State of play

Until recently, I was what you might call a pure Google product… visiting websites with Google Chrome, having several personal Gmail accounts and a GSuite for my pro mail. I also had synchronized drives… and an Android mobile! Anyway… he knew everything and I didn’t care… you know “I have nothing to hide…”

This has got to stop!

The summer of 2019 marked the beginning of a change of ideas! It’s only the fools… all this you see…

  1. I started boycotting Amazon… in favor of European or French e-commerce sites… when the American giant decided to defer the tax on French merchants using the platform…
  2. I wanted to decrease the use of Google products, starting with my personal and professional emails, in order to replace @gmail.com by personalized domains…

Let’s trust French products and startups!

Yeah! France has a startup that makes degoogling its hobbyhorse, I named mailo.com.

On Twitter, @hellomailo is very active on the evil that Google represents … I gave in to the sirens … especially since they have a family offer rather nice (on paper anyway).

What does the mail family offer consist of?

Basically, they offer to secure your children’s email accounts by filtering the correspondents through an approval of the address by the parent(s)…

Concretely, if a correspondent is not in your child’s address book, the email is directed to your Spams (already it’s starting to suck) for validation… if you validate… your child receives the email… ( but the address is not added to the address book => not very logical in my opinion )

If your child adds a contact in his address book, he will only be able to send him an email when you have validated the contact (that’s good… you should say that too!).

In short, not everything is ready but the offer is young and will be (I hope) improved.

So? What’s wrong with you?

Well, what doesn’t suit me is that the offer is young but a correct customer support (because I paid a subscription) should follow… and it doesn’t.

My kids sync their mail on Thunderbird. As the contacts have to be validated by myself, that they are then added to the online address book… they should be synchronizable via Carddav as my adult account… which is not the case… or I didn’t understand…

If you don’t understand… it’s not Mailo’s fault!

That’s true… but if I, a web professional, didn’t understand… what about Mrs. Michu?

And even so… I send emails to several addresses found on their site… no answers. I don’t miss an opportunity to challenge them on Twitter where they are active… and I don’t get any feedback…

How’s your professional e-mail coming?

To manage the @thivinfo.com emails, I was at G Suite (did you notice the time spent?) and I’m not at Mailo… seeing the little reaction on the private part, I thought it was not a good idea to entrust them with one of the most used means of communication in the professional world…

For my Pro mail, I trusted the Swiss host Infomaniak and its mail hosting offer for 1.5€/month. And I have to say that I am quite satisfied.

  • The service works well (Mail /contact / calendar synchronized on Thunderbird and Android smartphone).
  • support in case of questions is very responsive, reachable by mail, phone and instant chat depending on the time and day …

Courage… let’s run away

You’ll understand, I’m not going to make old bones at Mailo.com and certainly migrate everyone to Infomaniak.

Only downside, Infomaniak does not offer a filtering solution as Mailo offers for children …

2 comments on “Fighting GAFAM… it’s not easy.

  • Jean michel Silone

    Bonsoir Sébastien,
    Nous sommes dans une démarche similaire, pour ne pas dire identique. Ma compagne et moi avons également entrepris ce chantier de de-ga-fam-isation…
    Pour les mails pros, j’ai opté comme toi pour infomaniak, les perso, c’est encore en cours. Le sujet sensible des comptes mails pour les enfants me soucie également. Si tu as des pistes ou des conclusions, ce sera avec plaisir que je les recevrai.
    Bon courage et merci pour le partage.

    • Sebastien Serre

      Salut jean-Michel,
      Pour le perso, je suis aussi passé chez Infomaniak avec un domaine custom. Les enfants ont une adresse mail sur ce domaine mais, ils s’en servent pas des masses a vrai dire….

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