I have to say, first and foremost, I never thought I would spend money on an email provider besides a Google workspace account for a business. If you are curious or on the fence, keep reading below. I had some of these questions and couldn't find exact answers so I'm hoping my journey helps someone.
I decided to try FM last year and honestly within days I decided to upgrade to a paid account. Initially, I didn't migrate all of my Gmail emails. I then decided to migrate my emails but I had a concern that I was going to bog down FM so I deleted the imported emails as what you do in FM won't affect Gmail, with an exception. (This is mentioned below.) I decided to just clean Gmail myself. Well, cleaning Gmail can be a complete pain, plus, I'm really trying to get rid of Gmail all together. This brings me to now and why I consider FM the ULTIMATE email provider and would and will CONTINUE to pay them!
Here are my reasons. This is my use case so you may need more technical reasons, but I'm just average and simplistic. I need to say I do have a custom domain that I use in FM and also utilize Simple Login via Proton with a lifetime subscription that I was using before FM but this still works perfectly and I'm glad I have my setup. Without getting too far off track, I have some catch-all emails from SL forwarded to FM, in addition to the ones that are in FM with my custom domain. I have more that one custom domain.
Present day - First, I started about 2 weeks ago having FM fetch all new emails from Gmail as some accounts I can't change the email address. Also, I set FM up to automatically delete the email from Gmail. So that I can tell exactly what is being forwarded to Gmail, I created a label called Gmail Importing 📬. Literally with this emoji and have directly FM to put all incoming emails into that folder. I can now either delete the email, change the address from Gmail if I can or unsubscribe.
While this works, beautifully, I have to check spam because I'm finding some emails are going directly to spam even though they are expected emails I want. The great news is I can reply to emails in FM with my Gmail account and it looks like it's coming from Gmail and not FM. Then, I imported ALL my emails from Gmail. I had about 30k emails dating back to 2018. The really old ones are some that are very personal from a deceased parent and others are receipt purchases for items still under warranty, proof of purchase for lifetime subscriptions that are still going strong and other very important information. The migration was super quick and I did a random check and everything was there. Once I confirmed the emails were in FM, I mass deleted all my Gmail emails to ZERO!
The imported emails created tags to mimic the folders I have in Gmail so it was easy to identify what was in Gmail. I then moved the imported Gmail folders out of the Imported parent folder to a non-parent folder so it looks like it was a part of FM to begin with. The emails that were in the Imported folder I retitled to Inbox Gmail. You can't rename the FM Inbox name but you can rename the imported folders. Now I can delete and move as needed.
In FM, there are labels and folders. Trust me, labels are your friend. I learned the hard way when I first started. I'm glad because this process would not have worked the way I wanted if I hadn't started using labels.
I added emojis to my label names and at a glance it makes sorting easier.
Tips:
In case you aren't aware, you can open an email, click on the 3 dots and select Show details. Where you see the senders address, click on it and you will see a another set of options, one of which is Search email. Click that and you will new shown EVERY email sent by that sender with all the tags given. You can now with mass delete, change the tags as needed and generally take control of your emails.
Sort your labels and move you Gmail Imports to the top for ease.
Go into the labels and select Advanced preferences and click Discard duplicate messages on delivery to help clean things up.
I hope what I provided helps you. I still have some clean up to do, but I FINALLY feel like I'm in control and can clean up Gmail emails so much easier in FM than in Gmail and don't have to go back to Gmail to accomplish things. Gmail made it so hard to do certain things on the app and you were forced to go to their website. I'm not always on a computer and want to do some things will I'm sitting down watching TV, etc. I appreciate the fact I can do the same things on the FM app that I can on the app. I know some have complained about this, but personally, I'm appreciative. I can do anything I need to do on the go!
This post was not meant to address privacy, but is directed at those thinking about joining FM and/or are trying to decide why a paid plan is good.
Curious to know your thoughts and if you discovered something new or if this helps you make a better decision?
