Email is one of those things you only really notice when it stops working. We've been with Google Workspace for several years now, with our salon inbox — [email protected] — tucked inside it alongside our shared documents. This week, we packed it all up and moved house. Same address on the door, completely different building behind it.
The new home is Fastmail: an Australian email company that's been doing one job, well, since 1999. From the outside, nothing has changed: emails to our address still land in our inbox, replies still go from the same address, and the website's contact form still works exactly as before. But behind the scenes, it's a much better fit for a small business like ours.
Why move at all?
Google Workspace is excellent kit, and there's a reason it's everywhere. But over time we found ourselves paying for an awful lot we never actually used — slide decks, shared drives, meeting rooms with whiteboards, the whole office-collaboration suite — when in truth we just wanted email.
A few things in particular pushed us toward a change:
- Cost. The Workspace bill had crept up over the years. Fastmail charges a flat £5-or-so a month per mailbox — less than half the price for the bits we actually use.
- Less data, fewer worries. Fastmail's whole business is selling email. They don't run advertising, don't profile inboxes for marketing data, and the privacy policy is short enough to read in one sitting. That fits the way we already feel about our customers' personal details.
- It's all just email. Fastmail uses standard, open protocols (IMAP, JMAP, CalDAV — the boring acronyms that mean "any email or calendar app on earth will work with it"). If we ever want to leave again, we can.
Owning your inbox is a bit like owning your phone number... you don't really think about it. Until the day you want to take it with you!
How the move actually worked
The fiddly bit isn't the email itself — it's the domain. scruffies.co.uk is registered in our name, and a set of small "DNS records" tell the rest of the internet where to send the mail when somebody types our address. Move those records, and you move the inbox.
The internet's address book. When somebody emails [email protected], their mail server looks up scruffies.co.uk in this address book to find out which company is currently handling our mail. We just had to update the entry to say "send everything to Fastmail" instead of "send everything to Google".
The order of operations matters, though. If you switch the records over first and then start setting up the new mailbox, there's a window where mail can bounce. So the safe choreography looks like this:
- Set up the new home, empty. Create the new Fastmail mailbox at the new address, but don't tell the world about it yet.
- Copy everything across. Fastmail offers a built-in importer that connects to Gmail and pulls every message and folder over to the new account. Took about four hours running in the background — Gmail had a lot of paw-prints to copy.
- Switch the signpost. Update the DNS records (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC — more boring acronyms) so the world starts delivering to Fastmail.
- Keep the old mailbox open for a fortnight. Some mail servers cache the old address for a day or two; leaving Google live in the background catches anything in flight.
- Cancel Workspace. Once the new inbox has been getting all the new traffic for a couple of weeks, pull the plug on the old one.
We're currently somewhere in step four, and so far the migration has been almost completely uneventful — which is exactly what you want from an email move.
What this means for you
From your end: nothing. Email us at the same address you always have. Replies will come from the same address. Our contact form still works. Your old emails to us are all still there, every last one of them.
The only people who might notice anything are spammers, who briefly enjoyed our migration window and have already been sent on their way by Fastmail's rather good filtering!
Lessons from the move
For anyone considering the same trip, two small things were worth knowing:
- Test the contact form before flipping DNS. Our website's contact form sends to
[email protected]. Once the new inbox is in place, send yourself a test message before switching DNS — it confirms the new mailbox actually receives mail before you commit. - Keep the importer running quietly. Fastmail's import will keep pulling new mail from Gmail in the background, even after you've switched DNS, until you turn it off. Useful belt-and-braces for catching anything that arrived at the old address during the cutover.
Otherwise — a quiet success. Our digital filing cabinet is a touch lighter, our monthly outgoings a touch smaller, and our customer data is in fewer places than it used to be. All in all, a satisfying spring clean.
If you've got a question about anything in this post — or just want to say hello — the inbox is, fittingly, in fine working order. Drop us a line.
John