This weekend the grassroots FabLab conference ‘Koppelting‘ is taking place in Amersfoort, Netherlands. Together with Dirk van Vreeswijk I’ll be doing a session this morning on how to leave Gmail and other walled gardens.

In this session I try to summarize the way I constructed my path out of Gmail in such a manner that it becomes a guide that may enable others to act for themselves. The talk explains why I wanted to leave Gmail, how I finally found a way, and what the replacement solution(s) are I now use. It ends with a ‘recipe’, based on how I found a way out of Gmail, to help you think about what keeps you in your own walled gardens, so it becomes easier to explore alternatives.

Outline and slides
Setting the scene:

• Using gmail since July 2004
• 250.000 conversations, across 770.000 messages. 21GB total.
• 12 years the central hub for all my personal and work e-mail

Why I wanted to leave

• In part: everything was on US servers
• In part: because Google with my Gmail and all other data has a very extensive profile of me
• But most of all: Gmail was a single point of failure. Losing access would mean losing everything concerning mail communications

How I left Gmail

• From early 2014 started seriously considering it
• Getting to action was hard as it is extremely easy to use what you have, to stick in your routine. Ease of use keeps you locked in
• Finding “The Alternative” seemed impossible. Until I thought about the specific aspects that made Gmail so easy for me
  • Multiple addresses into 1 inbox
  • Cross device availability
  • Great filtering and tagging
  • A generic mail address as throw away mail
  • Spam filtering
  • Large free storage space
  • Great search
• Two core things stood out after making the list
  1. GMail makes it easy to be lazy (piling not filing). I needed to treat myself to a better process: spend a few seconds now (delete, file, delegate), to save more time on search later
  2. What made Gmail great to me in 2004, is now widely available functionality and technology

What I have now
This is described in more detail in my earlier posting that triggered this session. For each item that made Gmail attractive to me I searched for an alternative. Recombining them into a new workflow is a viable alternative for my Gmail usage as a whole. Apart from the technology replacements, key part is up front contemplation and more continuous reflection on my working process. I’m a piler, not a filer, but adding a few seconds during e-mail triage to at least decide putting it in a pile that is not my Inbox, makes all the difference.

The slides are available in PDF on this site, and will be embedded below (currently upload is failing).

Leaving a walled garden planning aid
Although the path for me leaving Gmail took quite a bit of time, I think the journey can be abstracted into a recipe to make it easier to spot your own path out of a walled garden (Gmail, Dropbox, etc.)
The basic steps are:

1. Pick the walled garden you want to leave
2. List all the things that make it so convenient for you
3. Reflect on what that list tells you, about your process and your tools
4. Find replacements for each element, then recombine them into your new workflow
5. Share what you found and did, so it is easier for others to follow in your footsteps

The outline and collaborative notes from the session are online on one of the etherpads of the Koppelting conference.

About Koppelting
Koppel is an old Dutch word for communal fields, Ting a Germanic word for a meeting of the free. Organized by the Amersfoort FabLab, a fully opensourced bootstrapped FabLab, Koppelting is the annual grassroots festival about peer production and free/libre alternatives for society.

Germanic Ting, after the Marcus Aurelius column in Rome, public domain