It lets me track who is sharing my email address and gives me control over that (set up simple filter to automatically delete any email received at [email protected] when I start getting spam on it).
It’s been really effective - such a part of my day-to-day flow now I can’t go back.
The transition was pretty painless. I setup an email forward from gmail to my proton inbox using [email protected], every email I received at that address I’d go update my contact information with. After a bit, I was able to turn off the forwarding. Basically the classic strangulation pattern for microservice migrations applied to email.
I adopted Fastmail for my domain email, and it has been a good experience (I do know that Fastmail is a five-eyes company with all the related issues around privacy, and I researched alternatives for several weeks, but I guess in the end I was willing to trade privacy for ease-of-use, uptime and various other factors).
Now I am looking into getting away from other Cloud-provided backups such as Prime Photos, iCloud, etc., moving to self-hosted NAS storage.
I'm documenting everything here if you're interested:
For me ideally I would like to move to something else (even paid) just because someday Google deciding to block me for whatever reason scares me quite a bit after having everything for the last decade attached to this account. I would like to export my emails, switch my domain to the new service, and import everything - but I have no idea how realistic that will be yet.