It's a process. I just set up a filter on Fastmail that showed me all mail that was delivered to my @gmail.com address within the last two weeks.

Then I went through that list every now and then, unsubscribing or changing email addresses as they came up. At the moment it's mostly just mail from sites I've used Google OAuth for some reason and can't be bothered to change (or just plain can't - one site actually uses email as a primary key and are completely 100% unable to change it.)

> Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it was relatively painless

If you have your own custom domain, changing providers is pretty easy, IMO. In fact, the portability factor is probably the best benefit of having your own domain.

> Changing email providers sounds daunting, but it ... Probably took a few hours at most.

That does indeed sound as daunting as I feared, unfortunately.

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.

As an alternative to forwarding, you can also configure Fastmail to fetch mail from (and send via) Gmail like a mail client.

Did you migrate any old email?

The daunting bit (if you're using gmail or something where you don't own the domain) is getting everyone to update their address books. I took the same approach that you did and it took years before the forwarded emails died down, even with responding to all of them with "please use my new address". I got there in the end, though.

> 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.

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.

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.

Private Email (a Namecheap product) makes me wish I didn't move that account off Gmail. I'll take a look at Fastmail.

>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.

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.

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?

Google just has an order of magnitude or three more data to work with.

It's exceedingly difficult to compete against "free".

I made a preliminary attempt as well and had the same experience. I hope to renew with a better success.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Make a new account then?

I think the next paradigm shift in software is going to be LLM-inferred user intent. Serving just what you really want, when you want it. Currently all inside whatever interface the LLM provider offers, but soon whatever interface the LLM decides is appropriate. People won't use apps anymore. Your LLM will tell you which emails you need to address, and will automatically triage the rest (and action those which can be actioned autonomously). You won't navigate to Facebook. You'll ask your LLMs what your friends are up to. You won't navigate to TikTok. You'll ask the LLM for some funny videos (or whatever you're in the mood for). We won't need to structure data hierarchically anymore. Just dump it somewhere, an LLM vectorises it, and it's super easy to retrieve later in whichever domain one needs it.

The internet is about to undergo radical transformation.

This is basically what my take has been after chasing everything else for way too long. Though I've not moved back and Gmail honestly isn't something I can now move back to (and no tracking/etc are not the reason). I just wrote a too long comment and I realise now most of that you've said in your short comment.

Email for me is just a communication tool that the world still uses. Nothing else.

If you want to be tagged and tracked in that way then there is no better platform than Google services for sure.

but, you're going to pay either way (assuming you have a custom domain).