I read this article about switching away from GMail and it struck a bit of a chord in terms of my own attempts to find a satisfactory replacement.

At the moment I feel I’m using all the services and at some point I should actually pick one or two that actually meet my need.

I have ProtonMail and Tutanota accounts for security. In truth I’ve ended up using neither (unless I see someone else using a ProtonMail address).

Day to day I’m probably still using GMail for most things and Fastmail for things where I don’t want to embarrass myself with my GMail address which is based on a gaming handle. Therefore over time my Fastmail address has become my address for financial things, communication with tradespeople and professionals and the odd real-world email invoice and so on.

It may sound strange but the biggest reason I don’t use Tutanota more is that it is hard to communicate verbally to other people. Fastmail still needs to the first word to be spelled out but people expect the XMail.com format and seem to have a lot less trouble with it.

I was on the verge of unsubscribing from Hey when it had it’s massive wobble over handling political issues at work (or alternatively white privilege, whichever way you see it). Rightly or wrongly I’ve kept on using and paying for it.

The strange niche that I’ve found for it is communicating with my extended family and occasionally a bit of business communication. The mail handling features just seems to work really well in terms of not wanting to respond immediately but wanting something better than “star” or “pin”.

When I started with Hey I was very excited about the “Feed” feature for managing email newsletters but after a while I’ve found myself not using it very much and instead I’ve started using Feedbin for these instead.

The Hey Paper Trail function is also good but when it comes to things like online orders I find the delivery updates easier to handle in GMail.

However exactly like the author of the article Fastmail is the most complete replacement for GMail having a similar functionality set (including a calendar) and while Hey might be better for having a well-managed near-zero mailbox, Fastmail is better for the pragmatic keep it all and search it when you need it approach to email.