My school has provided us some emails with a custom domain (not @gmail.com but @myschool.smth) and we as students are only able to login via gmail, however i obviously do not want that. What can i do to prevent that? I tried logging into the email via Thunderbird but i get blocked because my administrator doesn’t allow that.
Among other suggestions: consider using Thunderbird as your email client instead of the official Google-served website. This will prevent some Google tracking.
Tell them it is against you religion https://stallman.org/saint.html
The same can be said about work. I don’t use Microsoft products in my personal life, but work, work I have to use Microsoft products.
As others have said; compartmentalize it. Treat it as it’s own entity. So for me, what I don’t want Microsoft to know about I keep off work machines, and work emails, and work network.
We sadly don’t get choice when it comes to things like School, work, etc the same as we do for our personal.
Drop out
Stop being edgy and use Gmail if you want to fit in
Talk to admin about alternatives, if they don’t give you any suck it up and use gmail to access official school communication that goes to that email. It sucks, but you can’t always control these things yourself.
What’s your issue with using gmail exactly?
Presumably, privacy. Google is actively weaponizing and selling all data we give them.
But if it’s just for a school account then just use that account for school.
Sure. But don’t forget to take steps to prevent Google from harvesting your non-school data anyway. If using an official Gmail app, you’re probably screwed; they get your location, wifi, device info, why not?
If using a web browser, be sure it’s a privacy-focused one, don’t sign into anything but Gmail, and sign out and close the browser completely every time to clear cached data. And Google will still scan every email with automated scrapers, potentially training their AI on your carefully written essays, etc.
Change schools.
I wish lol
I mean… they control this, not you.
The only sane approach would’ve been to use an email client, but you already said they block Thunderbird, so… use gmail in a vm in a private browser tab i guess…
As much as I dislike Google, any self respecting workplace or especially a school is paying Google for enterprise/education accounts, for which Google does not collect data to sell or train their Ai, and further has specificalized written contracts clarifying SLAs of how the company/school info can be handled.
American data laws as a whole are not great, but this context is as good a scenario as you can get. It’s also not a battle you can win. You will use what you are provided in a work/school context.
For work and school you have to deal with the tech stack that is given. It is just life.
See if you can setup a rule to forward all email addresses out of that inbox, it’s likely this feature is disabled or blocked through a policy but it doesn’t hurt to try.
As others said, get a separate device for work/school tasks, don’t intertwine it with your personal life.
I would recommend in this situation:
Use Firefox or similar browser that has the ability to create container tabs
And open your school email in a dedicated school gmail container tab.
Then limit the container to just the dedicated sites. At least you won’t leak your browsing to google any more than you have to.
This add-on is needed to do some extra features with containers on firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/
You can set up auto forwarding of emails, to add last receive mails on another client using another inbox.
If their admin is blocking the use of external email clients I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re blocking forwarding to external email addresses to as that’s a very common action taken by attackers on compromised accounts.
I think this is typical. Microsoft/Outlook is popular too.
You could open gmail inside a separate firefox container. As long as you don’t use the email beyond school purposes it would be fine.
