Part 5 of “My Own Email Address”.
I’ve set up my own julian@ email address with Fastmail.
I have set up my Fastmail account to forward all incoming emails to my Gmail account, where I can read them just as if they had been addressed to my Gmail address. By configuring my Gmail account to add my new address as an additional sender, I can also reply to those messages and send new messages with my new address in the “From” field. For offline use I have configured Thunderbird similarly with the new address as one of multiple sending “identities” attached to my Gmail account.
At first I set up a regular user email account with Fastmail, and tried it out for a couple of days. Their email web interface is very good, and their whole system seems to be well designed and what I’d call “sensible”, which is a term of high praise from me. However, I decided for the time being to do a minimal migration, only changing my email address, and not also migrating my mail storage to a Fastmail mailbox and using Fastmail’s web interface. There are enough issues to deal with just changing address.
Now I am happy that the new address is stable — I am not going to be messing around in ways that will break it — I’ll want to start using it. One tedious step is to change all my registrations on web sites. That won’t be so hard, because only six months ago I went through the same process changing to my Gmail address and creating new passwords, and I was careful to save the results in my password manager so I know where to find them all this time around.
But updating registrations isn’t a high priority. It’s more important to me that I use my own address for personal communication, where people will notice it. (Maybe I should send out a mass “change of address” email, though I hate those.)
Even more important right now is to be able to use my own address on software engineer job applications.