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An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail

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Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail

#151

Post by vidarh »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #95
Scrounger wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Some TLDs get rejected or autocorrected by broken validators. I've had foo.dev changed to foo.de.

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.

Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail

#152

Post by vidarh »

kevinob11 wrote: post #80
beart wrote: post #5

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 lea…

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.

Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail

#153

Post by GaryBluto »

Considering moving to Fastmail myself. I usually use mailbox.org but they've been having far too many outages recently (some declared on their status page, some not). Problem is I use numerous E-Mail aliases for different services and it seems intimidating to transfer them all.

Can anyone speak to whether Fastmail is more or less likely to be accepted on "strict" sites that require larger providers?

Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail

#154

Post by frereubu »

kay_o wrote: post #43
frereubu wrote: post #40

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 ano…

I use mailboxorg its acceptable. 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.

Thanks.

Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail

#155

Post by frereubu »

jorvi wrote: post #45
frereubu wrote: post #40

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 ano…

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 us…

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.

Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail

#156

Post by theshrike79 »

GaryBluto wrote: post #153

Considering moving to Fastmail myself. I usually use mailbox.org but they've been having far too many outages recently (some declared on their status page, some not). Problem is I use numerous E-Mail aliases for different services and it seems intimidating to transfer them all. Can anyone speak to whether Fastmail is more or less likely to be accepted on "strict" sites that require larger providers?

I degoogled myself from Gmail/Calendar ... five years ago now? Zero issues with Fastmail that might've affected my life in any way.

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.

Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail

#157

Post by theshrike79 »

beart wrote: post #5

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 lea…

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.)

Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail

#158

Post by Gareth321 »

danpalmer wrote: post #94

I have a blog post that I've been meaning to write about why I moved from Fastmail to Gmail. I love Fastmail as a product, but I realised it wasn't what I wanted anymore from my email. 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…

I think the next paradigm shift in software is going to be LLM-inferred user intent. Serving just what you really want, when you want it. Currently all inside whatever interface the LLM provider offers, but soon whatever interface the LLM decides is appropriate. People won't use apps anymore. Your LLM will tell you which emails you need to address, and will automatically triage the rest (and action those which can be actioned autonomously). You won't navigate to Facebook. You'll ask your LLMs what your friends are up to. You won't navigate to TikTok. You'll ask the LLM for some funny videos (or whatever you're in the mood for). We won't need to structure data hierarchically anymore. Just dump it somewhere, an LLM vectorises it, and it's super easy to retrieve later in whichever domain one needs it.

The internet is about to undergo radical transformation.

Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail

#159

Post by phrotoma »

greyface- wrote: post #48
CJefferson wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail

#160

Post by Vinnl »

georgemcbay wrote: post #77
Vinnl wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it ... Probably took a few hours at most. That does indeed sound as daunting as I feared, unfortunately.

> 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 init…

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.

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