Nextcloud for contacts and Gmail

I’m looking if I can move my contacts out of gmail. Mostly for privacy. Moving out of email might be too hard for what it gives me (G Workspace domain with 50 accounts, plenty of storage, always up and catchall addresses)

I’m IOS based and so can set up the iPhone to use my nextcloud instance for contacts. So if I load my nextcoud contacts in IOS then the native IOS mail app will use them.

But I also use the Gmail interface and would prefer to exit my contacts from google.

If I delete all my gmail contacts there’s no real way of referencing my nextcloud contacts from gmail is there on a browser?

Hi @psyciknz

In the end, you need to consider how serious you are about the privacy thing and how much effort you are willing to put into it. For example, if you continue to use Gmail, Google still has access to most of your contact data and all the communication with them.

If you are serious about switching or at least partially switching from Google Workspaces to Nexetcloud, it also means that you may not be able to do certain things exactly the same as before. At the end there will be no way around setting up a test instance and testing the whole thing extensively. Nextcloud can theoretically replace Google Workspaces to a very large extent, except for the mail server part. But in the end, only you can decide whether it is sufficient for you.

To answer your specific question: The best working compromise if you want to continue using Gmail would be using the Nextcloud web mail client and access the Gmail accounts via IMAP. You will of course lose certain features of Gmail, such as taging etc, but on the plus side, Nextcloud Mail can interact with the files and contacts on your Nextcloud.

Thanks.

At the moment my compromise seems to be Nextcloud for contacts.

Return to the iOS mail client (from gmail or outlooks for iOS) and use that for the physics sending and receiving of emails with carddav connection to my Nextcloud contacts.

I’m also looking at moving away from gmail on the browser in favour of thunderbird or windows 10 mail client. Both of these can talk to gmail and use my Nextcloud contacts.

1 Like

Thats certainly better than host everything on the Google platform. If you are looking for selfhosted webmail client alternatives that are imho better then the Nextcloud Mail client, although not so well integrated into Nextcloud, you could have a look at Roundcube or Rainloop. Both can use the contacts on your Nextcloud via cardDAV. From there, the way is then perhaps a little less far to also say good-bye to Gmail for good… :wink:

I’ve currently got a mailcow instance running at home. I used to expose it for a domain, but it ended up being a little hard for dkim etc. it’s still there, but I’m not sure I want to move 24/7 to a self hosted email.

Because of privacy you can move from gmail e.g. to your home.
But what about support, availability, security, backup, restore, error … for your 50 accounts and 24/7. Are you a good admin?

Perhaps you use a good provider in your country.

1 Like

Yup. Running your own mail server is another story of its own. It’s definitley doable but you should have a good understanding about how it all works, even if you are using appliances like Mailcow. The whole thing has to be secure, the mails you send should arrive reliably and you don’t want to be burried in spam or worse that your server is used to send spam by a malicious actor. All this is not quite trivial nowadays. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be Google either. There are definitely other more privacy focused providers out there :slight_smile:

1 Like