Cancelling Fastmail: Export Your Mail Before It Locks

If you're looking up how to cancel Fastmail and export your email, the order of operations matters more than the cancel button itself. Cancel it deliberately and Fastmail keeps working through the rest of your paid period, then closes on schedule — a hard, visible deadline you can plan around.

Let the subscription lapse instead — an expired card, a renewal you missed — and Fastmail's own support docs describe something less obvious: sending and receiving stop before the account itself locks you out. You can still open the web app, see old mail, and feel like nothing's wrong while new messages are already bouncing.

This guide covers both paths on Fastmail's documented timeline, the checklist to run before you touch anything, the exact export routes for mail, contacts, calendars and files, and the two pieces of a Fastmail account a Gmail or Outlook cancellation doesn't have: masked email addresses, and any custom domain routed through Fastmail.

What actually moves and what doesn't#

Nothing about a Fastmail cancellation migrates your data anywhere. Cancelling — or letting the account lapse — only removes your access to it. Whatever you don't export yourself before that happens stays on Fastmail's servers until it's deleted, not somewhere you can retrieve it later.

Deliberate cancellation, from Settings, Billing & Plan, Cancel plan, keeps the account fully usable for the rest of your current billing cycle. It then closes automatically on your expiration date. From that point, mail addressed to you is rejected and you're logged out with no further access to anything stored in the account. There's also an optional immediate-deletion step, reachable from the same screen, that skips the wait — Fastmail says all data is then permanently gone after seven days, which functions as a recovery window with support rather than an export window.

A subscription that simply expires without a deliberate cancel follows a different, staged timeline. Fastmail sends a reminder two weeks before expiration, then roughly once a week after. If it still isn't renewed, sending and receiving are disabled first. Only after several more unrenewed weeks does login access itself get disabled, and eventually — Fastmail's own wording, with no fixed day count attached — the account and everything in it is deleted, freeing the username and its addresses for someone else to claim.

• A custom domain's registration doesn't move — Fastmail can't help transfer it once the account is closed
• DNS hosted at Fastmail for that domain stops resolving through them; DNS hosted elsewhere with just an MX record pointed at Fastmail is unaffected
• Masked email addresses stop routing mail the moment the account closes — they're addresses on the account, not a separate standing service
• Contacts and calendars aren't deleted the instant access is cut, but you can't reach them once you're locked out

Pre-migration checklist#

Run this before you click cancel, and definitely before a subscription you've already let lapse gets any older. Every item here gets harder or impossible once access is cut.

• Set up and confirm the new mailbox first, so there's somewhere to actually receive mail once Fastmail stops routing it
• Export mail folder by folder from Settings, Migration, keeping the 4 GB per-export limit in mind for large folders
• Export contacts as a single vCard file, and export or grab the CalDAV URL for each calendar you use
• Download anything in the Files section as a zip
• List every service using a Fastmail masked email address — banks, shops, newsletters — so you can update or retire each one
• Confirm whether your domain is registered through Fastmail or just MX-pointed at Fastmail from a registrar elsewhere
• If it's registered through Fastmail, start the transfer to a new registrar now, not after you cancel
• If it's MX-only, have the new MX records ready so the switch happens the same day you stop trusting Fastmail's inbound routing

Steps to export your Fastmail mail before cancelling#

1. 1

   Export your mail

   Settings, Migration, Export tab, New mail export. Choose one folder and a date range, then repeat for each folder — subfolders export individually, and a folder that only contains subfolders will fail if you try to export it directly. Each export run tops out at 4 GB; split large folders by date range if you hit that limit.

2. 2

   Export your contacts

   From the contacts import/export screen, click Download all contacts to get one vCard 3.0 file covering everyone in the address book. Most other providers and clients import vCard directly.

3. 3

   Export your calendars

   Settings, Calendars, then Export next to each calendar you want to keep, followed by Download for the .ics file. If your next client supports CalDAV, grab the calendar's CalDAV URL instead so it can sync live rather than working from a one-time export.

4. 4

   Export your files

   Open the Files section, select everything, and download it as a compressed zip. This is separate from mail and calendar exports and easy to forget.

5. 5

   Redirect masked email addresses

   Go through your checklist of services using a Fastmail masked address and change the address on file for each one, or point the underlying forwarding elsewhere if the service allows it. Once the account closes, these addresses fail exactly like your main one — there's no separate grace period for them.

6. 6

   Handle your domain

   For a domain registered through Fastmail, start the registrar transfer now — support can't assist with it once the account is closed. For an MX-only domain hosted elsewhere, update the MX records to your new mailbox provider once that mailbox is confirmed working.

7. 7

   Cancel the subscription

   Settings, Billing & Plan, Cancel plan, then confirm. Access continues through the end of your current billing cycle unless you separately choose the immediate-deletion option on the same screen.

What breaks when your Fastmail account closes#

The table below separates a deliberate cancellation from a lapsed, unrenewed subscription, because the sequence and the timing genuinely differ between the two.

Rollback plan#

If you clicked Cancel plan but haven't separately triggered immediate deletion, resubscribing before the billing cycle ends restores the account with nothing lost — cancellation alone doesn't touch your data.

If the account has already closed and you also chose immediate deletion, Fastmail holds the data for seven more days before it's permanently gone. Contact support inside that window to ask about reactivation; after it closes, there's nothing left to recover.

If you let a subscription lapse and it's currently in the staged decline — sending and receiving down, but login still working — renewing at that point should restore normal service, since Fastmail's own documentation describes the first two stages as reversible. The dividing line is the final, undated "eventually deleted" stage; once that's happened, there's no path back.

If your new provider is already live and you have no intention of going back, there's no rollback to plan for on the mail side. Instead, cross-check the export you already ran against the new inbox — a folder skipped during the per-folder export, or contacts not yet imported — before calling the migration finished.

Doing the migration without downtime#

Sequence this so nothing you receive ever has nowhere to land. Get the new mailbox fully set up and confirmed working before you touch anything on the Fastmail side — not the other way around.

If your domain is MX-only, update the MX records only once the new mailbox is verified. DNS changes propagate over a window of a few hours in most cases, during which mail could theoretically arrive at either provider — that overlap is expected, not a sign something's broken.

Keep the Fastmail account open and receiving through that propagation window, run your exports, and only cancel once you're confident the new mailbox has taken over. For senders who haven't caught up to your new address yet, an autoresponder on the still-open Fastmail account can bridge the gap for as long as it stays active.

Once your mail has a new home#

The mechanical part of leaving Fastmail — the exports, the DNS change, the cancel button — ends here. What doesn't end is rebuilding the filters, search habits and draft shortcuts you'd built up in Fastmail, inside whatever inbox you land on next.

That's the part AI Emaily is built for. Connect Fastmail while it's still open, or your new Gmail, Outlook or IMAP mailbox once it's live, and get one AI-assisted inbox with rules, semantic search and drafts written from a Personal Context brain and client profiles you set — not one trained on your Fastmail archive. Copilot mode holds every send for your approval, with undo and a full audit trail, so the agent can triage and draft without you re-learning a new client's shortcuts from scratch. We build AI Emaily. We don't host mail or replace Fastmail's own export tools — we sit on top of whatever provider you choose next, so the next migration is a mailbox move, not a workflow rebuild.