You might also consider registering a vanity domain to go with your Fastmail (or other) subscription. It’ll allow you to keep your email address even if Fastmail gets evil / bad in the future.
When I bought my domain, it was before Gmail was as ubiquitous as it is today. My email was hosted by a mom and pop ISP. Then I moved to Gmail and later to Fastmail.
Having my own domain is inexpensive, fun, and lets me maintain email portability over time. Namecheap is a good, easy registrar. I moved to them a while back and was impressed at their documentation and help during that domain transfer.
For those reading along at home, I want to strongly second your recommendation for people who really care about their e-mail (and, to some extent, overall identity on the Internet) to buy a custom domain.
Me, my spouse, and my teenaged kid all have our own domains. They're all hosted at Fastmail under a group account and we all can have as many additional addresses tied to our regular accounts as we want.
It does cost a bit more ($15/year/domain at Gandi, my preferred registrar) than just paying Fastmail directly and using one of their domains or sticking with the costs-no-money Gmail offering but it's been worth it in unexpected ways. My kid, for instance, is following in the "family business footsteps" and doing IT work for small clients. Since he had his own domain, he can have prospective clients e-mail him at "consulting@hisdomain.tld" My spouse uses a bazillion aliases for spam and inbound e-mail filtering without tipping off the spammers to the underlying e-mail address by having to use the + notation.
Someday, when my kid strikes out fully on his own, he'll be able to take his domain with him to wherever he wants (even host it on Gmail, if he prefers) without losing any of his addresses or other contacts. My domain has been around for over two decades and has been hosted in easily 20 different places, but my main e-mail address has remained the same.
Good advice. I assume I can forward my Gmail because that address has been my address for as long as gmail has existed. This is just like cell numbers. You attach one to everything in your life and transitioning is near impossible. Glad the government forced free number transfer. If only emails worked the same way.
I had a bit of concern about this as well when I moved off Gmail after 12 years. I did not import my mail in to my new service (ProtonMail) and can really only recall one or two times I’ve had to look at the Gmail archive in the past two years.
I think that, similar to cell phone numbers, people get very attached to these contact points and changing them creates anxiety. I happen to have changed both email address and phone number (after five years) recently and I think it makes sense to do once in a while. Otherwise these things become seemingly permenant identifiers and I have enough of those already (:
I recently moved email out of Google and it was surprisingly easy to migrate most services to the new address. The tricky ones are the email-as-username services.
Yes, I’d forward emails until you can get everyone trained over to using your new email address. I’ve done that in the past with mostly inactive emails that I got through professional or academic associations. Presumably Gmail still makes auto-forwarding reasonably easy.
Why not just leave the forwarding on? I still have my first e-mail address from the 90s forwarding all incoming mail to my current one, though it's very rare by now that anything comes.
I second Fastmail. Great company, great service, super fast (much faster than Gmail), and the import process is trivial. I've been a happy user for years and recommend them to everyone.
Seriously, migration is as easy as pointing your MX records to them and running their import tool. It takes ten minutes (I thought switching off Gmail would take ages, but no, literal ten minutes).
I think the problem here is that this is a Gmail-specific, non-standard feature, meaning there is no specification that allows to implement this in a reliable, cross-client way.
However, Fastmail is working on something similar with JMAP.
> However, Fastmail is working on something similar with JMAP.
They are! [1]
"It really is coming in JMAP! Come along to IETF in London to have a play, or I'll be pushing out links to updated JMAP Proxy in the next couple of weeks and you can play with it there :)"
Once they've got JMAP nailed down, they'd just need to support Gmail's native API [2] for retrieving rich message data for their import process.
Yeah, it was really easy. You basically give them IMAP credentials and that's it. They even do some clever stuff about putting your mail in the folders it should be when importing from Gmail, although now I forget exactly what.
When I bought my domain, it was before Gmail was as ubiquitous as it is today. My email was hosted by a mom and pop ISP. Then I moved to Gmail and later to Fastmail.
Having my own domain is inexpensive, fun, and lets me maintain email portability over time. Namecheap is a good, easy registrar. I moved to them a while back and was impressed at their documentation and help during that domain transfer.