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Comments (97)

• olivierestsage
  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
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  beart
  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.
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  steve_adams_86
  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.
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  danpalmer
  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.
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  dbgobrrr
  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.
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  anonthrownaway
  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...
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  CJefferson
  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.
• snapplebobapple
  Did this a half decade ago and hacent looked back.
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  paxys
  > Going and updating my accounts with a new address was easier than I was expectingIs 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.
• muhammadusman
  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.
• NoboruWataya
  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.
• neogodless
  Related:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375016 Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left (moddedbear.com) 75 days ago, 828 comments
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  etothet
  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.
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  frereubu
  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?
• Scene_Cast2
  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.
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  frou_dh
  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.
• mindwok
  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.
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  martin1975
  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.
• IndySun
  FastMail has an admirable bug bounty.Have its privacy claims ever been independently audited?https://www.fastmail.com/bug-bounty/
• stevenhubertron
  I have used Fastmail for 5+ years, no real complaints other then some real emails get caught up in spam folder.
• asgraham
  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)
• Asterism
  I've used fastmail since 2014. No complaints!
• totallygeeky
  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.
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  HeadOfProbing
  Anyone here know why the animations in the Fastmail iOS app don't run in 60FPS?
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  bix6
  Anyone have thoughts on proton vs fastmail?
• bpbp-mango
  fastmail really needs inbox categorization on the level of gmail
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  GiorgioG
  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.
• 0xbadcafebee
  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)