Yes… I pay $20 a year for the whole family
I use and love Gsuite with my company domain email.
If Google locks me, I can move the email to Zoho, Office 365 or any other 3rd party email solution within minutes.
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I’m with you, TJ!!!
I primarily use the gmail for junk but I am not exactly invulnerable.
I appreciate the warning!!!
I was locked out once. I couldn’t recall my password. I didnt know what I was going to do. But the next day it was there working fine.
They do tell you about the privacy to your account. They are even into Android cell phones!
I own my own email address, but Google have hosted it for longer than I can remember. OK so far.
Then there’s Apple. Apple doesn’t have random rules that decide to lock you out, they simply make do with shoddy software that might stop everything working. Then again, you do get to call someone and that is FUN! If you’re lucky, they will solve your problem with one or even a few phone calls. If you’re unlucky it will go TO ENGINEERING. Then, even if they acknowledge there is a problem and even if they promise a fix, they won’t tell you when that fix is coming. They won’t even tell you when it has shipped.
But then… no email service I have tried (there have been a few) has come close to the utility of Gmail which, unlike anything iCloud based, does just work 99.99% of the time. iCloud’s percentage? I can’t do the maths but my iCloud Drive issue is into its 21st month. Still… there’s a fix coming…
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Yes, I expect that you’re better off than someone who is using a free account with Google.
At the risk of sounding trite, the best thing to do is get started.
Remember, you don’t have to turn off your old account and it’s not going to start bouncing emails immediately. So you don’t have to do this all in one day, or one week, or even one month.
(For ease of discussion, I’m going to talk as if you are moving from Gmail to Fastmail, because that’s what I did, but the process is pretty much the same no matter what you are moving from and to. I’m also going to assume that your new domain is “jaketheo.com” just for the sake of discussion.)
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Get your domain working at “Fastmail” (new location destination). Make sure it has a rock-solid random, unique password and two-factor enabled.
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Most email providers will let you create an ‘alias’ or use “plus addresses”. For example, if your email address is “jake@jaketheo.com” you might also be able to receive emails as “jake+gmail@jaketheo.com” or just “gmail@jaketheo.com”. Create one of these aliases or test to see if you can use the “plus address” system. Let’s assume “jake+gmail@jaketheo.com” for the examples going forward.
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Once you know it’s working, create a filter from ‘Gmail’ that will send a copy of all of your incoming messages to your “jake+gmail@jaketheo.com” address. Why?
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Because you can easily filter all of your “jake+gmail@jaketheo.com” emails to a specific folder. When you find a new email in that folder, you know that’s a sender who needs to be updated.
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Also, from that point on, you will have a ‘backup’ of all of your email messages sent to ‘Gmail’ at ‘Fastmail’. You can have ‘Gmail’ keep a copy, just mark it as read so you’re not reading the same email in two places.
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Now, think about those 250+ addresses, and find the small subset of them that are connected to anything financial (bank, PayPal, credit cards, Amazon, Apple ID). Any account you would be horrified if you were locked out of or if someone else was able to access, that’s your starting point. There’s going to be a lot fewer than 250. There are probably fewer than 25. Change those first and update them in 1Password. You can do that in a couple of hours on a weekend while you’re watching TV. Getting locked out of your credit card account is much worse than getting locked out of your Netflix account.
Create a new “signature file” for jake@jaketheo.com that says something like:
Please note! Effective immediately, I am no longer using my old email address
jaketheo@gmail.com. Please update your address book/contacts with my new email address or else I may not receive your email.
Ok, yes, technically it’s very close to a lie, because you haven’t blown up your old email address, but you need to get people’s attention that this is something they need to act on now otherwise, they’ll put it on their “someday/maybe” list which is another word for “probably never”.
Start sending that out at the bottom of all of your new emails. People who care will see it and act accordingly. A startling number of people use autocomplete and will keep sending emails to whatever address comes up when they start typing your name. But most people will just ‘reply’ to whatever address you email them from, so as long as you email them from that new address, they’ll eventually catch on, whether they realize it or not.
And if they do send an email to your old address, you’ll see it in the special folder on your new ‘Fastmail’ account, and you can email them back and say “Hey, I’m glad I saw this, but just as a reminder, my new email address is jake@jaketheo.com.”
You probably don’t need to tell all of your contacts this information. Like the small handful of ‘crucial’ accounts, you want certain people to be sure to have this information. For the rest, you can tell them the next time they email you and you respond from the new account with the new “signature” at the bottom of the email message.
Do you really need those? I mean, maybe you do. Maybe you delete all unimportant emails and have thousands of important emails left over. But the majority of the email that I get is not all that useful after a week or so. There are exceptions of course: software licenses, epic poems from your high school sweetheart, that really funny email that your friend from college sent.
Again, unless you plan to shutter the old account, you’ll still have them in that account. What would be the worst thing that would happen if you lost access to them?
Personally, if it’s in my “Keep” mailbox or it’s got an IMAP “flag” set, it’s an important email. Most of the rest are not.
But let’s assume I’m wrong. Let’s assume that you need 100% of all the old emails that you have. You have two options:
A. Download and archive them locally using something like EagleFiler or Horcrux or Mail Archiver X.
B. Transfer them to your new account.
Horcrux has a feature to help you do that. Your new mail service probably has a way to do it too. It probably won’t require you to sit there and drag thousands of emails from one IMAP folder to another. It will probably be something you need to setup and then let it run.
