An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
moddedbear.com
moddedbear.com
For anything I missed, I set gmail to forward everything to my new host. Cleaned up the few things I missed, and am only left with spam. I still leave the forwarding rule there in case a personal contact or service I forgot pops up, but it has been years without any issue, and I never feel the need to log into gmail. Certain emails are not forwarded I think, despite the "forward all" rule... but nothing I've ever found to matter.
That does indeed sound as daunting as I feared, unfortunately.
(Don't get me wrong, I still want to do it, but it's still daunting.)
You don't have to do it all in one go. It isn't like you have to move everything all at once like you're moving to a new apartment.
I started moving away from gmail years ago. It took probably like 5-10 minutes to set up email under my own DNS control and to set a forwarding address on gmail that pointed to that email.
I didn't even bother to do an initial bulk move of things over to the new email, I just switched things over individually as needed in a sort of on-demand fashion. 30-60 seconds here and there moving over individual accounts one at a time and only when it became obvious that I was moving over something worth keeping up on.
Spread out like that it felt like almost no effort at all.
Every time google did something to piss me off I moved an account or two in anger. It felt good. It felt so good that when I searched my gmail and only found google-related hits in my password manager, I was slightly disappointed lol
It's probably not even several hours of work for me, except that I do want to set that time aside in case something goes wrong and I need to revert things; I can't afford to not receive email anymore.
That, and I do want to transfer all my existing email history.
This is one of the big reasons I switched to GMail when it was new. Most free alternatives like Yahoo would lock forwarding behind a paywall. A very transparent attempt to keep users by force.
I have no cloud document, email or photo storage at all. Just an IMAP box.
The only thing that's a bit of a hassle is the calendar. It also mostly works, since you can add your Fastmail calendar to Google Calendar, but Google is slow to sync.
If you have your own custom domain, changing providers is pretty easy, IMO. In fact, the portability factor is probably the best benefit of having your own domain.
My pet hate is my bank refusing to email me bank statement notifications to mail@mydomain.com ("not a personal address"), yet their password validation and marketing emails get through quite OK. Somehow they seem incapable of acknowledging that one department of the bank has made a technical decision in conflict with other departments...
Yes. But like most forms of discrimination, it's probably 100% legal. Same as Chuck's Pizza Parlor refusing to deliver outside an X mile radius, and 1st National Bank refusing to use the full legal name of anyone who's name exceeds the size of their DB's 'CustomerName' field.
I would receive some messages twice for some time, as people resent their mails to the new address
Things sorted themselves out without much effort. But indeed, it took at least a year or two.
Then I went through that list every now and then, unsubscribing or changing email addresses as they came up. At the moment it's mostly just mail from sites I've used Google OAuth for some reason and can't be bothered to change (or just plain can't - one site actually uses email as a primary key and are completely 100% unable to change it.)
Now, migrating filters and rules over on the other hand...
I do like that they are up front with how the data is handled and what that can mean for privacy. They are just working within the system but being transparent with it.
Also, I really miss the auto categorization into primary, promotions, social and updates. This is a killer feature!
I'm happy to be rid of the goog's convoluted management console, but wondering why fastmail's spam filters aren't up to snuff...
Meanwhile, on my other account, I have hacked together a basic email classification with n8n and cheap LLM model, and it works awesomely and costs peanuts. I wonder why services who want to be google's competitors don't do this?
It's exceedingly difficult to compete against "free".
This is mainly why I stopped forwarding emails from Gmail to Fastmail as >95% of the spam was sent via Gmail, and I suspect Fastmail doesn't try to filter those.
Anyway, a helpful tip for you is that the Fastmail spam filter is configurable. You may want to look at making it more aggressive. Go to Fastmail > Settings > Filters & Rules > Filters > Spam protection > Advanced settings. Here you can either just select the 'Aggressive' preset or even customise your own thresholds for flagging a message as spam. Here you can also check how many messages are have been learnt by the filters.
If you're forwarding emails from Gmail I'd also suggest turning that off or setting up a rule to dump the Gmail forwarded messages into a separate folder. I suspect you'll find most of the spam has been passed on by Gmail.
