set it up as a POP3 account in my mail client (eM Client, for the record), download it all, and then when I finally pull the plug just drag it into the local client archive, and then remove the account from the app. But I figure there have to be others who have done this, right?

This morning I was asked to find an archived email with photos of some scientific equipment. I searched "Powerlab," the name of one of the instruments, in gmail, and the email came right up. Great! But then I noticed that the word "powerlab" never appeared in the text of the email. I tried searching "ML206", an arbitrary character string from one of the photos in the email, and again, the email appeared in the search, without the search phrase highlighted in the search result, as it normally would be. I tried different phrases from jpgs in emails; not all yielded search results but some did.

I'm not happy about this. I accept some compromises to privacy when using Gmail, but sending text as an image can be a way of specifically avoiding information being harvested. All I ask for is a way to turn it off.

Can anyone replicate this? Did anyone already know about this?

Back in the day I remember setting up squirrelmail + qmail to host my own email as well as for others. And then I got that coveted gmail invite and never really looked back.

I've started to get into the mindset of erasing my digital trail, at least for my personal activities, and email seems to be the main one that I need to figure out.

The idea of setting up my own email solution came up again because I wonder how transparent / private services like protonmail and mailbox.org really are.

Any suggestions or insight would be appreciated. Squirrelmail seems to be now defunct, and I am pretty sure the world has changed enough that residential ISPs don't allow running of servers at home anymore. I guess I could setup something on AWS if I had to.

Hi,

I saw that Proton now has a Family Plan that includes all of their services including mail, calendar, drive, etc.

I've been looking to detach my and my family's life a bit from the big corps like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Proton sounds interesting.

At the same time I am wondering if they're really to be trusted any more than any other company. I found some critique of the E2E encryption being basically snake oil and not properly implemented etc. I am of course aware that there're always tradeoffs and while privacy is definitely nice, I don't need to go to an extreme degree of "no logs whatsoever, never even turning anything over to the police", I think I am just mostly looking to make me and my family less of a product of advertising, possibly AI/ML and so on, so some compromise is definitely possible.

I am curious, does anyone here have any experience with or opinions on the company and their products?