Fastmail is fantastic, I've been a very happy customer for at least a couple years now.
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.
Fastmail is the service I've paid for longer than any other, without any pauses, and with the most satisfaction of any subscription. Like the author says, email isn't exciting, it isn't a fun or interesting subscription, but it works perfectly for me and offers excellent value for what I pay. It's so gratifyingly functional and boring.
Same, been about 10 years now and it is the definition of 'It just works'.
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.
Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it was relatively painless when I actually committed to it. I did a search over my password manager for my old email and just went through the list logging in and switching to the new email. Probably took a few hours at most.
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.
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
In my mind it has to be done this way because there's absolutely no way you'll recall everything that needs migrating in a short time. Even if you have a password manager as your email is likely older than it, but it's probably a great start if you have that.
Changing email providers was easy. But replacing gmail address in all my accounts with my own domain based address took me 2 years to complete. You only have to do it once though, and then you can change providers at will.
Having new email sent to my new inbox would actually be pretty easy for me even, since I've already been renting my own domain for ages now.
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.
> For anything I missed, I set gmail to forward everything to my new host
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 want to try another provider, but my family (partner, kids, grandparents) stores pictures in Google Photos, shares docs from google drive, etc. It is all the extra stuff I get with Google that feels daunting to me, I'd love to switch for email and calendar.
You can just have a gmail account you don't use, and in fact even if you have your own domain, if you're willing to pay for Google separately, you can have a Google Workspace account for your custom domain and your e-mail for that domain at Fastmail and just not point any MX records at Google. It works fine - it's what I do as an artifact of having used them for e-mail and moved but not having bothered to untangle my other stuff (yet; but it's been years).
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.
> Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it was relatively painless
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.
Tradeoff: Failing to accept a limited number of rarer domain. Vs. all the errors caused by idiots who can't spell mgail.com, or gmail.cmo, or gmali.com, gmail.kom, or whatever the heck that thing is.
Excluding people from services because you can't be bothered to handle their perfectly correct and validated email address is actually a form of discrimination.
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...
> Excluding people from services because you can't be bothered to ...
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.
True. Vote your wallet as you will. Beyond that - discretion is the better part of valor, the low-level employees you can easily complain to are very unlikely to have any say in the policy, and Chuck is free to ask you to drive 40-mile pizza deliveries for the same pay and mileage as he gives at his 10-mile limit.
Is it discrimination if you decide to switch to custom power outlets in your house and then you complain that local hardware stores don't provide compatible parts?
I was on the application for the .name top level domain back in 2000 and then there was a reasonable excuse for that - we were in the first new batch of TLDs. We had to contact a lot of site owners to try to smooth the path. But given the number of new TLDs since, you'd think people would've learnt.
The daunting bit (if you're using gmail or something where you don't own the domain) is getting everyone to update their address books. I took the same approach that you did and it took years before the forwarded emails died down, even with responding to all of them with "please use my new address". I got there in the end, though.
It's a process. I just set up a filter on Fastmail that showed me all mail that was delivered to my @gmail.com address within the last two weeks.
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.)
Yeah, it's a pretty easy process these days. Just insanely time consuming. Fastmail has an easy migration tool as well if you don't want to go the IMAP route.
Now, migrating filters and rules over on the other hand...
My big problem with leaving Google is I’ve clicked on far too many ‘login with google’ boxes. In retrospect this was a mistake as it now ties my own domain to google basically forever, but lots of sites don’t even have the option to undo it.
Same; I was a sucker for GitHub SSO as well. I have no idea how to unwind it all, but (like Google SSO) it certainly had its benefits while I was using it. I remember there was an “open” SSO provider - OpenID maybe - back in the 2000s when a federated identity made interacting with blogs and such much easier. It’s the same with GitHub today, with various 3rd parties who need access to your code. They don’t have a “give me an git+ssh url” and so you almost need GitHub.
i’m not sure i’ll ever delete my google accounts, but my goal was to stop using them. if someday an email comes in, it’ll still get auto forwarded, and if i need to login, i’ll have access to it.
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".
Did it also give you a tip to "log in to your usual Wifi network"? I have a feeling all large corps let their heuristics run wild with little to none supervison.
I don't even bother with forwarding mail from Gmail, it's just a black hole for marketing emails that I'd only occasionally glance at when I'm looking for a discount code.
I switched away from Google and haven't had a single issue going from 'login with google' to a regular email/password FWIW. Every site has offered some kind of painless recovery.
This is a bit surprising to me because I switched emails some time ago, and most sites were painless, but there were a fairly long tail of sites that had no self-server mechanism to change email from one to another. A fair number of them required phoning in to read off my new email to a CSR rep. Another pile of them had no mechanism to change email at all, their only solution was to open a new account.
A lot of those sites will let you just reset password, send an email to the Google account's associated gmail, and then you're done. I suspect that it isn't thought through as an official feature in such cases, but it does often work.
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).
You can change the MX records of the domain to point at Fastmail (or some other provider) without losing the ability to log into associated "Google Workspace" accounts.
I thought this would be a blocker too but you can both host your email somewhere else and continue to login with google. You still need to keep the google workspace account enabled and active, you just point the MX record elsewhere.
