I've used a custom domain + gmail for the last decade. Earier this year I got sufficiently spooked and decided to switch email.

The migration to fastmail.fm , including a decade of old mail messages, was flawless (if slow, but it's a lot of data!). I highly recommend this route.

Did you upload all the messages from your client to fastmail or were they copied directly from Google to fastmail?

You just connect your Google account in the Fastmail settings and they set everything automatically

I wonder how long this will last until Google finds a way to prevent the migration out...

From what I can tell, it just uses standard protocols like IMAP (at least, it did when I moved from a non-gmail provider to it).

Gmail uses IMAP, but there are rate limits that seem to have been implemented recently: https://support.google.com/a/answer/1071518?hl=en

The rate limits won't stop someone from eventually migrating out, but it might take a while.

GDPR specifies the right to data-portability. In Europe services have to provide data in a machine readable, commonly used format for export.

(For just this reason.)

And that's why I think the GDPR is one of the best things the EU has ever done.

Thank god for GDPR. Shame on me for thinking that this kind of regulation was dumb

You're excused, based on the useless and annoying cookie notice law.

All the better to get out while you still can!

what other providers did you look at other than fastmail. Is there a TOS that might lead fast mail to lock one out?

> Get your own domain from a non-google registrar

The funny (er, scary) thing is I was actually thinking of switching to Google registrar for my domain after namecheap messed up their CNAME records and dropped a few days of emails (I already use GSuite). Google reliability, the promise of fair pricing and a free WHOIS protection was very attractive to me.

After this, fuck that.

Google has so many services that you could lead a reasonably diverse online life without going to another provider, without the accountability that typically comes with that sort of power. They really need to be checked.

Would forwarding continue to work if your account is disabled or terminated? That doesn't seem likely?

I wish there was a way to pay for Google (such as Google One) and it meant Google wouldn't ban your Gmail account. Period. However from reading HN anecdotes, it seems like they don't care about you (even if you're a paying customer). I realize this could feel like extortion, but it would be well worth the peace of mind.

> Would forwarding continue to work if your account is disabled or terminated? That doesn't seem likely?

No, but the idea is that you can point the domain at a new host and at least keep receiving future email, so that you don't lose the ability to password reset accounts, etc.

As for

> I wish there was a way to pay for Google (such as Google One) and it meant Google wouldn't ban your Gmail account

There's a reason I pay, like, €50 a year for my email hosting instead of gmail's free mail. I want to be able to actually reach a human when it comes to problems with my email instead of Google's customer service void.

That's why you need to own your domain. When they lock you out, you setup a new mailbox elsewhere and point your domain to it. That covers new mail. And the archives are still accessible because you've been forwarding mail all along.

you seem knowledgeable, is there a way to do this with every possible email address at your domain? Forward them all to that single other box?

Yes, and (for example) Fastmail allows you to do that very easily. So does Google if you prefer to keep the Gmail interface & are willing to pay for G Suite.

And, if your mail client’s UI allows, you can even send from <whatever>@yourdoma.in to avoid disclosing your “real” address when you reply.

My favorite use-case: you sign up for foo.com with [email protected]. Then foo sells their contact database, and now you’re getting viagra spam all day. Ok, just add a filter to auto-trash anything addressed to foo@, and the problem is solved.

Not op, but what you described is called a catchall address. Easily done with custom domain. Basically a regex for *@domain.tld, every mail sent to (anything)@domain.tld will arrive at a preconfigured mailbox, say [email protected] etc

I do a takeout every time I see one of these Hacker News posts :(

Check the archive, a lot of times Takeout has given me junk data, and I was spooked enough to manually back up a lot of messages with a web scraper...

I do this but there are pros and cons to every solution. I once forgot to renew a domain and let it expire completely. It wasn't one that I used very often but a few accounts used it and someone else registered the domain. Now they could very easily gain access to my accounts if they wanted to before I get around to fixing it.

Another problem is that for many years, a user will have been signing up to accounts with their gmail email address. If this address is locked, password resets become impossible. I'm hoping that address reuse never becomes a thing.

> I'm hoping that address reuse never becomes a thing.

FYI, it already is for yahoo. I got lucky that they _only_ deleted all my emails after I didn’t log in for a while, and nobody else managed to hijack the account while I was gone and password-reset all my services...

Just wondering if there are any trade-offs to consider if I were to use Google Workspace (G Suite) instead of a provider like ProtonMail.

Using a custom domain with Google's paid service seems like the least drastic change and you get to keep using all their services. Maybe the support won't be as good, but the products and integrations are probably better than any other provider.

And as long as you do regular backups of your Google data, I think this seems like a good solution.

I had a commercial GSuite for an organization I was running. A Google bug wiped my domain and all my data. Support was automated systems all the way down.

I think the downside of Google is this happens about 100x as often as other organizations.

Google security also cares about Google's security, not your security. Your odds of account compromise go way up dealing with Google.

I have always used a custom domain for this exact reason. I ran my own mailserver for over a decade but that got increasingly harder with DKIM, SPF, etc and the big boys (MS, Google) blocking more and more aggressively. I moved everything over to Soverin.net last year and I'm very happy wwi them.

Who do you recommend instead of Google Domains?

I’ve used Namecheap for many years without issue. My favorite feature is catch-all email forwarding for domains so you can use any number of email addresses for logins.

E.g. [email protected]

Namesilo has been both cheap and reliable for me in the last few years.

Cloudflare Domains is great for conventional TLDs.

Namecheap