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Why I moved away from Gmail

TL;DR

Storyline

My email lived on a Mikrus free add-on service — POP3 in, SMTP out, everything aggregated into Gmail. It worked. It had been working for a few years. Why change it?

Then Google announced it was dropping POP3 import support and killing Gmailify. At least they gave a few months’ notice.

I skimmed the announcement and thought: fine, forwarding (as a recommended workaround) still works, SMTP stays — I’ll just set up email forwarding and move on. Not even close.

Less than two weeks in, my mail started bouncing. Rejected for forwarding spam. My own inbox. I couldn’t even spam myself — great (funniest thing - those emails weren’t even a spam).

This was my main contact address, so I had to act fast. A quick search later and I found Purelymail: $10/year flat, or pay-as-you-go. My volume is tiny, so PAYG was an obvious choice. A few minutes of configuration and it just worked.

The only real adjustment was habit — I had to install Thunderbird everywhere. No regrets: it does what it’s supposed to, and it even auto-detected my Purelymail setup on the first try.

Why Not Self-Host?

I could have run email directly on my own server. I chose not to.

Maintaining a mail server means caring about IP reputation, spam filtering, security hardening, and the slow accumulation of script-kids attention. None of that is something I want to own for a service I use personally. The risk-to-value ratio is just bad.

Other options existed — Zoho, OVH, various shared mail providers — but most come with account limits. I needed flexibility: myself, a handful of clients, all with low volume. Transactional emails (campaigns, notifications) go through services like Mailjet or Brevo anyway — even free plans give you a few hundred sends a day.

Purelymail fits exactly what’s left: a few active mailboxes, low traffic, no nonsense.

Since I was already running the setup for myself, the next step was obvious — I could extend it to clients. Small businesses that want email on their own domain but can’t justify paying for a full mail hosting plan now get it included. The only rule: no bulk campaigns through it. For that, there’s Mailjet, Brevo, and others. That separation keeps the shared mailboxes clean and the IP reputation intact.

Lessons Learned

  1. Avoid vendor lock-in — always leave an escape hatch. If a platform kills a feature you depend on, you want options ready.1
  2. Match the solution to the actual need. Low volume, low cost — don’t over-architect it.
  3. For a few dollars a year you can have dozens of mailboxes that handle low-traffic use perfectly well.

AI Impact Disclaimer

  • DEVELOPMENT: N/A
  • WRITING: Translation, post structure and grammar

Footnotes

  1. RIP Tenor API — another Google acquisition, another slow fade. ↩