I was paying for Google Business for my family, and then decided to switch to iCloud, but left only my own account on Google, because of that reason.
Also, some services requires you to log in with a Business Google account, regular gmail accounts don't work (ie: Granola).
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!
FYI Fastmail works really well with the iOS native Mail/Calendar app if you wanted to try that out. iOS is pretty much the only platform I don't use the Fastmail app on.
I'm in the process of migrating away from my custom domain on Google (I'm grandfathered in from back when they offered it for free). So far getting all my old email, contacts, and calendar info FastMail has been seamless. All that's left is to repoint the DNS.
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.
You may already know this, but in case anyone else doesn't, you can create a Google account using a non-Google email address, so your SSO doesn't have to depend on a Gmail address if you don't want
I recently switched over 6 gmail accounts (both personal and business) from gmail to fastmail. I have been suddenly bombarded with a mountain of spam that the goog must have been catching. It doesn't seem like my constant flagging is doing anything. I ended up building a convoluted mess of filters that will probably cause me to misflag something important one day. :-/
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...
Thank you for this report - I tried leaving gmail 2 years ago and returned quickly exactly because of this. Sad to hear the situation remains unchanged.
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?
Interestingly, I have found it the other way around for me. While my main inbox is at Fastmail, I also have a historical Gmail account. My Fastmail inbox gets a few spam messages week. My Gmail account on the other hand gets hundreds a month (if not weekly) that slip past the google filters.
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.
I found "aggressive" was too much (which if you look at the custom option, sets the scoring to 4). I am running with scoring = 5 on the worst account and it misflags some emails - ironically it tends to misflag emails that are coming from domains where I get a lot of valid email from!
Re forwarding, there is a setting to address that in the same location:
"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."
PSA - A crucial detail about Fastmail's spam filter that should really disclosed more clearly is that your filter is only trained on email you flag from within the web UI. Invoking your email client's "move to spam via IMAP" function does not train the filter.
I'm in the process of leaving Proton and moving to Fastmail. I'm now paying for Mullvad and Fastmail, but haven't had a chance to port over a bunch of Simplelogin aliases I have over to Fastmail yet (my fault for not using a custom domain for those, which I've now rectified with Fastmail).
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.
I tried both and found Fastmail vastly easier to use.
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.
> Proton doesn’t encrypt the metadata and unless they’re proton too it’s not E2E
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 proton email since they had the .ch domain and two passwords to open your inbox, never used it for anything serious. Fastmail works well because you should never think of an emails as private or anonymous, the protocol itself wasn’t designed with that in mind, I won’t even mind to have my whole email publicly shared like a blog because I never used it for anything private.
I have multiple emails from different email providers I collected over the years, some are very unknown or obscure, that being said, I don’t actually use protonmail, last time I logged in probably few years ago.
I haven't used fastmail, but proton works well for me. It's mildly annoying to have to run a local IMAP proxy to use a proper email client for my mail, but it's not a dealbreaker. And with the US having had over a decade track record of violating everyone's digital privacy, I enjoy the fact that proton isn't a US company and is therefore less susceptible to that pressure.
I got the same capabilities from mxroute.com, another worthwhile alternative - hosted in the USA. Plus they offer a no subscription, 10GB one time fee (I think $150 at the time I got it) account...unlimited domains/subdomains, etc -everything managed thru directadmin. Replaced my Google Workspace email w/this and never looked back. I still use Google for authentication and Google Drive.
The sustainability of this is dubious to me because you're taking a one time fee for service forever, and eventually someone (possibly a future owner) is going to want to get more money out of you over this. Also, there are recurring costs to host this that continue forever, even with no further income from you.
They heavily limit the number of lifetime subscriptions they sell to avoid it becoming a sustainability issue. That product isn't available right now, for example.
The issue with mxroute is that it's run by one person, AFAIK. Of course, you can always move with a custom domain, but I'd rather have a team of people involved to manage risks better. Migadu (which I'm not a customer of) provides almost the same, but with a team and for a subscription. The lowest tier as of this comment is $19 a year.
I'm a happy user of Fastmail, but I would prefer a properly EU-hosted service. (Fastmail now have data storage in the EU, but much of their infrastructure is in the US and data still passes through there - something that they're open about, but I'd prefer not to happen). The last time I looked at mailbox.org the offer wasn't nearly as good as Fastmail in terms of storage, catch-all email addresses etc, but I took another look recently and it seems to be better. Does anyone here have first-hand experience of mailbox.org?
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.
As Fastmail themselves have pointed out many times, e-mail is inherently a multi-party activity with both parties holding a copy of the e-mails. Aside from the microscopic amount of people GPGing their e-mail and sending it over good servers, your e-mail is as private as the other party treats it. Which isn't very much. And you can't do anything about that.
You want private and / or anonymous communications? Don't use e-mail.
A lot of people seem to ignore this point when it comes to Proton’s E2EE of emails at rest. It wasn’t even a year ago when the US government subpoenaed a Pennsylvania man’s entire Gmail inbox because he wrote a letter to a DHS attorney. This wouldn’t happen with Proton. It would definitely happen with Fastmail.
