Leaving Gmail (Sort Of)

I recently completed a project I had been putting off for years: moving my business email off Google. Not because of a single dramatic issue, but because enough small reasons had accumulated that I finally couldn’t ignore them anymore.

This is the backstory of what pushed me to make the move, how I chose where to land, and a few things I learned along the way.

Why I Wanted Out

It was a combination of things, none of them catastrophic on their own.

Privacy concerns. Google’s business model is built on knowing things about you, and your email is a remarkably rich source of information. The more I thought about what was in that Gmail inbox: client conversations, financial details, personal correspondence, the less comfortable I was sharing it with Google. [Note: Google Workspace is separate from personal Gmail and does not use your data for advertising purposes.]

Price creep. I’ve been a Google Workspace customer for years, paying for a business email account for my domain. The price has gone up, and it will go up again. For how I’m actually using it, it started to feel like a bad deal.

The complexity of my own setup. I like receiving everything in a single inbox. Over the years I had built a forwarding arrangement that accomplished that but had become pretty convoluted. Mail from multiple accounts funneled into a single Gmail inbox through a series of forwards. It worked, but it was fragile, and troubleshooting it was not fun.

The legacy free Google account question. Years ago, Google offered free Workspace accounts for small organizations, and I was using one of those for a personal domain. Google has been on-again, off-again about the future of those accounts, and the uncertainty was worth resolving.

None of these was a crisis. Together they were enough.

Why Fastmail

Once I decided to move, I spent some time evaluating options. There are several credible email providers that position themselves as privacy-focused Google alternatives. I landed on Fastmail for a few reasons.

The company has a clear, longstanding privacy stance. They’re based in Australia, operate under Australian privacy law, and their business model is simple: you pay for the service, and they don’t mine your data to sell ads. They’ve been around since 1999, so this isn’t a startup, it’s a company that has been running email as a sustainable business for a long time.
The feature set is genuinely strong. Custom domains (including multiple domains on a single account), robust filtering, aliases, a clean interface on multiple platforms, and tools to import your existing email. For a business user, nothing important is missing.
Before committing, I actually read their Terms of Service and Data Processing Agreement (well, I had Claude read them). The privacy policy states that your information stays within Fastmail and its related companies, that data is only shared with carefully selected service providers when it’s essential for your email service. What’s notably absent is any reference to Fastmail analyzing your content for any purpose beyond delivering the service.
At around five dollars a month for a business account, it’s meaningfully less expensive than what I was paying Google. I can also stop paying for the Chrome extension (Simplfy) that de-clutters the Gmail interface.
Fastmail is clearly built with small businesses in mind, whereas Google Workspace is focused on the enterprise market. The feature set, the pricing tiers, and the support model all reflect that. Fastmail feels like it’s designed for someone running a small operation who wants professional email without an IT department to manage it.
Speaking of support, Fastmail has it. Real ticket-based customer support, where you can describe a problem and get a human response. Google’s support experience for small Workspace customers is, to put it charitably, inconsistent.
Fastmail is fast and lightweight — the kind of application that doesn’t make your computer work hard to run it. The Fastmail tab in my browser is currently using around 148 MB of memory. Gmail uses four times that. If you have an older machine, or you just want to avoid bloated software, it’s a difference you’ll notice.

A Word on Web Hosting Email

While we’re on the subject of where your email lives, I want to address something I see regularly with small business clients: using the email service that comes bundled with their web hosting account.

Most hosting providers include email as part of their packages, and it’s tempting to use it. It’s already there, it’s paid for, and it lets you have a professional address at your domain without signing up for anything else. I understand the appeal.

Here’s the problem: Web hosting is optimized for serving web pages. The email that comes with it is typically an afterthought — adequate for low-volume use, but not built or maintained with the same rigor as a dedicated email service. Deliverability (whether your outgoing mail actually reaches people’s inboxes rather than their spam folders) tends to be worse. Spam filtering is weaker. And critically, your email and website share the same infrastructure, which means a hosting problem takes down both at once.

