It’s been a few months since my post on leaving Gmail which sparked a lot of discussion on Hacker News. Email isn’t the most exciting topic in the world, but I figured I should give a little update on how things have been going after the move to Fastmail since so many people saw the original post.
The quick version is that I think I picked right with Fastmail. You can find cheaper email hosts out there. I’m sure they’re great too, but I’m really happy with Fastmail’s value considering all I’m getting.
I ended up starting fresh instead of forwarding my Gmail to my new address. This was definitely the right move for me for reasons I’ll get into.
My biggest concern moving away from Gmail was my inbox organization. Gmail does a pretty alright job of automatically sorting out promotional emails from notification emails from human-sent emails and so on. It’s the only reason my inbox has remained somewhat manageable over the years despite no effort on my part.
The solution for this that I landed on is subdomain addressing and so far it’s been keeping me even better organized than before. I’ve updated my important accounts with unique or category-based subdomain addresses, then any mail sent to those addresses automatically gets moved to a matching folder without me even having to create any rules.
If I had forwarded my Gmail to the new Fastmail address, organization would have been a whack-a-mole rule creation game.
Going and updating my accounts with a new address was easier than I was expecting. It does help that I’m keeping the Gmail address active as a junk inbox that I still occasionally check though, so I’ve only had to update the accounts that I actually care about. It wasn’t more than ten or so accounts, and I’m getting to the rest gradually as I remember about them.
Fastmail lets you connect something crazy like 100 domains to your account. That was a nice bonus for me because I was able to add a new address using my blog domain, something I’d been wanting to do for a while anyway.
This is probably a coincidence, but I’ve been getting way more email replies to my posts since I updated my contact page with my new address on my blog domain. I used to have a Proton address I created specifically for email replies listed there. It’s been a fun new motivator for blogging, and it’s also helped me remember to reach out when I read a cool post.
Since I’m talking about custom domains already, here’s something you might want to know if you’re thinking of making a move similar to mine. You’ll probably find your sent emails “greylisted” by your recipients’ email providers if your domain has been freshly registered — regardless of your email host. For example, emails sent from my brand new domain were getting delayed by a few hours when sent to Gmail addresses. Messages from my blog’s domain, which has been around for a while, were getting delivered immediately. It took a day or two for Gmail to fully trust the new domain and remove the delay.
This is something I’m using more than I thought I would. You can generate randomized addresses that route to your inbox so you don’t have to share your real address. It’s nice to use for services that you may want to easily block, since you can flip a toggle and start sending all mail received at a masked address to the trash.
There’s a bunch of other little things I’m liking about Fastmail too. Their apps are solid. Their documentation is good. I haven’t really found anything not to like yet.
The main thing I want you to take away is that the switch has been much smoother than I expected. If you’re thinking of making a switch too — to anywhere, not just Fastmail — I don’t think you have a whole lot to worry about. Especially if you move to an address on your own domain, then any other moves in the future will be even easier.
— JP