I moved my household’s mail, docs, and calendar out of the US cloud and onto the Proton ecosystem. The obvious fix, one European service per incumbent, fails the constraint: a household of four that needs 3TB of shared storage with full-quality photo backup. What I ran is four decisions.
TL;DR
Mail, labels, and contacts moved in a single OAuth-authorized pass; the legacy account and the phone’s contacts sync stayed where they were. The old mail account stays open on forwarding, iCloud stays the contacts source for lack of a Family Plan CardDAV endpoint, and office work runs on a free fallback.
The stack I was running
Cloud storage, office, mail, credentials, and VPN had spread across five paid services: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, iCloud+, a third-party mail client, and a separate password manager with its virtual private network (VPN). Together they fragmented the household stack and deepened its US-big-tech dependency.
A household of four needs 3TB of shared storage, including full-quality photo backup, under an EU-jurisdiction bias by default, and the five subscriptions met neither the consolidation nor the jurisdiction goal.
The risk is not losing mail
I expected data loss to be the danger. The failure to plan for is the pieces that do not move cleanly. Three forced a decision: contacts had no clean sync endpoint, the legacy account could not close because non-mail services depend on it, and ending the office subscription would leave a spreadsheet gap.
The cutoff-survival test separates service cutoff from data exposure; linked, not re-derived here.
The decisions, and what I rejected
I made the Proton ecosystem primary on a Family Plan sized for 3TB of shared storage. Passwords and one-time codes moved to Proton Pass, the VPN to Proton VPN, and the phone’s photos back up through Proton Drive at full quality.
Each live answer had a rejected alternative:
- Keep each incumbent subscription. Rejected because consolidation was the point, and it had to meet the 3TB shared-storage and photo-backup needs.
- Close Gmail outright. Rejected because non-mail services still depend on the account.
- Make Proton the contacts sync endpoint. Rejected because the Family Plan offers no CardDAV endpoint, which leaves iCloud as the phone’s contact source.
- Renew the Microsoft 365 subscription. Rejected as unjustified for a non-power-user of large spreadsheets.
The same bias shaped the model-tier choice one layer down and the split between local and cloud runtime.
What I actually moved
The import was easy: Proton’s Easy Switch ran Gmail through OAuth in one pass, moving emails, labels, and contacts together, labels recreated as Proton folders.
The forwarding setup is what made the old address safe to keep. I added the Proton address, confirmed the verification code in the Proton inbox, and kept a copy in Gmail during the transition. A Gmail auto-reply ran for 6 to 12 months before monitoring dropped to monthly.
For contacts, I merged duplicates inside Gmail, exported Gmail and iCloud as vCard, deduplicated the two sources, and imported one master into Proton Contacts so the phone’s dialer kept resolving names.
Cancellations closed it out: the Google Workspace plan, the Microsoft 365 Family Plan left to lapse around 2027-03, the third-party mail client, and the password manager. iCloud+ came down from 200GB to 50GB, and the bulk storage moved to Proton Drive.
What broke
Google’s vCard exports arrived corrupted. A UTF-8 encoding defect mangled accented characters, so “Hervé” came through as “Herv√©”; importing that file unprocessed would have defaced the contact list and broken duplicate matching.
I normalized the decoded text under Normalization Form C (NFC) and rewrote it as UTF-8 before importing, then bumped the vCard version line from 3.0 to 4.0, so the desktop Contacts app could match duplicates across both sources.
What did not move
The migration does not leave the US cloud entirely, and I would rather name that than round it off. iCloud stays the contacts source of truth until Proton ships CardDAV on the Family Plan, the legacy Gmail account stays open indefinitely, and the free Google suite stays the office fallback. Proton Drive’s suite has no Slides equivalent, so the fallback runs Proton Drive’s Doc and Sheet first, the free Google suite second, and a future employer’s Microsoft license third.
Two further fronts sit in their own registers: the self-hosted island that keeps messages out of a vendor cloud and the dictation path where inference never leaves the machine.
Where the household stack stands
Household cloud storage, mail, calendar, password and one-time codes, and VPN now run on the Proton Family Plan. The legacy subscriptions are canceled or slated to lapse, and iCloud+ is retained at 50GB for the phone’s backups and the contacts master.
The operator behind this stack, and its trade-offs, is on the about page. If this is the shape of your problem, let’s talk.