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I spent a few hours migrating my email away from Gmail to Fastmail. Probably had to update 100+ sites with my new email address. I you ask me why I did this, I

I spent a few hours migrating my email away from Gmail to Fastmail. Probably had to update 100+ sites with my new email address. I you ask me why I did this, I might grumble about Google becoming too powerful, and my desire to decouple my life from them. And that's true. But the concrete thing that pushed me over the edge was the UI getting worse and worse and worse. I'm sure there are a dozen great web mail services out there, but Fastmail is the one I landed on and it's been fantastic. But the moral of the story is that I might have stayed with "evil Google" longer if they also didn't screw up the UX.

dls2016 6y ago
What’s wrong with labels and tabs and important and starred and blah blah blah?
mcpeepants 6y ago
I'm in the middle of doing exactly this right now. I'm at the point where I have set up email forwarding from Gmail to Fastmail, but not switched any service accounts over to my new address. Even just this quarter-measure has improved the UX of email for me by roughly 573% It's not strictly the web interface that is better/faster/etc either. I get notifications from the Fastmail app for forwarded messages ~30-60 seconds before the Gmail app knows about the original.
tzs 6y ago
> Probably had to update 100+ sites with my new email address This is one of the main reasons I have my own domain. When I migrated to Fastmail, I just had to tell Fastmail that I wanted it to handle mail from the domain, set the MX records at my domain's nameserver to point to Fastmail, add a TXT record there for SPF, and add some CNAME records for DKIM. Fastmail gives instructions for all that here [1]. There was no need to update any sites with my email address because my address did not change. And there will be no need to update any sites if I ever decide to move from Fastmail to some other mail service, or to go back to running my own mail server. Even simpler, you can use Fastmail as your DNS provider. Then it is just a matter of registering a domain, and telling your registrar that Fastmail is your DNS provider. Fastmail takes care of setting up the mail-related DNS records then. Here are there instructions for this approach [2]. The only serious things I use addresses that aren't @mydomain for are things that I might need to receive email from in order to resolve problems with @mydomain. I strongly recommend this approach. [1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains-setup-mxonly.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains-setup-mxonly.h... [2] https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains-setup-nsmx.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains-setup-nsmx.htm...
- nicbou 6y ago
  I have my own domain and email host, but still ship it through Gmail because I like it. At least I know that I'm not tied to Gmail.
nicbou 6y ago
What's wrong with the UX? I haven't used anything else in a while.
- function_seven 6y ago
  I haven't used Gmail for a couple years now, but when I decided to leave, it was slow. Loading the page took awhile, sifting through emails felt sluggish, etc. Nothing like JIRA or other really slow sites, but just enough to be noticeable and annoying. Like I could "feel" the JS-heavy frontend doing more than it needs to in order to display a list of emails, or show a single one. Meanwhile it's nagging me on the left to add contacts to my GTalk, or Hangouts, or whatever they keep renaming that thing to. The whole tabbed inbox thing didn't really help me. There are some "promotional" emails that I want to see in my main inbox, but most I don't. But with the tab system, I still have to check it all the time to avoid missing the ones I care about. So instead of decluttering things, I now have more places to click on to see what I have. There was something about them disabling Exchange support a few years back. This made emails arrive much slower in my inbox on my iOS native client. I can't remember the specifics of that, or if IMAP is now functionally equivalent, but I don't care anymore. And I just really would like to see my inbox and the currently-selected message at the same time. AFAIK, you have to choose between the message list or a single message; can't see both. ------- So, after typing all that, I just logged into it again to see if my complaints held up. It seems faster now. I discovered I can disable the tabbed inbox (probably always could). I can enable a right reading pane (probably always could), and change the theme to a dark background (again...). I got it almost looking like my Fastmail setup. But they're 2 years too late, and the font rendering is kinda crappy on my non-HiDPI external display anyway So I guess now the only reason I don't use Gmail anymore is because Google.
franga2000 6y ago
I don't suppose Fastmail has labels, does it? Labels are the one thing that's keeping me from switching from Gmail full-time.
- function_seven 6y ago
  I was going to reply "no", but I checked the settings just now and it appears it does! This is from the settings: Labels ====== Organize messages with: [ ] Folders: file each message into a single folder [ ] Labels: add multiple labels to each message Switch methods at any time. Folders will become labels and vice versa. I don't use labels, so I don't know if it's the same as how Gmail does it. But multiple labels per message is a thing it looks like.

