Email Organization#

Currently, I have my main GMail account and another one on FastMail, which I use for communicating with friends and family as well as storing my calendar and contacts. Since my current GMail account has become an unmanageable spam magnet, how to set things up such that I can keep better control of my email?

Requirements#

Here’s what I’d like to have:

  1. Personal account for friends and family
  2. Corporate/professional account for businesses and such
  3. An account specific for Google Services such as Photos, Drive, etc.,
  4. A forwarding account that also provides a masking service when I have to sign up for email lists and such. This will be directed to the corporate/ professional account.

What I’ve come up with#

For my friends-n-family as well as Calendar and Contacts, I will continue to use my FastMail accounts. The nice thing about FastMail is that they allow you to create email aliases and then you can use their Email Filters to deliver aliased email to a separate folder. No change there.

For the corporate/professional account, there is nothing wrong with continuing to use GMail for this purpose. It blocks most spam and integrates well with other services. But, how to protect the account such that it doesn’t become a Spam-dump again?

Duck Duck Go#

Enter DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection service. This allows you to create an account in the @duck.com domain and then forward email sent to that address to another email address of your choosing. Duck Duck Go will filter out trackers and such from the email before sending it on, giving you a measure of privacy.

They also offer users the ability to create one or more throwaway email addresses for organizations that like to sell your data to third-party brokers. I’ve found that political organizations like to do this aggressively. The organization sells your email address and you start getting all kinds of email you don’t want? Deactivate it! You will need to either use Duck Duck Go’s Browser or the Browser Extension to manage private email addresses.

Duck Duck Go also offers a subscription service that provides the following:

  • VPN
  • Duck.AI
  • Personal Information Removal
  • Identify Theft Protection

As of the time of this writing, I haven’t decided whether to sign up for this service yet.

Google Service Account#

Finally, I’d like a Google account that’s only used for Google-specific services, such as the Google Worksuite, Photos, Drive, Youtube, etc., This way, I keep my private life separate from my public life. As for transferring everything, Google offers a Takeout Service to facilitate this. As of this writing, I’ve selected a number of services to export and am waiting for Google to create an archive (this could take hours or days according to their website). Once this is done, I’ll be sure to write about the experience.