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Comment by adhesive_wombat | Hacker News Reader

Man, I really need to get off Gmail to reduce exposure to something like this, but there are sooooo many accounts to update.

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My advice - just rip the bandaid off and do it. I had anticipated taking a whole weekend to update the email address on all my accounts, but it was a lot less painful than I had anticipated. Changing over ~50 accounts took me about 3 hours all told. Most services allowed me to change my email even if it used email as the “username.”

Using a password manager made this much easier, as I could easily keep track of which accounts I needed to update and which ones I still needed to do. I switched over to Fastmail and haven’t looked back.

Mind sharing why you choose Fastmail over alternatives?

I used ProtonMail a few years back, it was kind of “spartan”.

I had heard good things about Fastmail from other GMail switchers and signed up for their free trial account, and liked the experience.

The mobile app is great, they support 2FA with hardware security keys, and the price seemed reasonable.

I didn't do a lot of shopping around, but I chose them because they appeared to have a good customer service, good pricing for single-person use, and all the features you might want like support for your own domain name, email aliases, caldav, etc. I have been a happy customer for years and all of these things turned out to be true. I have had zero reason to even consider looking elsewhere.

Also the web app is really good. Like really really good. And I don't normally like web apps.

Support is helpful and responsive in the rare edge cases I have run into twice over many years when pushing their features to extremes

Been using them for, I think, 16+ years at this point. Their support is great. Their product is great. The price is great. For a techie like me, it's perfect. I don't know if I would put Grandma on it, though, but perhaps I would.

> I don't know if I would put Grandma on it, though, but perhaps I would.

I don't see why not; I think that overall FastMail is easier to use than gmail for example. It's not like you need to use a custom domain and all these things.

If you don't use a third-party password manager there's a good chance you're having Chrome remember your passwords and can just go down the list.

The first step is moving to a custom domain. You can stay on gmail if you want; but set up a custom domain, and set up email on it and tell everyone to use your new email address.

Once you have a custom domain, it becomes way easier to change to another email service without losing any messages.

Totally agree. I've been doing this for over a decade. I've barely used my actual Gmail address for anything. I've gone through many incarnations of email, but at some point Gmail was just a solid enough UI, had the best spam filtering, and so I switched.

Everything just forwards to my Gmail address. I have a personal domain which is also setup as an outbound address. Several other domains/addresses also forward. I also do a wildcard *@something.example.org which I use for accounts/signups (unique email per site), which lets me track who's selling my address (or is breached) and has some other security benefits.

The wildcards are fantastic. I got some spam the other week, emailed the company that passed on my address (they didn't even think to remove their website name from the address) and ask for them to remove all my personal information and they couldn't even a muster a reply. Guess they weren't expecting that.

So when you reply in gmail, that reply is sent using the smtp server for your custom email domain? Where do you host that?

I've had Google Workspaces/Gsuite like that, but how do you accomplish the same thing with just gmail? Do you have a separate email service forward to it, or is there some way to set gmail as your DNS MX mail server and have it direct a custom domain into (and out of?) your gmail address?

Ride both horses at the same time for about a year. Setup Fastmail on a custom domain, forward your Gmail there, and as you see people emailing your Gmail, update those accounts as you get the chance.

I had a Gmail as my primary for over 10 years, did exactly this for 3 years, and now I’ll get maybe 2-3 junk notices per year to my old Gmail.

Gmail has an option to send all the emails you get to another email address, and also delete them from the original email if you want. The way I'm currently doing it is waiting for something to send me an email and then changing the account for that particular service. Eventually, I would have completely left google's influence.

My concern is the hundreds of GB of photos I have saved with Google and Apple. I assume one day I will wake up and find I've lost access to them with no recourse, which means backing them up on a large hard drive is my only real option, exactly like 2010.

Nothing 2010 about it, 3-2-1 backup, you shouldn't be relying on any cloud provider holding your only copy.

This is true, but in any event I feel it's more likely I'll lose access to my Google account than that Google will suffer a storage failure and lose my photos. I didn't have a laptop or desktop for a few years, which makes having my own backups a lot more difficult, but at this point I should probably take care of it.

There are other options. You can use something like rclone to make multiple copies across cloud storage providers. You could also rent some cheap cloud storage like Backblaze B2 and use a backup software like restic.

Interesting ideas. Thanks for the suggestions.

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