What if protonmail, gmail or whatever email provider you are using goes belly-up? Are all your accounts doomed?
If so, what are some preventive measures? Adding backup emails to your registered accounts?
If Gmail goes belly up, you won’t have a problem. Every service will have a problem. You can just ride along with all the other customers.
It’s not my problem if it’s also everyone else’s problem
If you owe the bank $100 that’s your problem. If you owe the bank 100 billion dollars, that’s the banks problem.
All my shit is in the Google ecosystem. I am fairly confident that Gmail is not going away anytime soon. However, I am more afraid that some obscure ToS violation will forcibly disconnect me from their ecosystem, and I will have to scramble to make sure all my contacts have my alternate info. I am doubly screwed, as a Google Fi customer. If we all get suddenly degoogled, I lose a phone number that I have had for over 20 years.
As good a deal that Fi is for me (I normally don’t use bandwidth unless I travel internationally), I may switch soon just to reduce my exposure to Google.
This is why I’m migrating off Google to a custom domain. I have no fear Gmail is going away, but I fear if they ever block my account for some inscrutable reason there will be no way to appeal or get actual customer service.
Buy your own domain and use it for e-mails (there are many providers that support custom domains). If your provider shuts down, just switch to a different one and keep the same address.
This isn’t without its own problems. If you fail to renew your domain and someone else picks it up, they now have access to all your accounts. At least with a popular provider like Gmail, they don’t allow emails to be reused, and if they ever discontinue email services and drop the gmail.com domain, everyone will know about it and know that password reset requests should not be sent to these emails.
The only way to protect yourself from something like this is to own your own domain name.
You can still use something like Google as a provider but you can switch providers and recreate the same email addresses.It’s not really “the only way”. A similar problem to think about would be: what if your primary email account got compromised?
It makes sense to set up alternative means for recovering any account (or changing the associated email address), for example via second mail address, phone number, one-time-passwords, snail mail or similar. Many account providers use a recovery question system - here, I’d suggest using irregular answers, e.g. for “what is your favorite colour”, I would’t use a colour at all to make it harder to guess.
Compartmentalizing would be another approach: use different providers in a mix so that when one goes the way of the dodo, parts of your registered accounts remain useable. Ideally, for “critical” stuff like bank accounts, you’d split them up between different email addresses. But then again, for this kind of account, I’d really expect the bank to provide some other ways of backup access/restoration.
I’d be fine. If my email provider goes away, my troubles are over, because my email provider is me!
What’s a good place to start to learn about self-hosted email?
You can check out Mail-In-A-Box. Its a pretty good self-hosting email solution thats easy to install and maintain.
Awesome. Thanks!
I recently lost my oldest email and I didn’t plan accordingly. Roadrunner email. It’s still a pain in the butt. I’ve managed to change almost everything (that I can REMEMBER) to my newer email, but there are two that haven’t been changed because they require an email to the old email first… It’s gone.
That email was probably 20 years old and I have no idea what services I had signed up through it.
The moral of my story is to read emails from your email provider. Apparently they sent out warnings 6 months in advance, but I always ignored their emails.
Sometimes you can reach out to support and get them to fix it, but not always. Worth a shot, if you can remember the services that need to be changed lol.
Get a domain and register an MX record.
If your email provider shuts down, forward the mail somewhere else.
Cox just shut down their email services. They did so by transitioning everyone to yahoo and gave yahoo the cox.net email domain. As long as the provider plans accordingly, they can shut down and not screw over their customers. It was hell getting grandparents to understand their email changed but not really, and just to reconfigure outlook for them so they can keep getting those prayer requests. “No grandma, that’s your windows password, what’s your email password? because that doesn’t work. You know what, I’ll just look it up in the registry.” It was a pretty seamless transition all things considered.
I own my own domain and back up my emails. It would be a pain and cost a few $ but I’d migrate to something else or self host.
What do you use to backup?
Synology.
I figure I’d be mostly ok, the email I use for things I’d need to save is stored locally by thunderbird so I could still access those emails, the only problem would be changing the email on a few services.
The hardest part would be replacing that email address. That said, anyone have a rec for a good email service, preferably free, with IMAP/POP3 for use with tbird, that is at least ostensibly private (I know, email is inherently not private, but ykwim), and doesn’t just get shoved in spam on gmail (since that’s what everyone else has)? Riseup would be cool for instance but it’s impossible to get an invite. I’m thinking I may just pay mailbox.org but I’d prefer not to. Unwilling to self host, evidentially it’s easy to fuck your shit up by self hosting email.
I lost one, sent the emails I might need to another account. So that was ok but I forgot to change the email on every freaking service I use so it was very difficult to recover some accounts.
I have all of my email sent to my own domain, so while I would lose previous emails, if my provider just up and shut down, I could just switch to another provider, change a few records on my DNS, and all of my emails would go to my new provider from then on with no problem. I control the domain after the “@” sign.
Depends on how much you rely on it. If your contacts can’t phone or otherwise contact you for your new address, they’re gone.
If the services you use don’t mail you OTP codes on every log in, you can still log in using your old email and update it.
You can also contact customer support of some services and have them change it, using other ways to autheticate, e.g. physical letters with generated OTP codes.
I use a free email service with my custom domain. If it went down I’d just switch to another. Down time would likely just be while DNS records proliferated.
I think you meant “propagated”.
How do you monitor your email functionality? How long would it be before you noticed it was offline? What about paying for and configuring the new email server?
I get an email from LinkedIn about jobs roughly every hour so wouldn’t be long
Wouldn’t be too bad. I use Keepass for my bookmarks and most of my accounts with the database synced by Syncthing. If Syncthing and all of my devices also went down it’d be a pain but I’d have a fairly recent copy of the database which I backup to a pen drive I always keep with me. I’d have to spend a day logging into my accounts and updating the email but then I’d probably go back to just using Keepass from my pen drive and backing up to a second one like I used to until I found another solution for syncing it.
