Stephen B

I’ve been meaning to write up something about Jeffrey Zeldman’s excellent recent blog post Nothing Fails Like Success for a few weeks now. @Manton said some smart things about it (a couple of times actually) and so did @brentsimmons. I’m not sure I have too much to add, but I think it’s a really good read, and an important read.

I’ve been thinking about some of the ideas in the article for a while now. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is how much I want to see more open standards win out on the web. For example, I know that lots of folks complain about email these days, but in my opinion it’s a pretty amazing triumph that it’s still so used and that it’s a standard that’s not controlled by any one company. So far all of the supposed replacements for email I’ve seen put forward are proprietary and rely on one company or another. (I like Slack, but I don’t really feel like it fills the same place in my life that email does and I wouldn’t really want it to anyway).

Another such technology is RSS and Podcasts. So far nothing has managed to usurp the open architecture that Podcasts use, (Though it seems like a lot of folks are trying lately) and I’m really hoping all those attempts will continue to fail. I don’t ever want to find myself in a situation where I have to subscribe to a service (or even worse, several services) just to get most of the audio content I want. I don’t mind paying for things, (I’m a member and supporter of two different podcasts networks) but I don’t want everything to be locked up behind one or several proprietary services. I think the current state of things is pretty good. Some things can certainly be improved, but podcasts work as they are, and they don’t need big VC money coming in to ruin everything.

I like the idea of more technologies working on open standards that anyone can use and that allow people more control and choice over how they interact with the web. I’m really interested in all the work that’s going on with ActivityPub (the technology behind Mastodon), and I really hope more things get built on that and other open federated technologies. I want people to have a choice of what clients they like best, what companies they trust, and the ability to run things themselves (this was part of my recent thinking in moving to an email address at a domain I own if they want to. I’m tired of the same few companies running everything and keeping things within their own proprietary silos. There are lots of smaller companies trying to do things in a more open and person-centric way and I hope more and more of them catch on.

I’m excited to be using micro.blog for my blog, here at my own domain, instead of relying on Facebook, or Twitter, or Medium or whatever. If I decide I don’t like micro.blog anymore I can take my content and go somewhere else, and keep the same url (brandonshire.blog) so the rest of the world can just going to the same place for my blog.

Anyway, this is getting pretty long and kind of rambly so I’ll wrap it up. The bottom line is that I’ve been thinking about the open standards that underlay a lot of the stuff we use and I think that openness is underappreciated. I hope we can move more things to more open standards so we’re less reliant on the whims of a few huge companies for everything we do online. There are better ways and I for one am hopeful that more and more people will start to embrace them as they get easie

This is the third post on my switch from Gmail to email hosted at my own domain. You can find the first one on how I did it here. And the second one on why I did it here.

So when I was trying to decide on an email provider I looked at a few options before settling on FastMail.

The first was actually Google! Google provides email to corporate customers and such for a fee that lets you use your own domain. I actually have some experience with this at work, so I was aware of the offerings, and they’re actually pretty good. This was tempting because it would be familiar and it would let me more seamlessly keep using the google services I wanted to keep using (though with a different email address/account, which would mean some transition too). This being a paid account you do get a bit better customer service and some extra control over things, and your relationship with Google changes at least slightly more to that of a customer, rather than a product. But this would still leave me in a situation where I’d be giving Google all that data. It would change my relationship with Google slightly, but only slightly.

Another option that was mentioned a number of times was actually Microsoft. Like google they offer businesses hosted email plans that let you use your own domain. As I understand it these work mostly via Exchange, which is proprietary, but thanks to Microsoft’s major influence in the corporate world most things know now to talk to Exchange for email, calendars, contacts etc. It wouldn’t be any problem to use this option with my iOS devices or my Mac at home or anything else I expected to use. If you had told my younger Mac-partisan self in the 90’s that he’d be considering using Microsoft for something like this he would not have believed you. But Microsoft is a different company today. I also like that their business model is just based on customers paying them for products, and not on data collection and advertising. The company is big, boring, and stable. So I could feel pretty confident that they were going to be around for the long haul and that changes would mostly be slow and predictable, and that all my stuff would likely continue to work with them for a long time to come. This was an option I seriously considered. But ultimately I liked the idea of a company that focused more on email. But if at some point I decided I don’t want to use FastMail anymore Microsoft is a pretty strong contender for a second choice.

