Switching email providers is reasonably painless, fwiw. Set up forwarding, migrate mail when you can.

Even better if you set up the majority of your non-security-essential mail to be at your own domain, hosted by Fastmail/etc. Then you can easily change your email provider and your contacts don't even care. I've yet to implement this is in my own life, I just switched to fast mail - so I can't speak from personal experience on the domain portion of it.

NOTE: I mentioned non-security-essential email in reference to things like, your bank login or things that could threaten your life essentials. I say this because theoretically (and has happened before), using your own domain increases the attack surface area. My personal plan is to setup custom domain email with Fastmail, but still use the plain [email protected] for my security focused emails. The majority of my email will still be based on my custom domain for easy portability, but I plan to avoid that for my bank, for example... assuming fast mail lets me.

I can speak from experience regarding FastMail because that's exactly what I did. In fact, I migrated off a grandfathered Google Apps account with my custom domain to FastMail with that same domain. Yeah, it's a bunch of steps, but I'm very comfortable with making DNS changes. My wife and I have an account; it's worth every penny.

Also, FastMail allows for subdomain handling. I use this feature with nearly every site. You can have *@<YourFastMailId>.<YourDomain>.com route to <YourFastMailId>@<YourDomain>.com just as you'd expect. The way this handling works is even configurable.

Another very happy user of FastMail here, with our own domain. I initially was excited by subdomain handling, but switched back to only using my main account.

Using FastMail-specific features will lock you into this specific vendor once again, one of the main reasons to switch in the first place!

To be fair, how FastMail does catch-all delivery like this is standard and easily reproduced st any mail vendor (except Office 365) that supports catch-all, which is most of them. I use a catch-all address with FastMail that is @asubdomainichose.mydomain.org and it is the same subdomain I used with my previous setup before moving to FastMail.

Using a subdomain for catch-all is great because spammers can’t easily discover and flood the subdomain.

I'm in the weird Google Apps for Your Domain limbo right now myself. I've wondered what would happen if I switched to something other than GMail but kept my google account with that email address.

I know a long time ago you could set up a Google account using a non-GMail email address but I'm not sure if that's even a thing anymore. That's what I want though. Keep the email address with my own domain that I've used for 17 years and just have a regular old Google account using that email (and keep all my Google services and purchases associated with it).

Google has been absolutely terrible to Google Apps for Your Domain users (who were often Google's biggest supporters back in the day). They've been shoved into this weird second class status where their Google accounts only partially work with Google services. I completely regret ever setting it up.

You absolutely can set up a Google account with any email address you want.

https://accounts.google.com/SignUpWithoutGmail

I use Google services heavily at work, all on a Google account that was created with my work email address. And we are not a Google shop; my employer's email is self-hosted Exchange.

You can continue using your email address for your Google account even if you've got someone else handling the mail now. You can also sign up for a Google account with an email account from any domain or provider.

I switched to Fastmail years ago and it was the best mail-related thing I ever did. I was dreading the migration but it literally took ten minutes, switch DNS records (I have my own domain), run Fastmail's import, done.

I still can't believe how fast the UI is. It's by far the fastest web app I've ever used, and the same goes for the service in general.

Seriously, just ditch Gmail now, the alternatives are great.

Gmail is more than just mail, it's also integration with other Google services, like calendar. How does Fastmail fare in that regard?

FastMail supports CalDAV. I use my FastMail calendar with Thunderbird (Lightning) and on my iPhone; works great. They also support CardDAV for contacts. /satisfied FM customer since ~2008 or so

I had to purchase a CalDAV and CardDAV app (which were extremely cheap, mind) for Android, so it's not quite as plug'n'play there.

Why is jjawssd's (sister) comment dead? Davdroid works great and is free (as in beer and speech), though I would encourage people to donate if it's useful to you.

I wouldn't know, I have a self-hosted calendar. From the little I've seen, though, the calendar part of Fastmail is very good too.

Which self-hosted calendar do you use? would you recommend it? I'm in the market for a new one, but the current offerings that I've seen aren't great.

I use Radicale and find it great, but there's no UI, so you need to use whatever client you want that supports CalDAV (I use Lightning and the calendar on my phone). Lately I've been liking Nextcloud a lot, and that's a one-stop solution for lots of things, so nowadays I would recommend that if you have a home server or want to pay someone to host it.

Thanks!

I've looked at nextcloud, but IIRC, you have to have the whole suite installed, right? I'd love a way to just use the calendar function.

Yeah, you do. As I said above, Fastmail's calendar is very good too, and you can load your self-hosted/CalDAV calendars into it, so that's a good option.

Last time I tried fast mail they didn’t really support labels, only folders. Is that still the case, or is there a good workaround?

FastMail is standards-based, so it does not support labels. This is a good thing, and you should stop depending on Google-specific proprietary features. Even when I was on Gmail, I had a lot of issues with labels because the third party mail clients I needed to use didn't support them. The inbox tabs I ended up replacing in Gmail with rules/filters, that moved my social updates, for instance, to an actual social folder which worked properly on third party clients.

That being said, FastMail is also the leading developer/champion of a new mail standard called JMAP, which supports both labels and folders. I suspect, therefore, if it takes off, they may consider supporting labels themselves.

I used fastmail for a year and can recommend it, but if you’re European you should probably look up runbox instead as it’s housed in Norway.

That’s what I eventually switched to and it works fine.

> assuming fast mail lets me

It does let you, you can create as many aliases as you want (I'm assuming) on any of their or your domains.

Fwiw, I use Gmail exclusively in Firefox and have no problems at all. (And my machines are fairly dated.)

I've recently switched to MacOS's built in mail client with IMAP to Gmail, never have to wait for my UI to do something. So count me in as surprised how far gmail has gone downhill.

