Moving from Google Workspace to Infomaniak kSuite

February 9th 2025

French version here

Tip: if you just want tips about moving your emails and calendars from Google to Infomaniak, you can directly move to Moving from Gmail to Infomaniak’s Mail or Moving from Google Calendar to Infomaniak’s Calendar.

Why I’m leaving Google

The GAFAM and I

I’ve never been a big user of GAFAM services or most of the big social networks. In particular, I’ve never used Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok. I had a Facebook account that I didn’t really use, and I stopped consulting it in 2012 to finally close it in 2017. I only use Youtube - indirectly - because most of the videos shared with me are hosted here, and I use alternative clients to view them.
I’ve also been a happy Linux user for 20 years (so no Microsoft or Apple on my machine), and I’ve used LineageOS on my phone when I could. Finally, I very rarely use Amazon for shopping.

I’ve only really used 2 big services: Twitter and Gmail (+ Calendar).

I left Twitter in early November 2022, 14 years after I created my account, following its acquisition by you-know-who. Like many, I moved to Mastodon and am very happy here. I permanently deleted my Twitter account shortly thereafter.

So all that was left was Google, that is - again - mainly Gmail.

Why not earlier?

Actually, I’ve been thinking about getting rid of it since ~2015, if I remember correctly, but I procrastinated.

I’ve never been blind to Google’s appetite for my data. I’ve disabled all related options I could, I don’t use Google search engine, I use Firefox with several anti-trackers and Google Container. So in theory, “all” they ever got were my emails. Which is about the most personal thing I could give them, I know. But the problem with emails is that unless you encrypt them and only talk to people who do, they will get them anyway. And, you know, they would just profile me for advertising purposes, right?

OK, I always knew deep down that was bullshit. They will suck up all my data no matter what permission I actually gave them. They don’t want me well. And they will gladly give my data to the US government if asked.
I had no excuse, but I procrastinated anyway. I’ve been using Gmail since it opened, and I just didn’t feel like updating my email address all over the place. That’s about it.

Why now?

The last few months - and especially the last 20 days - have shown that while the best time to quit was long ago, the second best time is now. Google is following the trend of the other GAFAM members: they are kneeling at Trump’s feet and giving him gifts. They are forcibly implementing Gemini everywhere, regardless of cost or relevance (including military applications). They are changing their official values (so long for “don’t be evil” and for diversity and inclusion).

Note: if you need sources for the above statements, please read any reputable newspaper. I’m just too lazy to collect them, and the list would be longer than this paragraph. If you don’t already know this, or are in denial, there’s little chance that I will make you believe otherwise anyway.

And so I decided to stop using Google services, as much as possible.

My choice: Infomaniak

“Build or buy”

I have considered self-hosting the services I need, but have decided against it. I have the skills to do it, but it’s time consuming and energy inefficient. So I prefer to use good services that offer some guarantees. And then I just make sure: 1/ that these guarantees don’t change and 2/ that I don’t put all my eggs in the same basket.

I’m already a customer of Infomaniak: I rent my domain name to them. It happens that with what I already pay them for my domain name (~10€ per year), I have access to 2 email addresses and their office suite, with 15GB of space.

This is an independent Swiss company that hosts in Europe and is GDPR compliant. Their values and ecological commitment are OK for me, for now. If anything goes wrong, it’ll be easier to move this time because I’ll be using my own domain name, which I can transfer whenever I want.

Infomaniak’s services

I found their office suite - kSuite - perfectly fine. They developed part of it (kDrive, kMail…), but otherwise use OnlyOffice under the hood. I quickly checked that I could edit any office document as I would with LibreOffice or Google Docs, and that I could share them with anyone not using kSuite, with edition rights if needed. As I said, I don’t really use Google Workspace for these features (and again, I don’t want to put all my eggs in the same basket), but it’s good to know that Infomaniak’s Drive, Docs, Grids, Points, etc. work the same.

The services I was more concerned with were:

The web interface of these 2 services is almost identical to Gmail and Google Calendar. (Well, actually, you can make kMail look the same or different by telling it whether to group emails into conversations and whether to display a panel for reading emails).
I could use Thunderbird as I used to (and maybe I will someday), but for now I’m just as comfortable using these as I was using Google’s WebUIs.

Decision

And so, these are the reasons for my choice: I was satisfied with the values, the services, the price (and the additional price I will have to pay if I need more space, or to create addresses for my family). Moreover, Infomaniak’s FAQ (en, fr) is very complete, with clear articles on almost any problem you might want to solve.

Now let’s see how I moved my data!

Moving from Gmail to Infomaniak’s Mail service

Optional: sort out your emails first

Chances are you have a lot of emails you don’t care about, so why import them? This is an opportunity to clean up your digital life and save space!

I was able to go from ~6000 conversations to less than 4000 just by searching for common words in newsletters and ads, or for various services I knew I had used in the past.

I was also able to reduce my disk space from 6GB to less than 3GB by searching for emails with large attachments.
Erratum: I originally wrote that my emails took up less space once transferred to Infamaniak. This is not the case, I was looking at the wrong information.