Dedicated email services like Fastmail, Google Workspace, or Microsoft 365 exist because email is hard to do well. They invest in deliverability, redundancy, spam filtering, and uptime in ways that web hosting providers simply don’t prioritize. For a small business where email is a primary communication channel, it’s worth paying for a service built specifically for the job.

Making the Move

To be honest, email configuration isn’t for the faint of heart. It really helps to have some technical background or the assistance of someone who does. But the overall shape of the process is worth understanding.

I planned before I touched anything. I mapped out my current setup in detail before making any changes: every email address, every filter and rule, every account that might be affected. The planning phase probably saved me from several problems.

The Key Steps

First, I set up Fastmail fully before redirecting any mail to it. I got my domains configured, my old addresses recreated, contacts imported and filters rebuilt. I wanted Fastmail to be completely ready before any live mail touched it.

Then I changed the DNS records on my domains. These are the behind-the-scenes settings that tell the internet where to deliver email — to point my domains to Fastmail instead of Google. That’s the moment the switch flips.

After that, I imported my existing email. Fastmail has a built-in tool that can pull from a Gmail archive directly. My inbox went back to 2006 and totaled 157,235 messages. The first pass brought over 117,976 of those and then stopped. After checking with tech support, I restarted the process and the rest came through with no issues or duplications.

Finally, I set up forwarding of any mail that arrives in my gmail.com inbox to Fastmail.

Gmail isn’t gone, it’s just demoted. My personal Gmail address still exists and still receives mail, primarily from Google’s own services: Search Console notifications, Google Business Profile alerts, etc. Since it auto-forwards everything to Fastmail, I don’t have to check Gmail anymore.

A Few Things Worth Knowing

Some observations from the experience that aren’t obvious going in:

Your inbox labels don’t all survive the trip. Gmail lets you apply labels (which function sort of like folders) to your messages. When you import into Fastmail, messages that are sitting in your Gmail inbox sometimes lose those labels in transit, arriving unlabeled. Messages that were archived, on the other hand, come over with their labels intact. It’s a quirk, not a disaster, but worth knowing.

There’s no “never send to spam” filter. Gmail lets you create a rule that tells it to never mark certain senders as spam. Fastmail doesn’t have that filter option. The equivalent is adding those senders to your contacts — Fastmail treats contacts as trusted senders. It’s a different model but it works fine once you understand it.

Signatures work differently. In Gmail, signatures are configured seperately for mobile and desktop. In Fastmail, you set it once in the web interface and it applies everywhere.

The import takes time. A large mailbox can take days to import. Start it and don’t expect to rely on it immediately. With the break for consulting with tech support, mine took about a day and a half.

What I’m Not Giving Up

To be clear, this is a migration of email, not an exit from Google. I still use Google Drive, Google Search Console, Google Business Profile, and Google Meet for client video calls. Those tools serve specific purposes and the alternatives don’t make sense for me right now.

What I’ve done is taken the most sensitive, highest-volume part of my Google relationship — my inbox — and moved it somewhere I trust more. The rest of Google I’m using deliberately and intentionally, not by default.

Would I Recommend It?

For most small business owners, the honest answer is: it depends on why you’re considering it.

If you’re using Gmail for free and it’s working for you, the motivation to switch needs to be real, either genuine privacy concerns, or a desire to present a more professional custom-domain address to the world.

If you’re paying for Google Workspace and feeling the price, or if you have privacy or ethical concerns around using Google, Fastmail is worth a serious look. The pricing is competitive, the service is solid, and there’s something satisfying about having your email with a company whose business model you understand.

If you’re currently using your hosting provider’s email, that’s probably the clearest case for switching.

For me, it was the right call. It feels cleaner. And I sleep a little easier knowing that my inbox isn’t being used to profile me.

AI disclosure: This post was developed with AI assistance. I use Claude (Anthropic) to synthesize notes and conversation threads into a working draft, which I then rewrite, expand, and edit before publication. All content reflects my own views and judgment.