Another option I didn’t look at too closely (in part because at the time I didn’t realize that paid accounts would let use a custom domain) is ProtonMail. Their whole selling point is security and privacy. FastMail is very privacy and security focused too, but it’s not their primary selling point. I didn’t look too closely at ProtonMail during my search as I didn’t initially realize you could use your own domain with it, but if I ever decide to switch, or get really paranoid, I’ll be looking closely at their offerings too.

The last option that got mentioned by people a lot, is a company called FastMail. This is the choice I ultimately went with. A few pod-casters I listen to have mentioned using and liking FastMail for years, and it was recommended by a lot of other folks I talked to. They focus on email and things related to email (like calendars and contacts), and that’s about it. I like that focus. They also offered some nice features like sub-domain addressing which helps with sorting email on different topics and tracking who may be selling your email address and such. I was also impressed with how polished their help documents were and how easy they make it to use your own domain (in fact they kind of encourage it). They offer a no-credit-card 30 day trial which lets you use almost all the features (it mostly just limits you on how many emails you can send in a day during the trail), and I was able to get a 10% discount if I decided to sign up by using a referal code I got from a current user, so it seemed like a safe bet to give it a try.

Once I did I was even more impressed with FastMail. I was able to use them to handle the DNS for several of my domains which let me set up redirects and such from my old blog to my new one. I was able to set up several domains I own to work with my FastMail account for not extra charge, which let me set up aliases using those domains and other such things. All of that for $5/month (or less if you buy a year or more at a time, plus I had that extra discount!). The company seems very stable, they seem to offer all the latest tech, and you have an easy to understand customer relationship with them. You pay them, they provide you a service. There’s not advertising or tracking going on there. I was also happy that everything works through standards based protocols (Like IMAP, and CardDAV), so I can use my FastMail account with pretty much any email client I might like. I even like the web-interface!

Anyway! There are lots of good options out there for email hosts that let you use your own domain. Your needs or preferences might be different from mine, but I would encourage everyone to look into making the switch to email at their own domain. Controlling your own domain means you have more choice and you’re not locked into any one vendor, and it generally gives you a lot more control over your email than using an address provided by your email provider.

If you’re thinking about making the switch I’m happy to talk and answer questions!

And if you’re interested in giving FastMail a try you can use this referral link and you’ll get 10% off for the first year. (That includes buying multiple years up front). Full disclosure: I’ll also get at small credit on my account for anyone who signs up with that link and pays for a plan.

This is a follow up to my previous post where I went into more detail on how I made the switch from Gmail to email using my own domain. This post will be focused a bit more on the why.

(You can also now find my post on how I picked the host for my email here)

I’ve been growing increasingly uncomfortable lately with a number of the big tech companies, particularly those who’s business model is based on advertising and collecting data about users. A little while back I closed down my personal Facebook account, and I try to avoid Facebook as best I can. The company has not shown itself to be a good steward of our data, and I don’t think Facebook generally is terribly good for society. Every news story about Facebook since I quit has reinforced my feeling that it was the right thing to do.

I also want to distance myself a bit more from Google. I’m not trying to cut Google out of my life completely, the company appears for the most part to be much much better about protecting user data than Facebook, and Google’s products are far more useful and used in my life than anything Facebook ever made. I still use Google Docs for a number of collaborative things, I still talk to friends on Hangouts, and I have some shared calendars in Google Calendar I want to keep being able to use etc. but I want to put a little more distance between myself and the company, and I wanted to take more control for myself. There’s also that thing about being a customer vs being a product that’s always hanging in the back of my mind with free services.

For something as central and fundamental to my online life as email, I want to have a bit more control over it. I’ve long felt a little weird about having something so central to my life ending in gmail.com or yahoo.com or whatever. That makes me much more dependent on those companies, while an email address I own gives me more control.

With an email address I control I can switch providers on the back-end any time I decide I don’t like what a provider is doing, and the rest of the world can keep emailing me at the same address without interruption. No one emailing me has to care what the back end of my email service looks like. They just know to send it to my address. Heck, if I get really paranoid I can start running my own email server and not relying on any other company to actually handle my email (I am almost certainly not going to do this but I could if I wanted to!).

A friend of mine made this same basic transition many years ago and I’ve been thinking about doing it ever since. I’ve mostly been stopped by inertia. But recently I’ve been more and more interested as there’s been more and more news about how tech companies are using our data. I’ve also been inspired a bit by all the Indieweb talk I’ve been exposed to since switching my blogging over to Micro.blog and using micro.blog as my “home base” for social media and writing (I beleive in Indieweb circles this is referred to as POSSE which is a pretty cool acronym for a great idea). It’s made me want to control more of my own life online and be less reliant on any one company or provider.