Importing emails from Gmail to Infomaniak (10 minutes + sync)

Let’s keep it short. Here are the steps:

  1. Create your address on Infomaniak
  2. Set up email for forwarding from Gmail to Infomaniak’s Mail service (for future emails, the time for you to tell everyone to use your new address):
    • Opening your Gmail settings, tab “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”
    • Clicking on “Add a forwarding address” (this will send a validation link to the new address)
    • Selecting “Forward a copy of incoming mail to [the address] and [choose whether you prefer to delete, archive, etc, the email in Gmail]”
  3. Fetch your past emails:
    • Follow Infomaniak’s instructions, which consist in using this assistant https://import-email.infomaniak.com/ (also accessible from kMail: click on “Advanced actions > Import emails”) to give kMail the permission to fetch your emails from Gmail.
    • Wait for it to complete (you’ll see a progress bar). I took less than 1 hour to synchronize my emails.

The only difference you will see is about tags, which are a Gmail concept (incompatible with IMAP, although emulated on top of folders). So you will get good old folders instead.

Importing contacts from Google to Infomaniak (5 minutes)

You’ll probably want to import your contacts, too. Here’s how:

By the way, I’ve started using Fossify Contacts (F-Droid, Google Play Store) to manage these contacts. The Fossify suite looks interesting in general.

Reading emails on an Android phone (5 minutes)

I could read them with any IMAP client. Out of curiosity, I tried Infomaniak Mail (F-Droid, Google Play Store) and it’s basically a clone of Gmail. I’ll keep using it for now.

Moving from Google Calendar to Infomaniak’s

Importing calendars from Google to Infomaniak (5 minutes)

For every calendar you have on Google, you can click on “Settings and sharing”, and then export the Calendar as a standard ICS file. You can also export all calendars at one, in the “Import & export” section of the settings. You will get a ZIP archive with ICS files in it.

Then, in the Infomaniak Calendar Web application, you can click on “Advanced actions > Import” (in the bottom left corner), and select an ICS file. Proceed with all ICS files you downloaded. You can then customize the name and the color of the agendas.

Syncinc an Infomaniak calendar, and contacts, on an Android phone (5 minutes)

You will need to install Infomaniak kSync (F-Droid, Google Play Store) for this. It will sync both your contacts and your calendars, using CalDAV, so that any Android app can read them, including Google Agenda.

Edit: I’ve started using Etar (F-Droid, Google Play Store), which looks a lot like Google Calendar, and works well so far.

Sharing: syncinc a Google calendar in Infomaniak Calendar (2 minutes)

Follow Infomaniak’s instructions to import and sync a calendar using an ICS URL (i.e. a URL that always serves an up-to-date ICS file when queried). In the case of Google Calendar, it boils down to:

Infomaniak will synchronize the calendar every hour (I verified). The first sync can take a while, depending on how full your calendar is. But it went quickly for me.

Note, of course, that you have to be very careful not to share the calendar URL with people you don’t trust. It won’t be indexed by search engines, but it’s still a public link.

Edit: I found a problem with this sync: recurring daily events (no time precision, just dates) do not seem to be synchronized or understood. It’s really this particular case. In fact, non-recurring daily events or recurring events with time precision are well synchronized.

Sharing: Syncinc an Infomaniak calendar in Google Calendar (10 minutes)

This one is a bit more complicated. Technically, it works the same: Infomaniak can provide a URL to query to get an up-to-date ICS file, and Google accepts such URLs and will sync them. Except that it can take hours or even days.

Fortunately, I stumbled upon this blog post, which describes 2 very interesting tricks.

The first one involves enabling a hidden setting in Google Calendar. If you go to https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/syncselect, you can explicitly tell Google to sync the subscribed calendars. My tests were inconclusive. While one test event showed up after 1 hour, another took several hours.

So I moved on to the second trick, which is to let a Google Apps script periodically update Google Calendar events from ICS URLs instead of letting Google Calendar do it. And it worked perfectly! The script is here, and setting it up takes 2 minutes: one click to open the script, a second to copy it to the target Google workspace, and then you can edit a few options and click once to “install” it. Of course, I encourage you to read its code to make sure it does nothing wrong. I have, and have not seen anything suspicious as of this writing.

I configured it to push a few calendars of mine to my wife’s Google account, every 5 minutes. For this, I of course had to ask Infomaniak Calendar for ICS URL, as described here:

Again, please note that you have to be very careful not to share the calendar URL with people you don’t trust. It won’t be indexed by search engines, but it’s still a public link.

And that’s it! Sharing calendars in this way is not optimal, but it is enough for my needs. Of course, if you know someone who’s also using Infomaniak, you can share calendars in the same way as Google users.

My next moves

That’s all I have to say about quitting Google. Is there anything else I can do to stop relying on dubious services?

First, even though I don’t use it anymore, I have a Github account. That means I support Microsoft. That’s a shame, considering I haven’t used Windows or any of their other products in 20 years (for personal use, I mean). This site is hosted on Github Pages. I will be moving to something else (I’m looking in the direction of Codeberg.

Then I made a mistake when I bought my current smartphone, years ago: I forgot to check if I could install LineageOS on it, as I did with my previous ones. I can’t (I can’t install /e/OS either, which isn’t surprising since it’s based on LineageOS). Fortunately, someone pointed me to crDroid, which supports my phone! (Which comes as a surprise this time because… it’s based on LineageOS too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)