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.

Change schools.

I wish lol

I think this is typical. Microsoft/Outlook is popular too.

What's your issue with using gmail exactly?

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 can set up auto forwarding of emails, to add last receive mails on another client using another inbox.

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...

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.

Presumably, privacy. Google is actively weaponizing and selling all data we give them.

You get to choose what you use in your personal life, but you won't have much choice in your workplace.

My opinion is, be prudent. Compartmentalize school and life as much as you can.

But if it's just for a school account then just use that account for school.

Get used to work (or school) being separate from personal. Use a different device wherever possible. If it's not, use a separate web browser at the very least and delete your device level advertising ID, don't access gmail with Chrome on an Android device since that usually logs you in at the device level, too, and don't add the login to a personal Android device to reduce some of the links between them. Just understand the risk of not using a separate device. For example, some systems will have the ability for corporate accounts like Google Workspace, Microsoft Exchange, etc., to wipe the device it's accessed from when you leave, and if that's your personal device, well too bad.

The same can be said about work. I don't use Microsoft products in my personal life, but work, work I have to use Microsoft products.

As others have said; compartmentalize it. Treat it as it's own entity. So for me, what I don't want Microsoft to know about I keep off work machines, and work emails, and work network.

We sadly don't get choice when it comes to things like School, work, etc the same as we do for our personal.

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 need to suck it up; work and school choose their email providers. Use it purely for work - not your personal life and not for anything private. Use it in it's own browser container or even it's own browser if you want. Especially if your college doesn't provide POP3 or IMAP access. It is worth contacting the college IT to see if that is something you can use though - it my be something they can enable even if it's off currently or provide instructions for the correct server addresses. It'd be surprised if they didn't have either but they may want it all locked down in gmails services. More fool them.

My work (like many) uses Office 365 including Outlook for mail. So I have the crappy MS Office apps on my phone. But it is used purely for work (and I mute all notifications).

I use Firefox and have google account for my android stuff, which is in a container. And I also use the linux version of Edge (which is a flatpak) for the rare time I want to look at my work email of office online on my PC.

Why are you using edge for email? I use Firefox in Linux. In a container, of course 🤣

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.

See if you can setup a rule to forward all email out of that inbox, it’s likely this feature is disabled or blocked through a policy but it doesn’t hurt to try.

As others said, get a separate device for work/school tasks, don’t intertwine it with your personal life.

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 tried, i am not allowed to do so

How do i compartmentalize tho? only thing that comes to mind is to have containers, maybe flatpak or distrobox could help?

Just use gmail through the browser instead of installing stuff like the gmail app on your phone, and you can have it forward it to your email so you don't need to open gmail to get school mail. You'll probably just need to login for replies.

And when it comes to work in the future hopefully you'll be a provided with a work device. I wouldn't use a work device for personal use even if it were running Linux, and wouldn't install work related programs on personal devices. I just consider work devices and programs to be spying on me as default.

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/

Similar discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/i7vaq8/how_can_i_degoogle_at_school/

Anyway, if you want maximal compartmentalisation between your school identity & the rest of your life:

• Treat school Gmail as read-only, as far as possible: write & send only if absolutely necessary & be concise.
• Use browser compartmentalisation as others have recommended, or if you have time on your hands then go a step further & use Qubes.

Tell them it is against you religion https://stallman.org/saint.html

Tell them it is against your 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

Drop out

You can read your student code, most of them do not have anything that compels you to use the services that are provided. If that is the case, refuse to use the service and make your position known, they'll generally give you a workaround or if they say that's how it is, you can ask for the part of the student code with the nonexistent objective reason why you must use it.

If you don't want to be a squeaky wheel, there are technical ways of limiting the information loss, but the easiest is to not install anything and be conscious of what location, network, & device you use

if your school provides devices use those on public wifi and when you graduate send and email to the admistration / google to remove all your data will they most likely not but its worth a shot