I finally decided to take the plunge recently, and it’s been a lot easier than I expected. I feel good not relying on anyone else for my email address. It’s something I control and can do whatever I want with. The biggest challenge has perhaps been updating my email address everywhere, but at the same time it’s also been an opportunity to unsubscribe from mailing lists I didn’t really read, and to reevaluate whether I even want to have an account with some companies. I’ve closed down a number of accounts as I started the process of updating my email address. If I haven’t used it in years, it’s probably not something I need. If I do, I can always start up a fresh account with my new email address!

Overall I feel good about my decision and would encourage everyone to consider such a move (it may not be right for everyone, but it’s worth considering!)

Next up is likely likely a post about why I went with FastMail and some of the other alternatives I considered (some of which might be right for you!).

So, I recently decided to move away from Gmail as my email provider, and on to a new email address at a domain I control. I’ve had several friends mention to me that they’d like to know more about how I went about it. I thought I’d write up this post as a starting place for them and anyone else who might want to make this leap.

I’ve got some additional posts I’m working on addressing some other aspects of the transition, like why I did it (That post is now here), and how I decided on the provider I did ({That post is now here](https://www.brandonshire.blog/2019/04/10/the-first-was.html), but this one will be focused on how I went about it. Some of this info will apply to any situation, but a lot of it will be specific to my situation and the choices I made. The whole process was easier than I expected and made me wish I’d done this a decade or so ago when I first started thinking about it.

The first step for me was figuring out what my best options were for a back-end email provider (the actual email servers that would be receiving and sending mail for me). I asked around about email providers and eventually settled on FastMail. I’ll write up a separate post about the other options I considered and why I decided to go with FastMail, but the short answer is that FastMail was very highly recommended by a number of people, and I like that they focus solely on email and things related to email. They offer some great features and they use open standards which means they should be compatible with pretty much any software I might care to use. They also have a lot of well written and detailed documentation that made it pretty straightforward to figure out how to do most of this.

After I’d decided on FastMail I started a free trail. You get 30 days to try it out and they don’t even ask for a credit card when you start the trail, so you don’t have to worry about getting charged if you don’t like it but forget to cancel. After the trail, FastMail isn’t free. But I was ready to be a customer rather than a product, at least for email, so that’s what I was looking for. They have several plans from $3/month to $9/month (all with a discount if you pay up front for a year or more). For me the $5/month plan was the right one, as that’s the first tier that lets you use your own domain name (and comes with enough storage for me to move all my other email over!).

I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to use my own domain during the free trial, as that feels like the sort of feature that would require a paid account. But there are actually only a few restrictions on trial accounts (you can only send 120 emails per day, you can’t create websites through FastMail (yes, a FastMail account even lets you set up and host a basic website through them), and you can’t create forwarding rules. Otherwise, the trial accounts act just like real paid accounts. They obviously want you to get a good feel for the service and think it’ll sell itself once you use it.

FastMail makes it pretty easy to use your own Domain with their service. First, you’ll need to purchase a domain. There are a lot of registrars out there that you can do this through. I’ve generally used Hover, and I’ve recently had a few people recommend Gandi too (in fact that’s the one FastMail links to in their help page on Domains). You can use most any registrar you’re comfortable with though. Then you tell FastMail what domain you want to use and set up your domain to route email to FastMail.

You can do this a few different ways. You can do it the old-fashioned way and update the MX records at your registrar to have mail routed to FastMail. This way probably makes the most sense if you already have the domain set up for other things like websites and such and don’t want to recreate those DNS records again.

But since I purchased this domain specifically for this purpose and hadn’t it up for anything else, yet I want with the even simpler way, which lets FastMail set all of that up for you. For this method you just change the DNS (or “name servers”) at your registrar to use FastMail’s DNS servers. Once that’s set up FastMail will take care of setting up everything else so that mail will get routed correctly. You can still use the domain for other things like websites etc., you just update the DNS records and such through FastMail to point to external web servers and such. As mentioned above you can also host a simple website at FastMail too.

The next step was to import email from my other email accounts and set up forwarding so that any new messages that came into those accounts would show up in my FastMail inbox. This will vary by provider a bit, but FastMail provides general instructions for migrating mail (and contacts and calendars), and more specific instructions for major providers.

