I’ve used Fastmail for about 20 years. The worst thing that happened was that because of an outage in 2006, I couldn’t log in to download my homework in time for my teacher to believe I wasn’t faking. The best thing was that I deleted all of my emails in the 2020s due to an IMAP mistake and a human got in contact with me and fixed it. I think that speaks for itself. Definitely not canceling that subscription anytime soon
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
> 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.
A shout out to the fastmail management who acquired pobox.com and kept the domain going, leveraging the fastmail infra.
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.
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.
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 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.
The real downside to subdomain addressing is that very few other providers support it. I think Migadu is the only one I could find. If you do end up needing to leave Fastmail, you might have to configure each and every subdomain as a unique email domain somewhere else. I would avoid it if you're starting fresh.
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 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...
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."
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?
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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’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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> Can you cite an example of a big, well-known, etc service that enforces a 'you can't change your email address' rule?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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'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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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 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.
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'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’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 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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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 moved to Fastmail from gmail a few years ago. I'm thrilled to not have Google searching my primary email address any longer. I still use gmail for SSO for a lot of things from my 'gmail.com' account.
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
Subdomain addressing really is a killer feature. Since developers are braindead and can't implement a valid email address parser to save their lives, 'foo+bar@mydomain.com', 'foo-bar@mydomain.com', and 'foo.bar@mydomain.com' often get rejected as "invalid email addresses". But 'foo@bar.mydomain.com' always works fine.
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)
I’ve used Fastmail for about 20 years. The worst thing that happened was that because of an outage in 2006, I couldn’t log in to download my homework in time for my teacher to believe I wasn’t faking. The best thing was that I deleted all of my emails in the 2020s due to an IMAP mistake and a human got in contact with me and fixed it. I think that speaks for itself. Definitely not canceling that subscription anytime soon
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.
> 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 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.
I dont think you need a gmail account for that. just a google account without gmail would work.
> Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it ... Probably took a few hours at most.
That does indeed sound as daunting as I feared, unfortunately.
can always buy a domain with pop3 enabled mail like the old days. pretty cheap.
> 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.
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.
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
A few hours pf effort to liberate your email from Google. Well worth imo.
As an alternative to forwarding, you can also configure Fastmail to fetch mail from (and send via) Gmail like a mail client.
> 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.
A shout out to the fastmail management who acquired pobox.com and kept the domain going, leveraging the fastmail infra.
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.
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.
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 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.
If you want to be tagged and tracked in that way then there is no better platform than Google services for sure.
The real downside to subdomain addressing is that very few other providers support it. I think Migadu is the only one I could find. If you do end up needing to leave Fastmail, you might have to configure each and every subdomain as a unique email domain somewhere else. I would avoid it if you're starting fresh.
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 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.
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.
> This is thankfully mostly solved now by AI.
How did you solve this with AI?
They said “mostly”. AI solves 90% and then you solve the other 90%.
Lol. On almost every post someone comes in to say that $problem was easily solved by AI. Usually out of the whole context of the thread.
Snake oil level comments.
I generally am very satisfied with fastmail but I do have a hard time getting it to learn what is spam, maybe I'm missing something.
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...
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:
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."
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?
Google just has an order of magnitude or three more data to work with.
It's exceedingly difficult to compete against "free".
I made a preliminary attempt as well and had the same experience. I hope to renew with a better success.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
Hmmm, that is an interesting pickle. Some are probably fairly easy to swap over but it is so dependent on each service.
Alas, short term convenience can lead to long term troubles.
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.
> 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".
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.
Make a new account then?
One underrated thing is how easy it is to get credentials for sending emails. If you self host a lot of stuff it's quick to get going.
> 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.
I was able to change it on every single service I use except for a well known Canadian pizza chain.
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.
I had all the important stuff done in a week.
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.
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.
McDonald's. I wish I was kidding. https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/faq/can-i-change-the-emai...
https://www.coles.com.au/ (the 2nd largest supermarket chain in Australia) and https://makerworld.com/ are two I've come across.
> Can you cite an example of a big, well-known, etc service that enforces a 'you can't change your email address' rule?
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.
My hospital.
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 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.
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.
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.
Did this a half decade ago and hacent looked back.
Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375016 Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left (moddedbear.com) 75 days ago, 828 comments
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.
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 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.
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.
keep going – i was in your shoes 24mo ago.
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.
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.
Maybe they're betting on new people always signing up and paying, but not using it much. Still a risky endeavor.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
FastMail has an admirable bug bounty.
Have its privacy claims ever been independently audited?
https://www.fastmail.com/bug-bounty/
I have used Fastmail for 5+ years, no real complaints other then some real emails get caught up in spam folder.
Anyone have thoughts on proton vs fastmail?
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’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.
Nowhere near the same - there's no JMAP or true IMAP on Proton.
Interesting thank you! I don’t know much about JMAP but sounds trick.
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.
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 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 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.
How come you use both instead of just migrating fully to fastmail?
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.
UI/UX is definitely paramount for me, appreciate the note!
But can I still give all my emails to OpenAI??
(semi-serious question because I’m currently very opposed, but I’m afraid of my future decisions)
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.
Anyone here know why the animations in the Fastmail iOS app don't run in 60FPS?
I wish they would improve their iOS app. It does leave a bit to be desired.
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 know that this is at least somewhat on their radar. Scrolling used to not be 60 FPS either, now it is.
Is it still a Webview?
Some of it feels like so.
I've used fastmail since 2014. No complaints!
fastmail really needs inbox categorization on the level of gmail
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 moved to Fastmail from gmail a few years ago. I'm thrilled to not have Google searching my primary email address any longer. I still use gmail for SSO for a lot of things from my 'gmail.com' account.
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
Subdomain addressing really is a killer feature. Since developers are braindead and can't implement a valid email address parser to save their lives, 'foo+bar@mydomain.com', 'foo-bar@mydomain.com', and 'foo.bar@mydomain.com' often get rejected as "invalid email addresses". But 'foo@bar.mydomain.com' always works fine.
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)