Hey everyone, can you please help me what to do- I don’t have and don’t use anything from Google. Now for school I am asked to provide Gmail. Is there way out ? What else, maybe some other email provider is compatible with school emailing system, because now teacher must use her personal email to email me and she is not happy at all…
Never heard of an email system that can only send email to addresses from one provider.
Do you think its because my email is Proton, that is why teacher can’t send ? If that was Tuta or similar maybe she would bot have a problem?
100% it is. The domain .me is blocked all the time. Try the “protonmail.com” one its blocked less
That’s because it’s the middle of the week. I save all my email minutes by emailing on the weekends and after 7PM.
Someone else said
nobody should be expected to drop their principles on a whim.
But this is exactly what school is about, training you that you’re nothing but a cog in the machine, teaching you to accept getting beaten down over nothing just because someone higher up the chain from you made a decision and why would he ever consult you in that decision you’re just a lowly student/worker.
Lol that was not my experience. School taught me how to fight against oppression. It was everywhere
You went to a shit school then. Mine taught critical thinking, problem solving and working as a group to achieve a common goal. It also highly encouraged independent extracurricular activities with all sorts of clubs/teams that got school funding to finance their work. If you wanted it to be, you had a giant playground for academically inclined people experimenting and wanting to learn.
you are either not american or homeschooled or got a lucky tech school in the 90’s.
There’s a seminal essay called “Student as Ni__er” which will probably illuminate the other person’s point a little clearer.
Bruh that’s crazy that the school doesn’t give you an email for comms
Edit: and what kind of mailing system can only send emails to @gmail.com, that’s additionally stupid
When I was in school they provided me an outlook email. I used it only for school and made sure not to put in too much personal detail. If I had to use a personal email I’d use an alias. When I had to access it at home I’d login via a website. No systems schools use are in any way good for privacy so just keep it isolated as well as possible
Just make a Gmail account and set it up to forward to your real one. Only things that live in it will be the stuff for this class, and only temporarily.
What do you actually lose privacy wise from that? They get to know you’re in the class you’re in and see a very small subset of your communications related to it.
Ultimately, you’re the only one who can decide how much extra friction you’re willing to put up with for your principles, but in my experience it’s better to just make whatever bare minimum skeleton account you can to meet the needs and get on with life. Would you rather spend time fighting to make your special case setup work while giving the teacher reasons to evaluate your work more harshly, or learning the material?
Plus, there are benefits to blending in.
Those are some important principles. Recently, I’ve been thinking about following this method in a completely different context.
Using a privacy-respecting phone is entirely doable as long as you don’t need to interact with certain parts of the modern world. In 2010, such problems didn’t exist, but mobile Linux wasn’t available for this kind of use. Nowadays it is, but the world around it has moved on, and what’s required for a daily driver of a normie has changed radically.
So here’s how to adapt: Get some basic Android phone and use it for doing the few necessities that don’t work on a FOSS-based phone. That Android is just a skeleton. There’s nothing too personal, and you don’t use it for anything unless absolutely necessary. Same as that Gmail idea, but adapted.
Just make a Gmail account and set it up to forward to your real one.
I think this is a bad idea because now google knows your identity and knows the identity of your real email. So the NSA knows too. Forever. You basically “infect” or out your anonymous email that way.
I think having an “official” smartphone with your personal information for shit like this and never letting it interact with your anonymous ids either way is the only proper way. Not even email either account. You’d need some easy way to swap files that can’t be monitored from the outside. And a VPN so the IPs never overlap. And then they probably still can associate both ids.
Imo, if your risk model has to account for nation state actors, you’re not the type of person who needs to ask about this stuff or you’re already screwed.
There are plenty of different options for throwaway emails and defense in depth on that if you don’t want the link to be direct, but the idea is ultimately the same: make what you need to get by, insulate between your real and it to taste.
Yeah true. I think for most it’s just this disgusting feeling of being tracked and spied on, not a real worry or threat.
Have you ever tried to make a google account? If they somehow let you create one, they ban you from your own account within some months/years.
This is definitely not a solution. You need something that won’t lock you out from your school/work at the whim of some broken automated false-positive from an evil company with no way to contact support
Do not speak of the old magics to me…
I have five Gmail accounts. Youngest is 5 years old. Oldest is around 20. Even have the apparently desirable firstname.lastname address for myself. So I’m not familiar with the current hoops to jump through, admittedly.
