When I graduated university, they gave me, and others, graduate email addresses with the domain @institution.edu. The catch is, it’s entirely based within Gmail, despite having a unique domain. I want to keep using this address, as it’s tied heavily to my professional career, but I’m not sure how to decouple it from gmail ecosystem. Would using a client such as emClient be sufficient in breaking Google’s monopoly?
It’ll be painful, but I recommend moving away from that .edu address. Universities are notorious for causing headaches for grads trying to access their .edu addresses in the long run. Register your own domain, create an email under that domain, then use whatever email client you choose.
Worked in UK universities as an Enterprise Architect. Can confirm you can’t rely on those email addresses. It is a gift most Unis provide to graduates, but they’re not obligated to maintain it, or fix it when it goes wrong.
As per above, register your own domain name (I use my own full name .co.uk). This allows me to have lots of email addresses for (shopping@ work@ games@ amazon@ etc etc). Also, if the email host gets too expensive, does something you don’t like, or just cuts you off, you can point your domain name to another host and pick up from there. Obviously it is a good idea to keep a local backup of your emails (thunderbird or outlook) just in case.
The difference would be trivial since the mail would still be going through and sitting on Google’s servers. Client has to fetch it from some server and your university using Gmail means they’ve already outsourced the whole email system to Google.
I’d take u/anticonnor’s advice and gradually move services and correspondence to your new mail provider. Several years back, Google flooded the education market with cheap cloud services and “unlimited” storage. Then a couple years ago, they started charging huge premiums on storage use above a certain limit, leading to mass data deletions and the discontinuation of alumni email among many universities. Who knows when they’ll pull the rug again.
