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Here are the steps I've been following:

1) Sign up for Fastmail.

2) Sync all mail from GMail account to Fastmail (via the Fastmail web UI; you grant FM access to your GMail data through OAuth - once sync is complete you can revoke this access).

3) Set up an auto-forward rule in GMail for all incoming mail to go to your Fastmail address.

4) Set up a rule in Fastmail to put all incoming mail sent to your GMail address into a separate folder (or labeled with a special label if you're signed up for Fastmail's label beta). Any time you get email in that folder, that's a task for you to either unsubscribe or update the corresponding account to your new email address.

I'm currently in month #10 of migration. Most commonly used accounts were updated during the first couple of weeks. But be careful that the tail of services that are still configured to use your old email address tends to be long, and in my experience those are some of the more important emails that you don't want to miss. The ones that are only sent once every couple years.

Also, it really helps if you've been using GMail with a personal domain name (e.g. through Google Apps). In this case migrating is a matter of pointing the MX DNS records to Fastmail's servers. Bonus points: Fastmail allows wildcard recipients, so if you prefer to have unique addresses for each service you sign up for, you don't even need to set up a separate xyz@example.com alias. Just register with <whatever>@example.com and you'll get all email delivered to that address in your inbox, and you'll be able to specify it as the sender's address if you decide to reply to some of those mails. Having a separate email address for each web service also makes looking up who leaked what on haveibeenpwned.com more fun.

1 comments

And most importantly:

0) Get your own domain and set up MX record to fastmail servers

This way if you ever migrate again, you will not need to do it all over again. One word of advice - keep your registrar login and emails associated with the domains _not_ on your domain, otherwise it is going to present a problem should you ever need to fix anything related to domains.

And keep addresses, phone numbers, alternative emails, payment details up to date with your domain registrar.

Recently my provider decided to randomly cancel my domain, getting it back from transfer with everything out of date was painful.

That is a great advice. One of the registrars has been sending verification messages for one of my oldest domains to the mail account that I do not use anymore and one day they stopped serving DNS for it. I had an access to the old mail account still but if I had not, that would have been an arduous process indeed!

Then you are pushing the problem to someone else to manage the domains right? How do you set this up?

OK, I think the other reply missed your question (if I am reading this correctly).

Basically, if you register your domain through namecheap, then after setting up email at *@ximeng.net, don't update your email address to be namecheap@ximeng.net when changing the rest of your accounts. Reason being, if for some reason there is a problem with the domain, you don't want your only means of fixing that problem to potentially be invalid.

Therefore it wouldn't be a bad idea to keep the account associated with your registrar still on the original Gmail address (or if you are really paranoid, create a new email address through someone like protonmail just for your registrar account).

Right, that is what I meant - you’re then pushing the risk to the management of that secondary protonmail or gmail account. So you basically always rely on a third party to manage the registrar account.

Oh I see. I agree that it is a risk, so - in the vein of another advice in this thread - if you have a co cern about third party email provider, update your domain records to another provider.

Not sure I understand the question.

I have to manage a domain and have a basic understanding of how DNS works, that is unavoidable.

DNS is a bit complicated to describe in short reply but on a very high level: say I register a domain example.com. Registrars usually give you an interface to manage DNS where you can set A records (association with IP), you basically put there 2-5 IP addresses of the DNS servers serving your domain. You can also setup MX records that are used to resolve mail servers for your domain. Setting up fastmail is simple: you tell them that you want them to serve mail for example.com and setup couple of MX records pointing to the Fastmail servers (they give you the full host names).

Sorry I wasn’t clear - basically my concern was that you still have a dependency on a third party email address.