Q. How do you eat an elephant?
A. One bite at a time.
(Note: Please do not actually eat an elephant.)
I hope some of this was helpful. The hardest step is the first one. Once you get started, it’s much easier to continue. Until you get started, you can’t make any progress at all.
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Word of warning for the (not poorly reasoned) word of warning: This is a transference of risk from a hosted email provider to a domain registrar. It transforms the risk from one of losing access to an email account to one of losing control of a domain.
I think it’s good advice for savvy people, but I’ve seen far more people mess up with domain retention (or having their domains stolen) than I’ve seen lose access to an email account from a well established provider.
For very important services, it’s vital to understand account recovery processes and how to deal with their failure long before you need such information.
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This is a good point, too.
Once you have your own domain, you need to make sure that you don’t lose control over the domain or the DNS for the domain.
The major difference is that the risk factors are things you can control, rather than being at the whim of a provider. But you do have to control those risk factors.
This should be within the realm of those who are (or aspire to be) power users but a good warning nevertheless, from the aptly named @ACautionaryTale 
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I own that exact domain so that was a very accurate assumption!
All of it was helpful, thank you! I’ve bookmarked your post and now it’s time to roll up my sleeves!
(The poor elephant has no chance)
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And making it even worse, Google doesn’t even have a customer service line or email you can call. You’re 100% at their mercy and have no ability to plead your case.
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@tjluoma excellent write up mate. I will forward it to a certain family member who I know will be inspired to start using our family domain.
@MarkDMill I would have to disagree with you because that is simply not true. You can get support from Google through phone, chat and email. For personal gmail account you need to be a subscriber to google one:
Use “Transfer Lock”, pay for your domain 10 years at a time, and any time you get a piece of postal mail or an email regarding your domain go to the domain registrar’s website manually and check it out. That covers almost all of the bases. 
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Hmm, perhaps that is possible now–I remember years ago hitting a problem and looking fruitlessly for any way contact a human being at Google. But maybe that was my error–thanks for the correction!
I had the same problem when I was locked out of my Gmail account years ago. I’m glad to know there are options… but of course how many people are using Google One vs plain ol’ Gmail?
This is the trick for me, too. Ultimately there’s always a risk of losing access or control:
- Something can go wrong with your email service provider (e.g., Gmail can lock you out of your account, but the same is true for any other provider); and/or
- Something can go wrong with your domain.
Arguably there’s more risk in relying on a domain provider without a third-party service. In this sense, keeping an @serviceprovider account and using it as a backup email is not a bad idea. (Many places—banks, schools, etc.—will let you provide multiple email addresses for this reason.)
I think the fundamental takeaway from this warning you’ve posted is to put as many layers down as possible so that anything going wrong doesn’t mean you’ve lost it all.
With that in mind, I’d suggest another layer. This may be obvious, but it is worth mentioning: use an email app that downloads your messages so you can refer to them offline.
So many people use the web interface for their email on their desktop. Don’t do that! If you lose access, you can’t pull up the messages anymore. But also, if you lose internet, you can’t pull up your messages anymore.
This is in addition to a good backup strategy, of course. If you have offline email, a good backup strategy will back those up too.
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I recently moved from gmail to Fastmail using my personal domain. In doing so, I setup forwarding from my Gmail account to a folder in Fastmail, then I proceeded to update my email address for all of my important accounts first (banking, insurance, etc.) 1Password actually made this process rather easy by prompting me to update the login associated with each site as I logged in and changed my address. Going forward, as I catch important email coming into the Gmail folder in my Fastmail account, I can go to each site individually and update my email address. That means that the spam / junk mail that has accumulated in Gmail, as a result of my Gmail address being spread across the web for 15 years, can essentially act as a giant spam folder and only the important services get updated. Fastmail also allows you to setup wildcard email addresses, so you can setup distinct email addresses for any online service you use, which allows for more robust rules and has the added benefit of knowing who is selling your data.
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I don’t use the Gmail app, I pull everything into Apple Mail. I presume in that case, if the worst case happened with my Google email accounts, I’d be covered based on your advice. Am I correct?
Yeah, you’ve got it. Mail downloads your files. (They should be downloaded forever, unless I’m mistaken and there’s a preference control for it somewhere… I’m not a big Mail user!)
I imagine Gmail’s mobile app also downloads messages, so my warning is mostly for anyone who relies on the Gmail web interface on desktop machines.
Whatever you’re using, you can its offline abilities by turning on airplane mode then trying to look up an old email.
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Actually, a question that’s right on-topic for this thread (sorry for the double-reply):
I’m playing with the idea of a Fastmail subscription as I explore the different service alternatives (linking that thread again, for your convenience: iCloud Mail, Fastmail, Gmail: what are the differences? The Email Service Feature Comparison Table).
Do folks think it’s better to:
- Create an account (e.g.,
ryanjamurphy\at\fastmail.com) with the service, then add my own domain to that account; or - Create an account with Fastmail with my domain?
I am leaning towards the former, but I don’t know if it matters…
I would start with your email address based on your own domain.
The only reason I say this is that Im pretty sure Fastmail recycles email address using their own domain I.e. Fastmail.com
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