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dbgobrrr 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
AustinDev 19 minutes ago [-]
>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.
disposedtrolley 50 seconds ago [-]
> This is thankfully mostly solved now by AI.
How did you solve this with AI?
beart 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Vinnl 48 minutes ago [-]
> Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it ... Probably took a few hours at most.
That does indeed sound as daunting as I feared, unfortunately.
denkmoon 37 minutes ago [-]
A few hours pf effort to liberate your email from Google. Well worth imo.
mdavidn 45 minutes ago [-]
As an alternative to forwarding, you can also configure Fastmail to fetch mail from (and send via) Gmail like a mail client.
MetaWhirledPeas 17 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
stevenhubertron 4 minutes ago [-]
I have used Fastmail for 5+ years, no real complaints other then some real emails get caught up in spam folder.
steve_adams_86 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ColdStream 1 hours ago [-]
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.
frou_dh 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
anonthrownaway 1 hours ago [-]
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...
kiwijamo 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
tomaskafka 60 minutes ago [-]
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?
WarmWash 35 minutes ago [-]
Google just has an order of magnitude or three more data to work with.
It's exceedingly difficult to compete against "free".
thibaut_barrere 59 minutes ago [-]
I made a preliminary attempt as well and had the same experience. I hope to renew with a better success.
CJefferson 2 hours ago [-]
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.
john01dav 57 minutes ago [-]
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).
greyface- 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
pnw 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
Marsymars 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
threecheese 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ColdStream 1 hours ago [-]
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.
laweijfmvo 1 hours ago [-]
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.
thisislife2 57 minutes ago [-]
> 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".
kenhwang 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
jacquesm 1 hours ago [-]
Make a new account then?
IndySun 9 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
paxys 31 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
Marsymars 4 minutes ago [-]
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.
kiwijamo 8 minutes 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.
Marsymars 3 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
anonthrownaway 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
rationalist 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
frereubu 34 minutes ago [-]
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?
jorvi 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
kay_o 31 minutes ago [-]
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.
etothet 1 hours ago [-]
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.
dfee 60 minutes ago [-]
keep going – i was in your shoes 24mo ago.
martin1975 1 hours ago [-]
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.
john01dav 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
rationalist 10 minutes ago [-]
Maybe they're betting on new people always signing up and paying, but not using it much. Still a risky endeavor.
(semi-serious question because I’m currently very opposed, but I’m afraid of my future decisions)
HeadOfProbing 2 hours ago [-]
Anyone here know why the animations in the Fastmail iOS app don't run in 60FPS?
i1856511 43 minutes ago [-]
I know that this is at least somewhat on their radar. Scrolling used to not be 60 FPS either, now it is.
thebitguru 1 hours ago [-]
I wish they would improve their iOS app. It does leave a bit to be desired.
kiwijamo 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
Klonoar 57 minutes ago [-]
Is it still a Webview?
bix6 1 hours ago [-]
Anyone have thoughts on proton vs fastmail?
nsagent 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
bix6 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
rationalist 8 minutes ago [-]
Running a relatively-small opt-in email list, I've had problems with deliverability to Proton.
thisislife2 52 minutes ago [-]
Nowhere near the same - there's no JMAP or true IMAP on Proton.
bix6 40 minutes ago [-]
Interesting thank you! I don’t know much about JMAP but sounds trick.
tamimio 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
spencerflem 47 minutes ago [-]
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.
bix6 38 minutes ago [-]
UI/UX is definitely paramount for me, appreciate the note!
totallygeeky 3 hours ago [-]
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.
GiorgioG 1 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
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.
How did you solve this with AI?
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.
That does indeed sound as daunting as I feared, unfortunately.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
It's exceedingly difficult to compete against "free".
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).
Alas, short term convenience can lead to long term troubles.
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".
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.
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.
That was about five years ago, I imagine it might have been more difficult in the past, say 10+ years ago.
You want private and / or anonymous communications? Don't use e-mail.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375016 Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left (moddedbear.com) 75 days ago, 828 comments
(semi-serious question because I’m currently very opposed, but I’m afraid of my future decisions)
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.
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.
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.
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.