Re forwarding, there is a setting to address that in the same location:
Fastmail > Settings > Filters & Rules > Filters > Spam protection > Advanced settings
"If forwarding email to Fastmail from another service, enter the SMTP host names (not IP addresses) of the forwarding servers. The Received headers of these hosts are parsed to find the true email source. Please contact support if you require assistance with this feature."
Incidentally, I also moved to fastmail, and it is just boringly fantastic. It works. It has features I actually need and enjoy (masked emails!) and I recommend it to anyone who asks.
This is thankfully mostly solved now by AI. I recently had a do a migration that I had been putting off for years and it was relatively painless.
How did you solve this with AI?
Snake oil level comments.
Alas, short term convenience can lead to long term troubles.
You hope you can ... I didn't login to a Google Account for a few months now and it suddenly wants a lot of personal details to do additional "verification" because I am "suspicious".
Additionally, if you signed up with an email and password, you can often just sign in via SSO with a matching email address for convenience and still have the underlying password remain working. Again, possibly not an intentional feature (but rather something like using the email reported via SSO or via email verification as a primary key).
Then go through each service and email them to have them try and move your account to new accounts with a traditional username/password login. Some might even be able to change your login method to username/password without requiring a new account!
I think there's a tension between explicit and implicit organisation. If you want a really good email client, Fastmail is great, but while I did care about that at one point in my life, what I want now is really just the big box at the top of the email telling me about my package arriving today or showing my boarding pass. Fastmail is excellent for explicit organisation, but its implicit organisation isn't great. Gmail is the other way around. I don't like the Gmail UI or any of the organisation features, but I also don't really need to use them.
Email for me is just a communication tool that the world still uses. Nothing else.
The internet is about to undergo radical transformation.
I suspect your opinion might overlap with the preference for a manual transmission, older engines which can be easily maintained, Linux, "dumb" phones, and other products which can be easily repaired by you. I share a certain fondness for all of these, but would gladly sacrifice them to slash the frustration they entail.
I was really pleased my decades long investment in @short.name paid off, and I have been able to keep a short @pobox.com instance, which I undoubtedly would lose in the migration into @fastmail.com
Aside from the vanity aspect, the distinction between a real mail provider and a stable forwarding service is a useful one. Thank you Bron (and others) for keeping things going.
Masked emails have been so nice for throwaway/sketchy sites. It's done everything I could ask, would highly recommend for anyone looking to make the switch from elsewhere.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375016 Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left (moddedbear.com) 75 days ago, 828 comments
Is this really true? Out of the probably many hundreds of online accounts I use I can think of very few that actually let you change the underlying email (which in almost ever case is the username) without having to create a brand new account.
That was about five years ago, I imagine it might have been more difficult in the past, say 10+ years ago.
Philips Hue.
I've run into others, but that one sticks out because it's the only account I still have using my old email, since creating a new account would also involve re-pairing all of my Hue products.
Yeah, and they insist on using it for MFA.
Actually the tech support did change what I use to sign in, but the patient record/profile is separate, and not user-serviceable.
I tried twice to change it, but they were able to send me on epic bureaucratic fools errands; I had to give up!
I had all the important stuff done in a week.
I wouldn't say it is easier than expected though, logging in, changing your email, confirming the change, and then making sure the password manager was updated was a bit of work.
The webmail has io.ox in the URL so I assume it is hosted ox (www.ox.io of softwares) which is SIGNIFICANTLY worse performance and usability wise compared to the Fastmail webmail -- I don`t use SMTP/IMAP so I do not know what that is like. Routinely on restricted networks that only allow HTTP/HTTPS so it is a webmail only experience opinionated in mine.
You want private and / or anonymous communications? Don't use e-mail.
correction that it says:
> The investigators who questioned Jon told him Homeland Security couldn’t obtain his emails, documents, photos or other content with an administrative subpoena, he said, but the breadth of what federal investigators did ask for shook him.
> Among their demands, which they wanted dating back to Sept. 1: the day, time and duration of all his online sessions; every associated IP and physical address; a list of each service he used; any alternate usernames and email addresses; the date he opened his account; his credit card, driver’s license and Social Security numbers.