dls2016 6y ago

What’s wrong with labels and tabs and important and starred and blah blah blah?

mcpeepants 6y ago

I'm in the middle of doing exactly this right now. I'm at the point where I have set up email forwarding from Gmail to Fastmail, but not switched any service accounts over to my new address. Even just this quarter-measure has improved the UX of email for me by roughly 573% It's not strictly the web interface that is better/faster/etc either. I get notifications from the Fastmail app for forwarded messages ~30-60 seconds before the Gmail app knows about the original.

tzs 6y ago

> Probably had to update 100+ sites with my new email address This is one of the main reasons I have my own domain. When I migrated to Fastmail, I just had to tell Fastmail that I wanted it to handle mail from the domain, set the MX records at my domain's nameserver to point to Fastmail, add a TXT record there for SPF, and add some CNAME records for DKIM. Fastmail gives instructions for all that here [1]. There was no need to update any sites with my email address because my address did not change. And there will be no need to update any sites if I ever decide to move from Fastmail to some other mail service, or to go back to running my own mail server. Even simpler, you can use Fastmail as your DNS provider. Then it is just a matter of registering a domain, and telling your registrar that Fastmail is your DNS provider. Fastmail takes care of setting up the mail-related DNS records then. Here are there instructions for this approach [2]. The only serious things I use addresses that aren't @mydomain for are things that I might need to receive email from in order to resolve problems with @mydomain. I strongly recommend this approach. [1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains-setup-mxonly.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains-setup-mxonly.h... [2] https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains-setup-nsmx.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/domains-setup-nsmx.htm...

nicbou 6y ago
I have my own domain and email host, but still ship it through Gmail because I like it. At least I know that I'm not tied to Gmail.

nicbou 6y ago

What's wrong with the UX? I haven't used anything else in a while.

function_seven 6y ago
I haven't used Gmail for a couple years now, but when I decided to leave, it was slow. Loading the page took awhile, sifting through emails felt sluggish, etc. Nothing like JIRA or other really slow sites, but just enough to be noticeable and annoying. Like I could "feel" the JS-heavy frontend doing more than it needs to in order to display a list of emails, or show a single one. Meanwhile it's nagging me on the left to add contacts to my GTalk, or Hangouts, or whatever they keep renaming that thing to. The whole tabbed inbox thing didn't really help me. There are some "promotional" emails that I want to see in my main inbox, but most I don't. But with the tab system, I still have to check it all the time to avoid missing the ones I care about. So instead of decluttering things, I now have more places to click on to see what I have. There was something about them disabling Exchange support a few years back. This made emails arrive much slower in my inbox on my iOS native client. I can't remember the specifics of that, or if IMAP is now functionally equivalent, but I don't care anymore. And I just really would like to see my inbox and the currently-selected message at the same time. AFAIK, you have to choose between the message list or a single message; can't see both. ------- So, after typing all that, I just logged into it again to see if my complaints held up. It seems faster now. I discovered I can disable the tabbed inbox (probably always could). I can enable a right reading pane (probably always could), and change the theme to a dark background (again...). I got it almost looking like my Fastmail setup. But they're 2 years too late, and the font rendering is kinda crappy on my non-HiDPI external display anyway So I guess now the only reason I don't use Gmail anymore is because Google.

franga2000 6y ago

I don't suppose Fastmail has labels, does it? Labels are the one thing that's keeping me from switching from Gmail full-time.

function_seven 6y ago
I was going to reply "no", but I checked the settings just now and it appears it does! This is from the settings: Labels ====== Organize messages with: [ ] Folders: file each message into a single folder [ ] Labels: add multiple labels to each message Switch methods at any time. Folders will become labels and vice versa. I don't use labels, so I don't know if it's the same as how Gmail does it. But multiple labels per message is a thing it looks like.