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.
An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
71–80 of 220 posts
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#72I 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…
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 Fas…
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:
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."
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Running a relatively-small opt-in email list, I've had problems with deliverability to Proton.
Do you know if it’s @proton domains specifically? Eg are custom domains similarly affected?
I only received complaints from people with @proton addresses. Very few people use non-free email addresses.
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#74I'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…
The bigger issue isn't a privacy one, it's a security one. For many people, if you can get access to their email box, you can account-reset your way into any other account they own. So if an authoritarian state compromises your account (because they control the servers), there goes your everything
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#75I've used fastmail since 2014. No complaints!
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#76> 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.
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.
https://www.coles.com.au/ (the 2nd largest supermarket chain in Australia) and https://makerworld.com/ are two I've come across.
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#77Changing 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…
> 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 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.
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#78Earlier 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…
This is the way!
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
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#79I 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.
I recommend them.
Re: An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail
#80Changing 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.