That said none have been banned, so while I recognize the risk, I don’t agree with that inevitability, especially if you aren’t making heavy use of it.
Any email service that is not self hosted has the same risk, and self hosting isn’t generally in reach for people due to all the unwritten “trust rules” the major providers have quietly implemented.
That’s because they are all linked to your identity
Which is harmful to you because they’re selling all this information about you. And you shouldn’t recommend that others do the same. We should help people, not suggest things harmful to people.
There exists many other email providers that do not sell your data (most in GDPR countries), and they won’t delete your account if you manage to register it anonymously
Can you direct your teacher to take up her concerns with the school’s IT department? Sounds like you have an established workaround by having the teacher email you from her personal account. In my view, the school is at fault here. That said I understand the inconvenience for everyone involved of the added friction of avoiding the modern surveilance state.
I would consider the cost benefit analysis between retaining a modicum of privacy with your school assignments/work and being unable to participate in modern society
Just make one dedicated for academic use, you don’t have to dedicate your life to google
Doesn’t Google require a phone number for account creation now?
yeah, so they can track people’s activities/identity/location
That sounds super weird.
Does the school provide a Google account and email?
Even if they wanted it for authentication purposes, they’d have their own setup through Google. They wouldn’t insist on you having one.Is it just one teacher?
Ask another, see what they say.
If they confirm that’s how it works, then just make a gmail account for school.
If not, then you can decide how much you want to push back and educate this one teacher.This is a massive problem here too. Schools create these google accounts where teachers share work, etc. Its as if only google existed. How can we teach our kids to be openminded? I praise the suposedly young person that posted. Not all young people understand the threats of lockins.
There’s a lot more to this than lock in and open mindedness. Are you going to cause friction to multiple other people in a collaborative situation? Are you going to do it for something as small as opinions about data collection companies?
Like, go ahead and question it. Go ahead and see if you can get by without it. But if it’s making things significantly more difficult, are you personally capable of compromise? No one is making you sign your whole life and soul over to Google. You can make, use for this one class, and delete the account when you’re done.
Are you going to do it for something as small as opinions about data collection companies?
That is not a small thing; that is a very large thing! Society is being destroyed in large part because of that!
Fuck compromising with people who support this shit. It is good to be as obstinate as possible in that situation!
Yes, i’m sure there is a lot more to yjis but i also bet nobody asks these questions to start with.
Agree. Also weird b/c G has a special Google for Education scheme for schools. Which the school would be tied into, and accounts would be made through that. G makes promises like it won’t use the student’s data for other purposes, no profiling, no ads, etc.
I still wouldn’t be happy with having to use G as a student. For lots of reasons, like normalizing it so students will keep using G after they graduate. Even so, I believe G does make a good faith effort to adhere to their promises about not using student data for other purposes. But prob only if done through the official channels to create the acct.
AFAIK Proton permits to redirect mails from Gmail and others to Proton Mail.
I found this article. I will try to create Gmail account in library, because through my Tor browser with VPN is asking phone nr. https://itsourcecode.com/blogs/how-to-create-a-gmail-account-without-a-phone-number/
You cannot create a gmail without a phone number these days. There used to be work aroubda where you sign up for a gmail via youtube or on a smart TV (don’t advise the smart TV one), but I’m sure that doesn’t work anymore.
I think if you don’t want the gmail associated with your phone number you just have to buy a prepaid phone. If you live in a country where you can’t pay for prepaids with cash and without an I’D, then I don’t know. Welcome to the ponopticon I guess.
I can’t vouch for those paid SMS services, they seem like a scam to me.
I’ve created gmail without a phone number. It seems to still be possible.
Careful though. Google may lock you out of your account at any time, not allowing you to login until you add a phone number.
That just means they already linked your browser fingerprint to your unique identity
If you’re doing things right, they will demand a phone number so they can link your account to your identity. If they can’t link your account to your identity, they’ll lock you out and delete your account. Because if they can’t sell your data to others, you are giving them no $$
How recently, what country are you on, and what method.
It was around last year.
Fresh firefox profile, US. Worked fine.
