Life after Gmail: subdomain sorting and masked addresses make the Fastmail switch stick

A few months after publicly ditching Gmail, the author reports the move to Fastmail has held up well. Rather than forwarding old mail, they started fresh — a decision that turned out to matter, because Fastmail lacks Gmail’s automatic sorting of promos, notifications, and human mail. The replacement is subdomain addressing: each important account gets a unique or category-based subdomain, and mail to those addresses drops into a matching folder with no rules to maintain. Only about ten accounts needed updating, since the old Gmail address stays alive as a junk inbox.

Fastmail’s support for roughly 100 custom domains let the author add an address on their blog domain, which coincided with a noticeable uptick in reader replies. One practical gotcha for anyone using a custom domain: freshly registered domains get greylisted by receiving providers, so early messages to Gmail were delayed a few hours until the domain built trust — a day or two in practice. Masked email, which generates throwaway randomized addresses that can be toggled straight to trash, proved more useful than expected.

The broader takeaway is that switching providers is far less painful than people fear, especially when you move to an address on a domain you control — which makes any future migration nearly frictionless.