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- Hacker News
- 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.
by ggm - 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.by CJefferson
- Make a new account then?by jacquesm
- 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.
by ColdStream - 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).by lardissone
- 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.by laweijfmvo
- 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.by greyface-
- 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.by threecheese
- 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.by pnw
- 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).
by john01dav - 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...
- I made a preliminary attempt as well and had the same experience. I hope to renew with a better success.
- Google just has an order of magnitude or three more data to work with.
It's exceedingly difficult to compete against "free".
by WarmWash - 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?
by tomaskafka - 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.
by kiwijamo - 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.
by dbgobrrr - >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.
by AustinDev - Considering moving to Fastmail myself. I usually use mailbox.org but they've been having far too many outages recently (some declared on their status page, some not). Problem is I use numerous E-Mail aliases for different services and it seems intimidating to transfer them all.
Can anyone speak to whether Fastmail is more or less likely to be accepted on "strict" sites that require larger providers?
by GaryBluto - Most providers from my understanding don't handle aliases well.
I have a catchall *@domain.tld and Fastmail when it receives an email on an alias, responds correctly with the proper alias.
Also when I compose, it let's me write in a custom alias for the From sender.
Other providers and email clients seem to want you to create an identity for each alias which is a huge burden.
- I degoogled myself from Gmail/Calendar ... five years ago now? Zero issues with Fastmail that might've affected my life in any way.
I can kinda-sorta remember a few outages, but they were night time in my TZ so I found out about them after the fact.
Also I _love_ how they're not doing the Proton route and trying to become an everything-service. They do mail, calendar and contact sync, that's about it. No VPNs or cloud storage or AI offerings.
by theshrike79 - Thank you for the write up! Question: do you notice that you’re getting spam from unrelated companies after signing up for an alias? (Like, you sign up for a grocery store loyalty program and somehow end up getting pharmacy spam?)by memset
- Fastmail search sucks
But now I use the MCP and that seems to resolve all my search problems. Now I let an agent search. Their MCP can still be improved though
by whazor - 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.
- Private Email (a Namecheap product) makes me wish I didn't move that account off Gmail. I'll take a look at Fastmail.by raffraffraff
- 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.
by ColdStream - I really wanted to move all of my "important stuff" to Fastmail but I found the emails I was sending kept getting caught in spam mail of the receivers, especially to Outlook emails. This is using the default fastmail.com domain
I know it's not Fastmail's fault but it's a big dealbreaker for me since a lot of professional emails are on Gmail / Outlook. I had this same issue with Proton, missed some opportunities because they didn't even see my mail.
by fossilwater - 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.
by beart - Did you migrate any old email?by darkerside
- > 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.
- 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.by kevinob11