I’m engaging in a slow effort to decouple from Google.

My first step was to decouple email, calendar, and contacts. For a long time I’ve been using Fastmail as a mail server for my non–Gmail domains, and then fetching this mail into Gmail. Before deciding to reverse this flow, I briefly considered ProtonMail and Mailbox.org. While I appreciate the data residency and security of ProtonMail, it seems that the added security creates some connectivity challenges. As for Mailbox.org, there were no compelling features that motivated me to switch from Fastmail.

Fastmail provides direct integration with Gmail to import mail, contacts, and calendars. Before doing this, I first disabled Gmail’s email import from my Fastmail account. When I first attempted to import my Gmail content into Fastmail, I was surprised by the storage estimate. Google reported that Gmail was using about 4GB of my Google storage, and this matched the size of email data when I downloaded all of my email from Google Takeout. However, Fastmail reported that there was an estimated 116GB of email that would be downloaded from Google using IMAP. This was quite disconcerting to me, partly because Google indicates that they may throttle IMAP downloads to 2.5GB per day, and partly because Fastmail charges based on my storage usage.

The Fastmail import from Gmail may create duplicate email messages for any emails that have multiple tags, so my first thought was to ensure that I had no emails with multiple tags. However, this did not affect Fastmail’s download estimate. My second thought was to sift through old archived emails that I no longer needed, and while this helped, it did not help significantly.

After working with Fastmail support, it turns out that the IMAP import size estimate is based on the entire storage usage that Google reports, which includes Google Drive: and I currently have over 100GB of data on my Google Drive (stay tuned). After crossing my fingers, I went ahead and imported my email. Google’s 4GB of email was fully imported in just under an hour, after which Fastmail reported that I had about 4GB of email.

When I imported my own email, for some reason the Gmail Sent and Spam folders appeared as custom folders within Fastmail, and I had to move the emails to Fastmail’s equivalent folders. However, when I did this for my wife’s email, these two folders transferred seamlessly.

I appreciate that the keyboard shortcuts in Fastmail’s web interface generally match those of Gmail. I also appreciate how easy Fastmail makes it to configure Apple devices. So far the experience has been relatively seamless for me, and I haven’t noticed any problems at all with my contacts or my calendar.