However, what information the US government can or can't get from tech companies seems like a moving target.
So good luck.
I.e. my friends who are willing to share keys now and then but not actually pay for the service.
Otherwise I'm stuck with signal asking for donations forever / waiting for something to actually replace email.
If you're not in one of those places and you want to move from gmail you might as well pick a safer jurisdiction.
If you want privacy you go with a Swiss provider like Proton.
They did recently increase their storage from 10GB to 20GB (along with a price increase from 30 to 36EUR/year). They also have had catch-all addresses as long as I've used the service, you just setup an email alias for it.
Can anyone speak to whether Fastmail is more or less likely to be accepted on "strict" sites that require larger providers?
I can kinda-sorta remember a few outages, but they were night time in my TZ so I found out about them after the fact.
Also I _love_ how they're not doing the Proton route and trying to become an everything-service. They do mail, calendar and contact sync, that's about it. No VPNs or cloud storage or AI offerings.
I have a catchall *@domain.tld and Fastmail when it receives an email on an alias, responds correctly with the proper alias.
Also when I compose, it let's me write in a custom alias for the From sender.
Other providers and email clients seem to want you to create an identity for each alias which is a huge burden.
The hardest bit, which you just have to do slowly over the course of 2-6 months is update your new email in services and accounts (banks, insurance, airlines, etc) but with a password manager, you just do it as you use them and it’s pretty easy.
The best thing for me was that I’ve had my Gmail for 20+ years, so thinning out the list of companies that have my email is nice - now my Gmail is mostly marketing emails from companies I don’t care about. I go into it occasionally to see if there is anything I need and then just delete in bulk.
When I switched my mail hosting from GMail to Fastmail, all my email addresses stayed the same.
I badly wish that they added a few key enterprise features: mandatory 2FA, SSO, provisioning, and more robust audit logs. If you’re reading we would pay for this! Fastmail makes SOC-2 a bit tedious for us to maintain.
They changed their pricing plans several years back, but kept me on the grandfathered pricing, which was very reasonable. Then earlier this year, they more than doubled my annual price, at which point I felt it was no longer worth it. At a certain point, e-mail is e-mail.
For those who just want simple IMAP e-mail hosting, I can recommend mxroute.com and purelymail.com - I've used both, and both work well, and are very reasonably priced. The owner of mxroute.com can be a bit abrasive to uh, put it politely, but to his credit he is very dedicated and responsive. The community surrounding purelymail.com is also responsive and helpful.
I'd encourage everyone to take it a step further and self-host your own IMAP server. Doing this is very simple; use a script like getmail[1] to pull your new messages from your e-mail host and deliver them to your local IMAP server. If you have a VPN set up on your phone and laptops, you can access your e-mail everywhere. Been doing this for years, and it has been wonderful knowing that I have full sovereignty over my entire e-mail history.
Like another comment, I too have a couple of services connected to "Sign in w/ Google". Until I actually delete my Google org, those will still remain active. Since I'm not paying, I feel OK about this.
The only downside is that search is not as effective as Gmail.
Other than that, they have everything I would want an email provider to provide. On the last renewal I checked the competition. ProtonMail is nice but they are expensive and the end to end encryption comes at the price of breaking basic email standards.
Will I keep using fastmail? If they keep their prices reasonable, I don’t see why I wouldn’t continue with them for another 25 years.
So instead of "moving away from Gmail to Fastmail" it's more like "using Gmail and Fastmail" for me.
I recommend them.
If I were to try switch again I'd look for a mail service that specifically mentioned using LLMs for spam. If they say they're using one of the "open source" spam prevention solutions I can almost guarantee you its not going to do shit. They aren't good enough to catch all the permutations of serious spammers (who probably test on those tools before sending anyway.)
Edit: it also occurs to me that you could simply download all your mail locally and pipe it through a local model. That could actually work really well, tbh. If you hosted that on a server you would have the advantages of online access with gmail-grade spam filtering at any standard host.
Despite having Proton since 2018, I've really gotten fed up with their service quality — they seem to half-ass most of their services and it's a real pita to use their ecosystem. People have been complaining for ages and nothing changes, so I've decided to take my business elsewhere.
