Migrating your email

Background

Back when dial-up was 33.6k and HTML email was frowned upon, I ran my own mail server. This was a luxury that not many people had, but it gave me huge amounts of experience running a live service on the Internet.

There are several problems to hosting your own email. The most significant is that you’re responsible for everything. Whilst that means you have ultimate control, there are more exciting things to do in life than continually review DNS blocklists and anti-malware technology.

Around 2013, I decided that it was time to migrate to GMail, and let Google handle my e-mail. Google are huge, and huge is frequently (but not always) a good choice when it comes to service providers.

In 2021, I decided to split my company email away from my personal email, so set up a Microsoft 365 tenant and got used to the fact that I’d have two mail clients. That fact alone makes it so much easier to think of the bigger picture, what you’ll do in five years time when your business grows and you have more employees.

Keeping decisions under periodic review is good, as something that was right for you a decade ago may not be right for you any more – and that’s fine.

Given the direction the world could be going in, I decided it was right to migrate my personal email away from Google and on to Proton, an organisation with a different, more positive and more private outlook.

The process was entirely seamless, and I am happy with the Proton Mail client, the free VPN software (even though I use my existing VPN) and the cloud storage feature with Proton Drive.

Advice

For those of you who’ve never migrated email between providers, it can be a scary experience. Here’s my list of things to think about when you’re migrating:

1. Do you have control of DNS records for your domain? You need to be able to change these by yourself, commonly achieved by logging in to a provider’s web interface and submitting changes there.
2. Have you reduced the TTL (time-to-live) on the MX records in your domain to a much smaller value, e.g. 15 minutes? Doing this means that if you mess up some of your changes, you can roll back without the Internet caching invalid records for a long time.
3. Have you verified that your new provider can receive email for your domain name? It’s difficult to do without changing your MX records, but possible if you get friendly with telnet and submit a test email by hand.
4. Will your new provider deliver all email to one mailbox, or do you need to set up aliases? For example, you might have everything to @example.com sent to your mailbox, or you might have separate mailboxes for postmaster@ and hostmaster@.
5. Do you need to migrate your previous email to your new provider, or are you going to start from scratch? It might be that you just back up or download your mailbox and keep it locally if you don’t often refer back to old email. Or, you might want to migrate your sent and personal items, but ignore other folders such as bulk emails.

I can’t emphasise enough that lowering the TTL on your MX records is really important. Having caused a day-long outage years ago with a typo in an MX record, the simple act of saying “Don’t cache this for more than 15 minutes” can be an absolute lifesaver.

Appraising Proton

A month or so in, I’m very happy with Proton. The migration was seamless, and the tools very good. I can’t vouch for the level of support, nor for any outages, but those vary wildly between providers.

One weak point is that it wasn’t simple to migrate certain folders from Google to Proton. There’s Proton Bridge which you can run locally and use to copy over the email you want, but it seems very, very slow. That could be Thunderbird’s fault, or it could be the transactional nature of “download an email”, “upload an email”. Copying email overnight was the easiest workaround.

Another point is that I’ve not found out how to share my calendar with the Apple Calendar app on either my laptop or iPhone. Whether you consider this a negative or not will depend on your personal comfort levels, but it isn’t too much of a hassle here.

Proton VPN, which isn’t something I think I’ll use very often, is ridiculously straightforward and is a Wireguard configuration that takes seconds to configure. I’ve tried it out and it might prove useful when I’m on an insecure, untrusted WiFi network and want another layer of security. However, I have an existing VPN to my own equipment which will probably get used more often.

Conclusions

I’m happy with my decision. It was in no way as painful as migrations have been in the past, which I put down to the fact that this isn’t my first rodeo. If Proton doesn’t live up to my expectations, it’s my domain name so I can move it elsewhere.