Gmail takes about 30 seconds to load for me, FastMail takes about 4 seconds. The name doesn't lie. (Similarly, rather than loading page by page through big folders, I can near-instantly scroll through 10,000 email folders on the FastMail web UI.)

No ads or tracking in FastMail, it's spam protection is (IMHO, YMMV) better than Gmail's with an extremely low false positive rate.

And I get customer support from real live humans when I need help.

Right, just in a few minutes of playing around with FM, I can see it is true to its name - it's fast! How does one go about transitioning from gmail to FM when you have a lot of stuff going to gmail?

So, I knew I wanted to use my own email domain going forwards to prevent this problem in the future. I got [email protected] set up, and forwarded it to Gmail. Then for about a year and a half, anytime I looked at account settings anywhere I'd change it from my Gmail address to my own address. (But it all still ended up in the same inbox.)

When I decided to switch to FastMail in 2016, I repointed that address at FastMail and the vast majority of stuff moved with me... instantly. FastMail also has tools to import your mail archive using IMAP for what's already in your Gmail account.

Now that all of my mail uses my own domain name, if I ever needed to leave FastMail, it'd be painless... none of my mail is going to a FastMail address to begin with.

My strong recommendation is that people do this even if they intend to stick with Gmail for the time being, just to give themselves the future option.

Good idea, thanks for sharing. So I set up an MX record (on Route 53) to point to Fastmail and also set up DKIM by adding several CNAME records for fm1._domainkey.mydomain.com. FM confirmed pretty quick that those changes were made. The last bit is SPF config. I added a TXT record as per the instructions, but I keep rechecking with FM and it's not verified. Emails from FM currently show up as being sent "via messagingengine.com". Any ideas - do I just need to wait?

Scratch that, seems to be working now. Not showing up as "via messagingengine.com" anymore in spite of the fact that it still hasn't verified SPF. Looking forward to cleaning up my email by switching to FM!

On day zero, you can also tell GMail to start forwarding all mail to Fastmail.

This is also viable, though I chose to never forward from Gmail to FastMail. In my case, my plan started long before I picked a replacement provider anyways. Second, forwarding breeds complacency: I wanted to make sure my emails never were seen by a Google server, so I didn't want to not notice that an email was sent at my Gmail, not my own address. (I still occasionally check my Gmail account for stragglers.)

One thing is the general desire to separate your email from Google.

Apart from that I find their webmail to be faster and superior to Gmail. They also provide file storage with WebDAV access which I find useful for apps (like notes applications etc) which support it for syncing between devices.

Fastmail has a much nicer web interface, with many more features. It offers multiple email aliases and custom domain addresses. You can store files and images and so transfer them between computers. You can even set up simple websites. And, they aren't scanning your mail.

Usually that it is not owned by Google