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…
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.
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.
Maybe the teacher’s just using the software wrong? The “restriction” might as well be a user error. That’s worth considering before giving up and making a Google account, don’t you think?
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
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps you could direct your teacher to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail#Criticism. This is just laziness and stupidity on the part of the school, IMNSHO.
EDIT: Although, to be fair, the school is probably getting this from Google for free—that’s how they getcha.
Teacher likely doesn’t have the power to change the system and is just another user, so you’d just be tilting at a windmill. At best, preaching to the choir.
It would be like me telling you why I don’t like Gmail since you don’t seem to like it, either.
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.
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 $$
You could use SMSPool.
Why does your school not have their own in house email for students?
Participants, what is I use [email protected] ? 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 🤣
Isn’t Proton owned by massive zionists?
Any suggestions for email provider?
Disroot
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…
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)
until this day, you can register your own email for youtube. it might work as a google login later on.
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.
This really does not sound like it’s your fault at all. You and your teacher should be raising this issue to management, claim that you do not agree to googles terms of service nor privacy policy and that they can’t force you to comply.
SMTP and IMAP are documented protocols and they’re choosing to place these arbitrary restrictions upon students and teachers, time for them to reap what they sow and make it a headache for them.
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
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
Do you think library PC would be considered trusted environment?
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)
AFAIK Proton permits to redirect mails from Gmail and others to Proton Mail.
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!
