I migrated my mails from Gmail to fastmail.com two years ago and never looked back. Imported all my google mail, so I did not loose anything. What I love about fastmail is their pure focus on mailing. It’s a beautiful product with many useful features. For instance you can create as many alias names as you like (although I heard there is a limit, but I haven’t hit that yet). I create an alias for any new website I sign up. I also have aliasses that serve as a base-name (for instance mypurchases@fastmail.com) and can be used multiple times like so for instance: amazon@mypurchases.fastmail.com.

Edit:

I am also using my personal domain instead of @fastmail.com You never know when / if you need to leave a service provider again, and you don‘t want to change your email address again.

FastMail is also one of the last providers with a push notification certificate for Mail.app, last I checked - which makes it feel right at home on iOS.

I'm sold. If I pay $3/month can I migrate all of my dozen Google accounts? I have an email for each product in my portfolio and switching back and forth.

I would gladly pay a subscription fee if it means Google isn't reading my emails to sell me ads.

I had four gmail addresses. Imported a ton of emails from these accounts into my fastmail account. The alias feature is something I haven’t seen anywhere else, at least not so polished. Previously I hated signing up with my personal email address on sites I‘d use only once to shop for bicycle parts or whatnot.

can you explain more about the alias feature? what makes it special? Because I think this could be a killer feature as I have that exact same problem when signing up to websites

Very easy: After signup you go to Settings > Users and Aliases. There you see a list of your alias names. And you can create a new one with a click. Underneath the alias name you select which email address to forward to (I manage several email addresses for my family). That‘s it. You can even setup aliasses in a way that you can send messages from them, so they do not serve for receiving emails alone.

Their service is excellent. You get answers from real human beings within 24 hours (unlike trying to get help for Gmail; won‘t work).

damn thats really all I wanted. Just a really easy way to receive, send email from an temporary address that isn't from a free website.

I'm most impressed by people who can quit Google maps. If I'm on the highway driving, or if I have to get somewhere in a hurry or it's an urgent situation, I just cannot trust another platform.

One time my friend was driving and he asked me to navigate. The exit was coming up, meanwhile I'm stuck trying to get OSM+ to understand what rounte we are on. That was an unpleasant few minutes. Despite trying to stick with it, such moments kept coming up again and again. It made me realise that Maps is mission critical to me.

By contrast, Gmail was easy. Fastmail ftw, forward all google mail to it, and the fact that most of my email use is work email, which is on its own domain anyway.

See I find driving to be about as good with Apple Maps and Garmin maps as Google Maps. (And they don’t have ads like Google Maps.) The stickiest point of any Google product for me are the Google Maps reviews. Yelp isn’t really a thing in Canada, so since the death of Urbanspoon, if you want restaurant reviews, Google Maps is it.

I think things might be better across the Atlantic than here in Europe wrt Apple Maps. I can't confirm since I don't have Apple Maps on Android. I agree, though, that the reviews and the opening hours are very useful.

Restaurant reviews are useful... That sounds a lot like Google's recent advertising push...

I wholeheartedly agree. When I had 25+ minutes added to a trip while I needed to use the bathroom because OSMand told me to drive off a bridge, I just gave in :/

I use Apple Maps. I find it’s better for driving because it tells you speed limit etc.

Maybe location dependent but google map here (Bay Area) also has speed limits.

I've been a long time fan of Android but I still cannot be forced to swap it for the Apple ecosystem which really is no better than Android.

What I would like is a hardened, privacy focused distro of Android that is guaranteed to be independent from Google. Sounds like a tall order but here's hoping Samsung will come up with their own mobile OS although how unlikely this will be.

I’ve got a bunch of older Android devices (mainly Samsung s3, S4 and s6s) that run lineageOS. Some of them are completely degoogled, but it makes life really difficult to use them as “regular phones” without access to google play store. Way too many apps most people want to use are not available any other way.

Samsung have not demonstrated being any more user friendly than google in my opinion. My S6Edge ran out of OS updates about 3 years after if was released. I have iPhones several years older that are still getting updated to the latest iOS. And there’s a whole bunch of crap undeletable Samsung software on their devices that I trust even less that Google’s apps.

I tried this for 2 years. Eventually I ended up with 2 phones - the google store one (with a burner number) and the non google store one. Things like being able to order uber (you used to be able to order on the mobile browser) made life difficult. Eventually I gave up.

Current strategy is to only have a burner google account on the phone and rotate gmail accounts every year (on phone refresh). Keep personal google accounts off the phone (using linux desktop) with a vpn and in firefox with privacy settings.

Use containers on the browser - never mix google, whatsapp facebook and other activities.

Use a phone registered in EU for privacy settings. Use a paid burner gmail account (again I figure it is better for privacy).

Annoyingly I also need an iphone for i-message with family members.

I would never trust Samsung for this. You'd still end up using a closed OS, just one published by a different company. And in this case the company you're substituting has an appalling privacy record. Vastly worse than Google