Never heard of an email system that can only send email to addresses from one provider.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2026
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Privacy
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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.
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
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
until this day, you can register your own email for youtube. it might work as a google login later on.
AFAIK Proton permits to redirect mails from Gmail and others to Proton Mail.
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)
Ask your teacher to check with the IT department why there's such a restriction in the first place. Maybe they just falsely assume that Gmail == email? If they actually can't use any other provider, both you and your teacher should confront the IT department or whoever made that decision.
It's probably for auth. Make all the kids get a Gmail and then use it as your identity provider. Way cheaper and easier than running your own IDP.
You can use google services without a google mail.
Op says their teacher must email them. So i think it’s email
This is not as simple as you make it out to be.
Teachers are not IT experts, nor are they privacy aware in many cases. School IT people are at best tech-savvy teachers who know where the esc key is. So entering a discussion with them will end up in a monologue from their end explaining their hands are tied. Schools (or groups of schools) make decisions on what infrastructure to use, and they hardly stray from that, just like companies do.
Best bet is to setup a burner account which you solely use on school assignments. Set up your browser (or dedicate a separate browser to school) to use different profile directories (!!) so you don’t mix private with school.
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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.
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
The blame isn't on you tbf nobody should be expected to drop their principles on a whim. Being compatible only with gmail is so bad.. I hope you can work it out but it's more a thing for school faculty to change.
Worst case scenario you make a burner acc. Are you sure there's no "login/connect with another provider" type link?
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.
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
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