I forwarded email in Gmail, and move over forwarded emails as I can. Note that it's not been an easy process, it's still a massive undertaking changing all those emails.

I did think about switching to my own domain for emails though. I have previously avoided it because it adds a new vector of attack - i.e. if an attacker gets my domain, they have my email. With that said however, I can still keep a handful of important sites hooked up to my real email. Eg, my bank can go directly to fastmail, but randomsite.com would send emails to [email protected].

That would give me freedom to move my email where ever I see fit, with minimal changes. It seems tempting.

Thanks for your detailed response. You mentioned:

>"I forwarded email in Gmail, and move over forwarded emails as I can."

I didn't understand what you meant by moving over forwarded emails. Once you forwarded them aren't they available on Fastmail's IMPAP server? Or is there some other cleaning process you go through? Thanks.

(Not OP) OP probably means as emails are forwarded and appear in Fastmail, OP goes to the sender of the email and lets them know about the new email address (so they aren't sent to gmail in the future).

You can easily set up email forwarding in Gmail to forward all messages to your new address. After that it's just a matter of switching everything over to email your new address directly.

Generally it’s better to fetch email as not to trip additional spam filters. Many email providers support this, ex https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/fetchotheremail.html. If moving from gmail you may need to adjust security settings, which is probably another indication that Google isn’t a great teammate in this.

fastmail.fm is what I went to, years ago, for e-mail redundancy.

Fortunately I have two major, long-standing e-mail addresses, so I put one of them on fastmail.