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Posted by neogodless 18 hours ago

An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail(moddedbear.com)
250 points | 157 commentspage 2
zacwest 8 hours ago|
The real downside to subdomain addressing is that very few other providers support it. I think Migadu is the only one I could find. If you do end up needing to leave Fastmail, you might have to configure each and every subdomain as a unique email domain somewhere else. I would avoid it if you're starting fresh.
paxys 13 hours 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.

rationalist 13 hours 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.

starky 5 hours ago|||
Most of the sites I have accounts on did let me change my email. Looking at my password manager, about 1/5 of those that use email for login don't use my current email.

I wouldn't say it is easier than expected though, logging in, changing your email, confirming the change, and then making sure the password manager was updated was a bit of work.

kiwijamo 13 hours 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 13 hours 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.

LeapingLennie 12 hours ago||||
https://www.coles.com.au/ (the 2nd largest supermarket chain in Australia) and https://makerworld.com/ are two I've come across.
havaloc 8 hours ago||||
McDonald's. I wish I was kidding. https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/faq/can-i-change-the-emai...
ButlerianJihad 8 hours ago|||
My hospital.

Yeah, and they insist on using it for MFA.

Actually the tech support did change what I use to sign in, but the patient record/profile is separate, and not user-serviceable.

I tried twice to change it, but they were able to send me on epic bureaucratic fools errands; I had to give up!

sodapopcan 9 hours ago|||
I was able to change it on every single service I use except for a well known Canadian pizza chain.
coffeefirst 9 hours ago|||
Oh yeah. I did this in 2021. I got the list out of 1Pass and just did them in small batches. I hit a few that wouldn’t let you change but nothing important.

I had all the important stuff done in a week.

Marsymars 13 hours 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.
anonthrownaway 13 hours 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.
jim180 3 hours ago||
Shameless plug - I’ve made an app for Apple platforma, that gives easier access to masked mail (from menu bar on macOS)

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/secret-inbox/id6462335670

neogodless 18 hours ago||
Related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375016 Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left (moddedbear.com) 75 days ago, 828 comments

alexmuro 8 hours ago||
I generally am very satisfied with fastmail but I do have a hard time getting it to learn what is spam, maybe I'm missing something.
k4runa 5 hours ago||
Fastmail is great because every time I get a new startup idea I can set up emails for each domain name I buy and it all goes to the same inbox.
tomcam 5 hours ago|
If you reply to an email, does it use the “primary“ domain name or does it use the same domain it was sent to?
grsmvg 5 hours ago|||
Primary domain name. You pay for the inbox, not the domain.
scronkfinkle 30 minutes ago||
Maybe I am misunderstanding but I don't think this is true. Indeed you pay for the inbox, but it's not the primary domain. You can reply from any of the email addresses you created (which doesn't cost extra) and it automatically sets the FROM to be the email it was received on
gorgonian 5 hours ago|||
If you have Fastmail configured to send from that domain as well, it will automatically reply from the same address the email was sent to. You can pick which address to send from, of those you have set up.
tomcam 19 minutes ago||
That’s great. Thank you.
frereubu 14 hours 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 13 hours 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.

frereubu 1 hour ago|||
Fair point, but my desire is for "good enough" rather than perfect. I know my emails go into other systems, it's more about feeling that my inbox is hosted by a company solely based in a jurisdiction where it can't be compelled to do anything by the US government. It's also a matter of principle - I want to move as much of my infrastructure as I can away from US-based services because I don't trust things not to get worse there.
0xbadcafebee 12 hours ago|||
The bigger issue isn't a privacy one, it's a security one. For many people, if you can get access to their email box, you can account-reset your way into any other account they own. So if an authoritarian state compromises your account (because they control the servers), there goes your everything
armadyl 10 hours ago||
A lot of people seem to ignore this point when it comes to Proton’s E2EE of emails at rest. It wasn’t even a year ago when the US government subpoenaed a Pennsylvania man’s entire Gmail inbox because he wrote a letter to a DHS attorney. This wouldn’t happen with Proton. It would definitely happen with Fastmail.
0x262d 5 hours ago||
wow, hadn't heard about this until now. article: https://archive.is/J9Ant

correction that it says:

> The investigators who questioned Jon told him Homeland Security couldn’t obtain his emails, documents, photos or other content with an administrative subpoena, he said, but the breadth of what federal investigators did ask for shook him.

> Among their demands, which they wanted dating back to Sept. 1: the day, time and duration of all his online sessions; every associated IP and physical address; a list of each service he used; any alternate usernames and email addresses; the date he opened his account; his credit card, driver’s license and Social Security numbers.

However, what information the US government can or can't get from tech companies seems like a moving target.

lazide 5 hours ago||
One thing to consider - they even got the swiss banks to roll over and cough up data on their numbered accounts. This was a decade+ ago.

So good luck.

kay_o 13 hours 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.

frereubu 1 hour ago||
Thanks.
nottorp 6 hours ago||
They're also headquartered in Australia, which is very friendly, privacy wise, with the US isn't it?

If you're not in one of those places and you want to move from gmail you might as well pick a safer jurisdiction.

egorfine 3 hours ago||
I'm using Fastmail for about 15 years and this is one of the services I'm extremely happy with. Definitely recommend!
muhammadusman 13 hours ago||
I moved to using Fastmail as my primary over 7 years ago and I still use it as my main email address but I had hoped I could get rid of my gmail but instead it became a catch-all junk inbox similar to OP's gmail. The main issue is that so many websites use Login in with Google as a way to sign-in that I just had to keep my gmail logged in most of the time.

So instead of "moving away from Gmail to Fastmail" it's more like "using Gmail and Fastmail" for me.

Hard_Space 6 hours ago|
Switched to FastMail two years ago. Mostly, it's a pretty boring service, which is exactly why I'm willing to pay for it!
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