Thank you for the write up! Question: do you notice that you’re getting spam from unrelated companies after signing up for an alias? (Like, you sign up for a grocery store loyalty program and somehow end up getting pharmacy spam?)
An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
171–180 of 220 posts
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#172Fastmail search sucks
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
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#173I'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…
EU hosted because you want the government to spy on your emails?
If you want privacy you go with a Swiss provider like Proton.
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#174I moved over to Fastmail a maybe five years ago and it was pretty painless. The actual mechanics I did in an hour or so while half watching a movie.
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.
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 serv…
I’ve liked their VPN so I’m considering my email there but people seem to have a really strong preference for fast mail so I’m curious why. 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.
I moved because I found the Proton service to be poor. That includes reaching out to support for issues with my email and not really getting a good resolution.
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.
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#176When I had more time on my hands, I jumped from CPanel email to Outlook (when they offered free custom domain mail) to Zoho before landing on FastMail. It's been about a decade now and, other than adding the occasional custom domain and the rare service outage, I have made very few configuration changes. Worth every penny. I have zero regrets.
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#177Been a paid customer for over 13 years now. I'm very happy with them, have never considered switching to anything else.
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#178Absolutely love Fastmail.
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.
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#179I moved over to Fastmail a maybe five years ago and it was pretty painless. The actual mechanics I did in an hour or so while half watching a movie. 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…
If you use your own domain name for email, you only have to do the slow thing once.
When I switched my mail hosting from GMail to Fastmail, all my email addresses stayed the same.
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
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