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by swozey 1696 days ago
Well that explains it, I literally switched from gmail to fastmail 2 days ago and it was going amazingly until last night when I couldn't load it. "Oh great, an unreliable service I just paid a year for" -- this makes me want to support them even more. Their customer support was fantastic. I didn't inquire about the outage, instead a dns issue I'd created.

If you're a heavy gmail user you should read this story of my last year (out of 10+) with them and IMO migrate off as soon as you can. I wish I hadn't used an @gmail as long as I did.

For some unknown reason, they won't tell me, G marked my google pay account as "possible fraud, unable to verify identity" at some point this year. No idea when, I realized it when CC expired and my 3 month old Google Fi account wouldn't pay its bill and it wouldn't let me enter a credit card to pay for any G service. My G services started to drop like flies once my card expired. They locked me out of Google Pay and won't let me enter a new CC to pay for subs/gdrive. I had to clear out the entire 50gb of my gdrive so that I could get EMAIL again to my now "free" gmail account which is hovering around its 15gb limit, that's how old it is. The real kicker; I can't contact support anymore because I'm not a "paying customer" who gets their "world class support."

The fun part of this was I was completely without a cell phone for a week until I got onto ATT. Support (live chat) was completely useless and just sent me to a page to send them a copy of my license and a utility bill. I did that about 4 times now and I still can't change CCs on my Google account to pay for things. And they still won't contact me, won't tell me what the deal is or anything. It's been about 6 months.

I was joking to a friend before I switched to Fi "watch this be a terrible idea, it breaks and I'm without a phone for a month and have nobody to fix it." Welp.

Anyway, I tried out Protonmail months ago and was completely unimpressed with its search, interface, etc. I had low expectations of fastmail (due to proton exp) but it's great, I'm really impressed. It threads conversations like you'd expect and I could actually find things I searched for, I sold a house in the middle of my Proton use and it was miserable keeping track of all of the emails/docs/etc I was getting/sending for some reason. I remember searching for important attachments and it finding 10s or hundreds of attachments that were my realtors signature picture of herself that showed up in every email.

Sorry for the tangent, be very careful of how much you rely on G services because this cliche horror story you randomly see on twitter/reddit completely happened to me. I'll never be able to stop using this @gmail account because I have so, so many things tied to it but I'm going to try my best to undo most of that.

My biggest fear now is that my G account gets completely locked and all of the things I use G to authenticate to will be lost. Undoing all that is a nightmare.

Use a custom domain for your email..

1 comments

I feel like I hear more and more of these horror stories. I’ve been looking to migrate my custom domain away from Google for a while and was also looking at Fastmail. I use an @gmail.com for everyday things because it’s widely recognised and easy to communicate to people over the phone or even face to face in a shop for a digital receipt.
About the domain, I recommend you get your own domain if you ever migrate off Gmail. That way you hopefully won't have to do it again anytime soon, even if you move to another provider
If you keep verbal communication in mind when picking a domain it’s fine. Get a five character one and it’s five syllables instead of gmails two.

Doing the thing where you try to sign up to services using servicename@yourdomain.com confuses people though. I stopped doing that after having to explain to people I receive emails to any address sent to my domain a few times.

I could see using uncommon top level domains being a problem as well.

I’m open to ideas! My poor imagination often seems to stumble across domains already taken :)
I went first initial, middle initial, first three letters of last name. If that doesn’t work for you I’d just try different combinations of your names letters until you get something available.
Mine is firstname@firstnameLastinitial.dev and it makes people stumble, especially the .dev, also it's kind of rare nowadays but some sites don't think thats a TLD.
Thanks for the reminder that one of my most critical domain names is still on google domains. I've started using porkbun for newer domains I get but I still have the main one on google. I need to get that off before they lock me out of the console or something ridiculous.