Hopefully I don't get flamed for my decision; that's another annoying aspect about Proton. There's a vocal portion of the userbase that are zealots and really take you to task when they feel you are criticizing Proton in any way.
Are you leaving just because general annoyance or improved feature set or what? It’s a lot of work to migrate so I don’t want to be back here in 2 years swapping again.
What's worse is that I ported all my emails over to Proton, which meant my data usage was above the free tier, so I was essentially hostage to keep paying (even though my actual usage is on Proton is much below the free tier). While they do label the emails you import, it's useless because it gets intermingled if they are part of the same thread (for example, all my bills that switched over were tagged as imported even when I got a new bill; this was an issue for even direct email threads with other people). Furthermore, it's nearly impossible to bulk delete anything, you have to use their web interface (which is very limiting). If you try to delete using something like Thunderbird, the emails stay in All Mail, so it's not really deleted (thus keeps using your disk space, preventing you from moving to the free tier). It took me nearly a week to devise a way to properly delete the imported emails without accidentally deleting real emails. Using the web interface is SLOW. It was painful doing the deletes that way because Proton struggled to keep up with the deletes, it was glitching like crazy.
Needless to say, that was a shitty shitty experience, and I'm positive that's part of their approach to lock users into their platform.
The encryption part wasn’t that valuable for me and ofc Proton doesn’t encrypt the metadata and unless they’re proton too it’s not E2E so I’m happy sticking with Signal for that sorta stuff and leaving email for talking to businesses.
To be fair though your emails are E2EE at rest in your inbox, so in the event of seizure or a subpoena they can’t hand over anything usable aside from metadata unlike fastmail who will hand everything over.
I have integrations e.g. for scripts, external mailers and so on, so I don't want to pay something AND still have to setup something myself and maintain it. Fastmail has the concept of app passwords, which are username+password combos that you can scope to specific services (e.g. only sending emails, only accessing calendar, ...), which is perfect for my needs.
They recently recently removed app-based font size from the backend (but just for mobile), and released an updated Android app which only uses the system-level font scaling, which broke it for people who hadn't upgraded yet. Plus the app-based functionality was useful. Not sure why couldn't just add a new "Use system font-scaling"
Then there was the debacle of removing horizontal separators in the list view. After backlash, they added an option.
Have its privacy claims ever been independently audited?
Can't speak for other use cases but highly recommend for solo devs and small teams.
Great support, great pricing and never had an issue with their services
If you use a custom domain and email clients rather than webmail, moving around becomes a lot easier. Another tip is to use a service like addy.io where you can create a new alias for every service, to help protect against spam.
I know it's not Fastmail's fault but it's a big dealbreaker for me since a lot of professional emails are on Gmail / Outlook. I had this same issue with Proton, missed some opportunities because they didn't even see my mail.
The initial pain of moving everything over to your own domain in particular, is greatly trumped by the long term enjoyment of having it and knowing moving provider again if I need to wont be nearly as painful.
Tbf using it with outlook on my desktop is annoying too. The bridge often logs out on restart. I was thinking about Fastmail as an alternative
Somewhat unrelated criticism of Gmail - during the migration, I found out that there is no way to search for starred archived emails in Gmail. They don't show up in Starred, nor in any search with is:starred. Their star status also doesn't carry over when migrating.
I canceled and left Fastmail for that reason.
There are a lot of delays and cross-checks built into our process for re-enabling access to your account, because it would be catastrophic to let the wrong person into an account because they claimed to be that person and to have "lost their password". So a "don't give access" failure is generally less costly than a "give access incorrectly" failure.
It sure sucks to be on the wrong side of one of those failures though. If you ever do give us another try, I hope it goes much more smoothly for you.
Is fastmail gated with 'whatwg cartel' web engines like gmail.com?
But now I use the MCP and that seems to resolve all my search problems. Now I let an agent search. Their MCP can still be improved though
(semi-serious question because I’m currently very opposed, but I’m afraid of my future decisions)
Fastmail's Gmail integration to injest mails and calendars works fantastically. I've only had the calendar integration fail once, and was easily able to reconnect it. And iirc, you can even send mail through Gmail from Fastmail, so you can use Fastmail as an interface for both systems.
