Escaping from Google

Google has been pulling the plug on G Suite legacy free accounts, after 10 years. To me this meant having to pay a user subscription for each domain that I have there, or resort to weird domain aliasing tricks to get the job done. As such, I’ve decided on finding an alteranative suitable email hosting.

Landed on fastmail.com for now. Heard nice things about them, and tried the service out. The interface is clean, snappy and easy to use, possibly even more featureful than Google’s. Migrating both domains in took less than one hour, and importing existing mail was a breeze. Retained compatibility for all weird features I was using, like routing tricks, and an absurd number of aliases, and since I don’t rely in any of Google’s mobile applications, there was no change in how I use any of my email clients.

I do have some concerns around privacy, though, seen that Fastmail is an Australian company, and that their government has been passing anti-encryption laws. However, the truth is that email is inherently unsafe, and so I will use other methods of communication if I need more privacy. I did check protonmail.com as well, but the usage I make of aliases wasn’t really compatible with any of their plans.

I considered getting back on the wagon of hosting my own email server, but I don’t have that kind of free time anymore. Furthermore, the siege on indie servers seems to have only tightnened in the last few years, so I’d most certainly have to rely on a paid third party SMTP relay to send my email, which would bring us to square one in terms of how costly this would be.

I’m also moving every website account I have using my @gmail.com address to one of my domains. This has been a lenghty, many-month effort I’ve been doing on my spare time. It has also been great to purge some website accounts I haven’t used in a while.

I’m happy with this move. I’d have done it sooner knowing what I do now.