That's the thing that gets me. So many optimisations have gone into user interface software over the years. And some of the stories of early Apple work, like 'round rects [0]' are truly inspirational.

I wrote software using Cocoa about a decade ago (so I may be out of touch), and it was clear how much thought and effort had gone into making the user interface responsive. And it generally shows.

The idea that you would just give up on that precedence is baffling. And let's face it, email's important but it's not rocket science.

[0] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...

Never liked webmail anyways.

Thunderbird might be superior, but I really like that App because it's so light and fast.

What version of Firefox are you running? You are either exaggerating greatly or have other issues with your system. I run the latest stable release of Firefox and the performance of Gmail (particularly the features you mention) is fine. I’d be happy to upload a screen recording to verify.

He's not the only one. It's a recurring comment here on hacker news and a problem I've encountered as well, and I'm running the latest stable release.

Same here, I run the latest Firefox on both Windows and Linux. Gmail always takes at least 5 seconds to load.

If you experience a reproducible Firefox performance problem, please consider using the Firefox profiler add-on [1] to record a profile and file a bug with "[qf]" to the whiteboard field. These "[qf]" Firefox performance bugs get reviewed by engineers twice a week. Having a profile makes the bugs much easier to diagnose.

[1] https://perf-html.io/docs/#/

I think that Chrome also suffers on this front? But it's better at doing pre-fetching than Firefox is

This could really just be that part. I have a hard time imagining explicit sabotage of FF on the gmail frontend. The likeliest explanation is that perf testing and the like only happens in Chrome

The classic question to ask at this point is whether this affects you with a fresh install, or only once you have added all your extensions?

Firefox 63.0. Fibre internet connection. 3.1 GHz Mac, 16 GB RAM.

It's tricky to share a screen recording because there's personal information. But I just did two for my own curiosity. From a fresh load, once the "Loading Gmail" screen has gone away, it took 8 seconds and 11 seconds respectively from clicking 'Compose' to having a new window open.

Maybe there is variability. There are a million combinations of factors out there. I suppose as an engineer you make the trade off of "do I hope for the best case" vs "do I make something that works for a broad audience". The previous version shows that they can make something that works for my own anecdatapoint if they want to.

I have a lot of issues with google apps for business. Sometimes I have to refresh the browser 5-6 times before it will display any email in the primary inbox as well.

It's just horrible to use in firefox (in arch linux) and I'm currently looking for a new provider.

I might just go all in and use protonmail.

Protonmail is great but doesnt offer custom domains. If you need domains people mostly mention fastmail but i think there are far better choices like mailbox.org and kolabnow. Mailbox does not look like much from their homepage but it has awesome web client and it extremly reliable private provider thats in bussiness from 90s. I had account there for last 5 years without single problem.

This is actually not quite right, we have offered custom domain support since 2016 :)

https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/custom-domain-...

I've experienced both very fast and very slow with the new Gmail on the same machine with Firefox on Linux. It's currently faster than Chromium, but maybe tomorrow I'll see ten-second load times. Who knows? For the record, I use uMatrix (and uBlock Origin on easy mode for client-side cleanup), which might be affecting it somewhat.

>and the performance of Gmail (particularly the features you mention) is fine

>ten seconds to load your inbox

>16 GB, i7, SSD, 100 MB/s internet etc.

>fine

Exactly what I was thinking. How is that even close to fine? WTF?

I’m a little surprised to read this because Google Mail works fine for me in Firefox (ArchLinux). In fact it’s smoother than some of the Electron-based clients I’ve tried and less painful than trying to get push messages on Thunderbird working (sure, there is always IMAP but that requires regular fetches).

FIY, IMAP actually allows "push messages" via the IDLE extension. If you use K9 on android, it's enabled by default. I never used gmail, but I'd be surprised if the gmail imap server didn't support it (and I would dismiss gmail entirely if it didn't).

Is this a new thing? I don't recall seeing an option for that in Thunderbird (desktop version by the way; not the mobile / Android version) the last time I looked (~9 months ago).

IDLE is an old extension. Unfortunately Thunderbird is a crappy client.

What would you recommend then?

I don't use Thunderbird myself - was just following the discussion on from the OP who did use it. However I've yet to find a client I like so genuinely interested in any suggestions you might have.

I'm currently using mutt with "getmail" (which does support IDLE), which I can recommend -- it's an excellent client, but only if you're fine with tweaking.

I used TB until two years ago, but I gave up with it's unfixed bugs and quirks. I do prefer graphical clients, but not if they are clunky or buggy.

I used Silpheed and Claws for years, but Silpheed locks (or used to lock) the UI during fetch (unacceptable IMHO) while Claws has some critical bugs in the filter/rule logic that made me lose mail in several occasions by refiling into the wrong folder while processing a lot of messages. If you arent't a heavy filter user you might be fine with it though, I think Claws gets a lot of things right.

KMail wasn't bad when I used it, but it was too long ago to make an honest comment today.

Same issue here. Mails not loading, poor initial load time. That is with zero extensions enabled.

I am now using mutt/notmuch/mbsync to prevent having to go through their horrendously slow web interface, and eventually move away from Gmail completely (probably to ProtonMail or fastmail).

> A context menu does a multi-second HTTP fetch before showing.

Where? The only one I can trigger that does any kind of network is in the inbox, and that's only to get some icons. The text for the options is already loaded.

I'm talking about the RSVP box for integrated calendar invites. Not a right-click context menu.

Yup, that was all the push I needed to migrate all my Google stuff to fastmail.

I have the same problems on Chrome.

Ditto, they really need to work on speed on the new gmail.

Firefox on mobile or PC? I haven't experienced that on PC.

I've had the same experience. poor performance and display anomolies.