Since the two accounts I was migrating mail from were both Gmail accounts I used the Gmail specific migration instructions. I used the importer tool FastMail provides and it went into my accounts and pulled in 15 years’ worth of email without much trouble at all. In fact, it was done much faster than I expected, taking only about a day or so.

Next is setting up forwarding, which will let any future messages that come in to your old mailbox be automatically sent to your new mail account, so you don’t miss anything. Here I do suggest varying a little bit from FastMail’s suggestions. They suggest running the import tool, waiting for it to finish and then setting up forwarding from your other account. However, I would suggest setting up the import to start and then turn on Forwarding right away, don’t wait for it to finish. I wasn’t quite sure how the importer tool would work, so I followed FastMail’s suggestion and found that I ended up with a number of emails that came in after the tool had started working that weren’t imported. It’s possible doing it this way will lead to a few duplicate messages, but that seems like less of an inconvenience to me than having to go back and figure out which messages need to be manually forwarded.

In my case, I don’t actually plan to shut down my old Gmail accounts (though I am encouraging people to email me at my new address, and I am updating my address with companies and such) I’ll just let them sit there forwarding any messages they receive. You might decide to do differently, but no matter what you’ll probably want some period of transition while you get the word out about your new email address, so I very much suggest setting up forwarding if you can.

Next up was transferring contacts. This was pretty straighforward. It just involved exporting my contacts from my Gmail account and then uploading them to FastMail.

Finally, it was time to set up all my devices to work with FastMail. I use the FastMail web interface at work, but at home and in my personal life I use the default iOS and Mac mail apps. I know people have other apps they like more, but for the moment the built-in mail apps work just fine for me and I know how to get around in them. I may decide to try out some other apps that handle mail differently in the future, and I know that FastMail will likely work with any of them too. (FastMail does offer its own app too).

Anyway, I’ve set up new email accounts before, so I was ready to go in and start entering various addresses and settings and such. Also, FastMail requires app-specific passwords so I knew I would have to take an extra step to set up additional passwords. But just like with their DNS options for setting up a domain for email, FastMail surprised me with a clever and simple way to get all of that set up without any fuss. They offer an “Automatic Configuration Tool” which lets you download a profile to your iOS device, which you then install, and it automatically configures your device to use your FastMail Mail, Calendars, and Contacts. All I had to do was tell it to generate a profile for my iPhone, then I scanned a QR code on the site, followed it and then said “yes” when my phone asked me if I wanted to download the profile, and then installed it from the settings app. Everything was configured for me right away. Easy. (Of course, if you’d rather do it manually, and/or don’t trust/like the idea of installing profiles and such, you can do it manually too). I did the same thing for my iPad and then when I was at home used a similar process for my Mac.

Once that was set up, I then went in and disabled mail and contacts for my other accounts, so I didn’t end up getting two copies of every email send to those accounts (one in the original Gmail account and then another copy when it was delivered to my new account). I went ahead and left Calendars for my primary Gmail account on in my iOS devices and my Mac because I’m part of a few shared Google Calendars, and I still want those to show up on all my devices, but I’m switching mail and contacts over to FastMail. (I have the FastMail calendar on too but may or may not actually use it).

And at that point I was done! Well except for sending out an email to my contacts letting them know about my new email address and updating my email address with all the company’s and services I use. But that has also provided me with an opportunity to evaluate which services I actually want to keep using and which I may want to close and delete my accounts with. It’s also been an opportunity to be more mindful about what newsletters I’m subscribed to and such. In many cases I’ve just decided to unsubscribe rather than update my email address. It’s been nice.

It may sound like a lot of work to do all of this but I probably only spent 2 or 3 hours from the time I decided to do this to being set up, and most of that time was spent deciding on a provider and then carefully reading the instructions and such before actually taking each step, just to be sure I did it right.

I’ll have at least one more post after this going over in more detail why I wanted to make this transition, and possibly some other follow up posts about things like why I picked FastMail and what other service I looked at. Please let me know if you have any questions, or suggestions! The above is a basic overview but there are no doubt lots of specifics I left out that might be helpful to anyone thinking about doing the same. The above is meant to be a starting place, not an exhaustive guide. I hope it can also be a starting place for conversations about this and other similar issues.

If, after reading all of that you want to do the same, and decide to use FastMail, you can use this referral link and you’ll get 10% off for the first year. (That includes buying multiple years up front). Full disclosure: I’ll also get at small credit on my account for anyone who signs up with that link and pays for a plan.