> 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.
Fair point, but my desire is for "good enough" rather than perfect. I know my emails go into other systems, it's more about feeling that my inbox is hosted by a company solely based in a jurisdiction where it can't be compelled to do anything by the US government. It's also a matter of principle - I want to move as much of my infrastructure as I can away from US-based services because I don't trust things not to get worse there.
I want some sort of hybrid paid for by my fastmail sub. Something like a first party gpg on the happy path for anyone who uses fastmail and a wasm/whatever (if possible) web app link for keen buy not willing to pay email recipients.
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.
I've used mailbox.org for a few years and been quite happy with it. Its definitely more basic than Fastmail or Proton, but it meets my needs perfectly.
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.
> Going and updating my accounts with a new address was easier than I was expecting
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.
When I made the switch from @Gmail to my own email domains hosted by Fastmail, I never had any problem changing the email on my 100+ accounts with various services.
That was about five years ago, I imagine it might have been more difficult in the past, say 10+ years ago.
The majority of mine are changeable, but the process is typically convoluted. The two that I have run into so far that I can't change are OpenRouter and Ecobee.
Can you cite an example of a big, well-known, etc service that enforces a 'you can't change your email address' rule? I haven't really seen this sort of thing in the wild to be honest. Maybe one or two over 20+ years? I think the norm is using a username or an internal identification number (such as an UUID). It is rare the email address is actually used as the primary key to identify an account.
I didn't keep exact numbers, but of the ~400 Hide My Email aliases I have, probably 85% of them allowed changing email in the online self-serve, 10% required contacting customer support, and maybe 5% needed a new account.
Oh yeah. I did this in 2021. I got the list out of 1Pass and just did them in small batches. I hit a few that wouldn’t let you change but nothing important.
Most of the sites I have accounts on did let me change my email. Looking at my password manager, about 1/5 of those that use email for login don't use my current email.
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.
Good move! I was there before, and the worst part was... I was using a @gmail.com address. Bad mistake on my part. So actually tracking what I used the address with, that was my real pain. Now everything is on my custom domain, so if I need to move on from my current provider, it will be painless. In the process I did manage to delete a whole bunch of accounts I didn't use anymore.
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.
I like Fastmail but I'm starting to feel that the subscription cost is a bit overpriced for the way I use it (just IMAP email - not using the app, calendars, contacts, file hosting, ...). I've researched and found some other independent paid email providers that are significantly cheaper, although I suspect most of having a low bus factor with just 1 or 2 people operating them.
i have been using posteo.de for the last decade with no problems at all. Exactly the feature set you use. I only recently started to use their Caldav stuff which works.
Same here. I don't want a custom domain for certain things, and Posteo (posteo.de) was good. Posteo increased the mailbox storage to 4 GB recently and the default number of free aliases too. I'm satisfied that it's run by a team and not by one person (the low bus factor mentioned above). At EUR 1 per month, it's way cheaper than Fastmail for multiple mailboxes across family members and provides a lot more value, IMO.
It's likely that regular Fastmail users are subsidising their AI costs. I've talked to several people who were a bit shocked when Fastmail decided to complicate their offering with the current hyped trash.
I stopped reading their privacy policy at "Fastmail is an Australian company" - Australia is a five eyes jurisdiction. That said, I'm a happy customer of almost a decade with them, but my email correspondence is pretty boring and not politically sensitive.
Interesting. Should any email provider based in any of the 5 Eyes (or even 14) be avoided? But I feel, particularly for everyday folk, we have reached the point at which avoiding some level of surveillance is now virtually impossible.
Sadly true. Even if your provider takes privacy seriously, chances are the other side is using US big tech who'd happily give away their copy of your data to any sufficiently credentialed authority.
I moved to using Fastmail as my primary over 7 years ago and I still use it as my main email address but I had hoped I could get rid of my gmail but instead it became a catch-all junk inbox similar to OP's gmail. The main issue is that so many websites use Login in with Google as a way to sign-in that I just had to keep my gmail logged in most of the time.
So instead of "moving away from Gmail to Fastmail" it's more like "using Gmail and Fastmail" for me.
I would move back to Fastmail if they offered it. Yes, I could muck about with MCP but give me AI light features, such as categorization and perhaps AI conditional rules.
I made the move some time ago. There are some unpolished parts here and there, but I'm glad I made the move.
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 did this for my business' email about a year ago. A few weeks ago, I moved everything. Fastmail is awesome, but perhaps more important is how bad Gmail's web interface is. Fastmail is way more responsive and fluid and feels almost native.
I have been very happy with mailbox.org. I recently signed up for early access to Thundermail, which is the new email service being rolled out by the Thunderbird team. I have no particular need to change except that I like the idea of supporting Thunderbird. So I will be keeping an eye on it.
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.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 55.8 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375016 Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left (moddedbear.com) 75 days ago, 828 comments
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.
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.
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.
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...
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!
(semi-serious question because I’m currently very opposed, but I’m afraid of my future decisions)
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I recommend them.
So instead of "moving away from Gmail to Fastmail" it's more like "using Gmail and Fastmail" for me.
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.
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.