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.<p>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.
As an alternative to forwarding, you can also configure Fastmail to fetch mail from Gmail like a mail client.
> Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it ... Probably took a few hours at most.<p>That does indeed sound as daunting as I feared, unfortunately.
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.<p>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.
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.
> <i>and if i need to login, i’ll have access to it.</i><p>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.
Hmmm, that is an interesting pickle. Some are probably fairly easy to swap over but it is so dependent on each service.<p>Alas, short term convenience can lead to long term troubles.
Make a new account then?
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.
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. :-/<p>Also, I really miss the auto categorization into primary, promotions, social and updates. This is a killer feature!<p>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.<p>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?
I made a preliminary attempt as well and had the same experience. I hope to renew with a better success.
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.
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.<p>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.
Related:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375016">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375016</a> <i>Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left</i> (moddedbear.com) 75 days ago, 828 comments
But can I still give all my emails to OpenAI??<p>(semi-serious question because I’m currently very opposed, but I’m afraid of my future decisions)
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).<p>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.<p>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.
Nowhere near the same - there's no JMAP or true IMAP on Proton.
I tried both and found Fastmail vastly easier to use.<p>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.
Anyone here know why the animations in the Fastmail iOS app don't run in 60FPS?
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.
Fastmail is fantastic, I've been a very happy customer for at least a couple years now.<p>Masked emails have been <i>so</i> nice for throwaway/sketchy sites. It's done everything I could ask, would highly recommend for anyone looking to make the switch from elsewhere.