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.
Drop out
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.
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.
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.
Among other suggestions: consider using Thunderbird as your email client instead of the official Google-served website. This will prevent some Google tracking.
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/
Tell them it is against your religion https://stallman.org/saint.html
Tell them it is against you religion https://stallman.org/saint.html
As others have said, at this point you don’t have a whole lot of choice; you pretty much have to use what the school provides you.
BUT, what you can do is try to rally other students to your cause. You pay the university, which means that students in numbers have influence over how the the university operates. I think your best chance to enact change is to create a petition to get the university to change to a more privacy-friendly alternative, and put together a proposal on how google and microsoft are harmful, and why your proposed alternative is better.
Stop being edgy and use Gmail if you want to fit in
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…
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.
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.