Maybe it doesn’t work if I try it again.
Yeah its been a good year or two that you pretty much need a phone number.
If its a fresh residential IP that’s not already been flagged, or you havent made too many gmail accounts already then it might still work. You might have to buy a new device completely and then it works. But I am doubtful, I don’t have the resources to test all of that but from what it seems they’re locking out all the methods.
Can you create one for me? I dgaf if you have access to it 🤣
You could use SMSPool.
until this day, you can register your own email for youtube. it might work as a google login later on.
I thought there was no way to make a Google account without a phone number, but as recently as December 2025 I know of at least 1 workaround: when I created the account while logging in for the first time on a factory-reset old Chromebook, it bypassed phone verification. It might be worth trying this, if you can borrow a Chromebook (and ideally reset it, so it’s unused or a display model)
Participants, what is I use Googlemail@proton.me ? Hahahahahha I was trying to find a solution which looks like Gmail to pass them😅 anyway, I will be talking with teacher in next days and I will ask about why they need my Gmail only. And I will say that I don’t even have one. Maybe it will be enough to tell that all necessary info I will get during physical meetings and there is no reason to email me.
Thanks, I hate it 🤣
While funny, your teacher and school aren’t going to give you kudos for being a smartass.
I know… trying to find a way that everyone would be happy…
Isn’t Proton owned by massive zionists?
Any suggestions for email provider?
Disroot
google is very picky about this, but you can still create a google acc if using a “trusted” environment.
i had success on a relative’s android phone (with preexisting google acc and valid usim) and school computer (windows chrome). they probably internally log ties to that machine being used to create acc, but at least it doesn’t ask for phone number to auth and stuff. so, try using your school computer/tablet/etc for registration
This is terrible advice. Don’t do it.
why? do you have a better alternative?
Because if google lets you create the account, it’s only because they were able to link it to your identity. And then they will sell all of your data about you.
If you have a unique fingerprint but they can’t link it to your identity, google will lock you out of your account and delete your data because you aren’t giving them $$.
The former causes you harm. The later causes you harm.
if google lets you create the account, it’s only because they were able to link it to your identity
yes, they’re linking it to the identity of the school machine, or the (many other) students/teachers in the school that used that computer
If you have a unique fingerprint but they can’t link it to your identity, google will lock you out of your account and delete your data because you aren’t giving them $$
not sure wdym, haven’t experienced that personally. just create the google account on school machine once, setup gmail’s mail forwarding feature to send mails to your burner email, which forwards them to your primary email, and never bother with the google account at all. if there’s something necessary you can use the school computer again.
If you use a shared IP (eg on a school machine) whose fingerprint isn’t uniquely tied to your real world identity (name, birthday, etc), then they will flag it and demand a phone number or an image of a State issued ID so that they can link it to your identity.
If you don’t provide this, they will lock you out of the account and delete your account.
Google isn’t providing email for free. They need to be able to sell data about you to third parties. And if they can’t link it to your identity when they sell that data, they’ll delete it because you’re not giving them enough $$ to offset the expense of your account hosting
If you managed to not have this happen to you with your other accounts, it’s because they saw you login on another device that is uniquely fingerprinted and tied to your identity. Or they read your email and determined your real identity from the emails (eg amazon account purchases, address or name somewhere in an email)
i’ve already said enough that there’s at least some case where it works like i said, since i’ve had the exact usecase. i didn’t get flagged, asked for phone number or got the account removed. i see no point in replying any further.
Do you think library PC would be considered trusted environment?
absolutely not. but you’re only going to use the created account for your school things, no?
your teacher is also going to access their acc through the school network anyway, so there’s no further breach that can occur from the school network being pwned.
edit: if you mean trusted by google it may be. at least was the case for me
If it’s that you have to use a Google account, you should still be able to register your own email account as a Google account.
Have you ever tried to make a google account? If they somehow let you create one, they ban you from your own account within some months/years.
This is definitely not a solution. You need something that won’t lock you out from your school/work at the whim of some broken automated false-positive from an evil company with no way to contact support
I have. Ironically with an outlook account. Still works.
That means you’ve failed at privacy because they were able to link it to your identity, and now all your data is being sold to third parties
Sorry, I don’t get how to do it. I have Proton email. How fo register it as Google account?
