What's the advantage of fastmail compared to, for instance, the free iirc 5 mail addresses that gandi offers you when registering a domain name: https://www.gandi.net/domain ?

I have not explored what Gandi offers, but I can tell you Fastmail has a very user-friendly & intuitive interface for email, calendar, contact management, etc... a la Gmail many years ago. If not better. The $30/year includes all these services. And, I would think, since email is Fastmails bread and butter, it gets all the attention, as opposed to being an add-on/additional item that may not be top priority for a company.

And, to be clear, I have no stake in Fastmail, nor do I work for them, I am just enamored with their product. I wish I would have made the switch years ago.

Calendar and address book (with CalDAV and CardDAV) is another thing.

$30/year isn't a big deal for people who actively use email (especially if you work in tech industry were salaries are higher), but I can tell you for a fact that non of my close relatives (and I doubt many of my friends) would be willing to spend the money for seemingly no benefit.

They mostly use email for promotion/ad emails and registering for services/games/whatever.

I've thought about switching, but last time I tried I couldn't get my own domain working on the first try, so I just gave up. I think even I would just like to have my own domain in the email and wouldn't gain any other benefits.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Fastmail. I am curious if you or anyone else might be able to share any tips or resources for successfully migrating from something like Gmail to Fastmail.

How do you get everyone to update their contacts?

Also it seems like even if you forward form Gmail to your Fastmail account Google still knows your business.

I'm not trying to make a case for not doing it but rather would be interested in hearig what has worked for others.

It took a lot of time, honestly. But I really wanted to extract myself from Google and cleanup my email, so I did everything manually, sending emails to friends and family from the new account, getting rid of any old emails I absolutely did not need, and forwarding any archival stuff I could not let go of to Fastmail and/or exporting emails and docs to my PC.

That said, Fastmail does have an import function, but I did not use it when I migrated: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/migratemail.html

edit: word choice

He was talking about servers, not just clients, and not just free. I've been running my own email server for a couple of decades, and it's getting harder and harder over time.