Up until recently my biggest gripe was the lack of offline mail, but finally both the web app and mobile app have offline now. The UI is still a teeny bit clunky (the whole email view reloads itself, even in the mobile app, for no reason), but I barely notice it. It's very stable, fast, reliable, and simple. I even use the 'file storage' feature as a replacement for GDrive sharing the occasional file.
One thing you don't realize when you leave Gmail is just how much crap you've signed up to over the years. I haven't used my Gmail for several years now but it still gets mail. (I'm keeping the account active so nobody else takes it and uses it for a weird attack)
Gemini is happy to write emails for you, yet Gmail _still_ doesn't support push email on iOS. Like, what are we even doing here?
Fastmail, instead, is like: "Here's a detailed and well-written document on how to set up Fastmail with your Apple Mail, and just in case you need it, and you probably won't, we have the webapp." It's very reminiscent of what Google _used_ to be like back in ye olden days.
If someone knows of a good equivalent for Drive, I'm all ears. I'm RAVAGING to get off that platform.
Whenever this discussion comes up here, or say on Reddit, the focus immediately moves to privacy, anonymity, tracking. Those are valid points, no doubt. What takes a back seat, I suspect, are aspects like reliability and some sort of accountable customer support — and no, a smaller company doesn't need an army of support agents, just a few people and an intention to help and solve problems, delays being okay. Many utterly irresponsible hosted email providers get a pass just because they posture with an activist flag. The whole virtue signalling in this sub-industry muddles things.
Some are worse. Some deny you basic email access in the name of things like e2ee. Now e2ee is a fine idea, but enforcing it unilaterally — and yet not really enforcing it, because let's face it, you can't until you "move" your ecosystem, the way Signal has been "moving" it. Locked to the app, locked to the web app, yet your emails flow to other systems and addresses that aren't e2ee (as they should!). You just can't use IMAP, among other things. This has become such a toxic topic on certain forums that I start wondering if maybe I'm the one holding it wrong.
Another observation: bundling things that aren't email. This is another contentious topic. I wish there were more mainstream, custom-domain-hosted email providers that just did email, nothing else. I first started using disposable email designed to route to my domain via my mail host (a German one). It was as convoluted as it gets, and still is. Then came Apple's HME, with limitations I wouldn't wish on an enemy. Finally settled on SimpleLogin. Not the best, but what I like is that it gets out of the way — I can receive emails on those addresses and send from them easily. It's also a separate service, not hooked to my mail host, and I wouldn't want that now.
What would I do if I had to go back to when I was starting?
1. I wouldn't look for a "private" email provider — just get my own domain (which I did) and sign up with a better-priced, responsible, email-only provider (preferably something larger).
2. Never use the free email that comes with the mail host account.
3. Let go of privacy and tracking on email. It's almost painful to say, but I'm tired of that part.
And if Gmail hadn't done idiotic things like forcing "folders" on my account with no way to change or delete them (Important, and whatnot), I might have just stayed with them. At least my emails would have been delivered — unlike with my current host, which doesn't do "emailing" up to standard. For heaven's sake, just let my email through, and let senders get through to me as long as their ID is verified and they're not on any spam list.
Hell, I am thinking of moving a domain of mine to Zoho. A company I'd have never imagined thinking of in the same breath and it has not become "better" somehow. But here we go, a decade later. This is just a rant I guess. But I am really exhausted and yes switch mail providers even with your own domain is daunting! The apprehension of downtime, fear of losing emails, something breaking etc are just too much. But at least there's a possibility.
tl;dr: If I do it over and Gmail stayed what it was back then, I'd just go back to them, just with "my own domain." Not that Google got better; just shows how disillusioned I am with the personal-domain-hosting hype.
My own domain, nothing else. Not the rest of what I've done chasing for "this kind of" mail hosting.
If you want a monthly price you have to tab across to get the true figure of £5.40.
The higher price wouldn't put me off - it's still very low - but the deception erodes trust from the very start.