Comment by theshrike79
5 years ago
Start the process of getting out right now.
Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product.
I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since 1995.
> Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer
Google now sells domains, as well as email through GSuite.
I use them a lot on new projects, because I find them so insanely convenient, but I can't help shake the feeling that now I'm both the product and a paying customer.
So I'd probably nuance your words with: "select a provider whose livelihood depends on your custom".
If you want to get your own domain to take control of your identity, do NOT under any circumstances register it through a hosting package. Ideally keep it separate from everything, including your email provider.
And do NOT register it through a provider whose only support is Machine Learning!(tm).
Can you access the DNS records of the domain you bought if your Google Account is ever locked?
Not OP, but I can, since I bought the domain elsewhere and just point MX records at Google.
If you buy a domain through Google, you should still be able to transfer it to another registrar.
Or better yet, get the domain elsewhere. (Not GoDaddy either.)
You can the use whatever service you want. G Suite, Exchange Online, roll your own, …
If recommendations are useful here, both EasyDNS (easydns.com) and Hover (hover.com) seem ok.
I've used both over the years, though the EasyDNS UI is a bit harder to work with. They seem more technically competent than Hover though, who are decent but not fantastic. ;)
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If you get your own domain, get one on a well-known TLD (e.g. .com, .org or your own country code). If you get a gTLD that's not well-known, there are some endpoints that will block you because your email is "not valid".
It's not a big deal. I've had a .so domain for a decade and have only had to use a different email a couple times.
There is a different danger however — after about 8 years the annual fee went from about $15 to $60.
> It's not a big deal. I've had a .so domain for a decade and have only had to use a different email a couple times
That is exactly the point krageon is making. If you have a .so domain (or .earth like me), you need to have a backup at least, so you can still access things like a normal human. My @gmail.com address have been used for this, but seems I'm gonna have to get yet another domain with a normal tld so I can stop using the gmail one for when .earth is not correctly accepted.
Price changes are a concern indeed. But I think if you get something form your country, or a .org, it should be mostly fine.
I've had the same .org domain for around 15 years now. Except for the coup we've seen last year where somebody tried to buy it privately (thankfully averted, I believe), I've see no price hike over time.
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Things like .rocks, .guru, .club, and all those other recent gold-rush gTLDs have been a disaster from the spam standpoint*. It doesn't help that some registrars are complicit via allowing massive bulk name purchases, so I see zillions of somebody@{random-word-1}{random-word-2}.goldrush addresses, all with valid DKIM/DMARC.
* Not to mention phishing. Is that link going to foobank dot com or foobank dot club?
Ironically enough, .email is considered a spammy TLD according to the Spamhaus TLD check.
Is .dev or .io considered a well-known gTLD by now? I’m in process of setting up email for my .dev domain.
Avoid .io; it’s not reliable and raises ethical questions:
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20171113150544/https://getstream...
[1] https://plan.io/blog/moving-from-planio-to-planiocom/
[2] http://www.thedarksideof.io
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.io isn't a gTLD at all, it's a ccTLD belonging to British Indian Ocean Territory (which I find to be bullshit, since those islands have no permanent inhabitants).
That said, there are ccTLDs which behave more like gTLDs (like .io, .me, .fm, .gg, .cd) and are treated as such across much of what you do online, but whether that'll impact your email delivery depends on who you communicate with and how they treat spam.
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Do not use .dev, some companies are using .dev for internal dev hosts and might be blocking on DNS level all external dev addresses.
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I have a .is and .co that I hope are considered well-known .
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This is true, I bought a .club domain and had to realise that some providers classify it as spam.
I can happily second the Fastmail recommendation. I self-hosted mail for 17 years and there's nothing I want that they don't do.
I've had an email on a personal domain for years.
But I still use my old gmail for one thing: Point of contact for the my domain registrar. Do you have any suggestions for how I can solve this?
In my case, I use Fastmail to provide my email.
With it, I have email from multiple domains doing what I want. I also have a <username>@fastmail.fm which has only been provided to one person: my domain registrar.
If you pay someone to handle your email this is a good approach, IMO.
Two domains registered at two different places, then cross-connect them at the registrars. To keep it fully distributed, you'll want to host one domain at one provider and the other one at a second one. (I do this - it's ~$10 USD/mo for both providers email hosting and ~$10/year to register each email domain, usually big discounts if you purchase for many years at once)
A second hosted email domain has an additional benefit - it allows you to also control your recovery (secondary) email, such as you'd add to your banking/financial website, etc. and not have any of your email options where they can be taken away like this post. It's trivial to have one of the email hosted providers do an IMAP pull from your GMail account, so you can still keep it around just manage it as an external account (such as for your Android login needs).
Thank you. I have been on the fence for a bit. But I will initiate project leave Gmail and Gdrive now. It will take me a year, but the deliveries and the final goal is clear.
Any thoughts on getting your own domain and then still using gmail for receive email on that domain?
I actually have my @gmail.com address redirect to Fastmail, I have a filter on the Fastmail inbox that shows me mail sent to the gmail address.
I go through the filter every now and then to see which services are still using my old address and change them to use the newer one.
It's also a nice way to find out how horribly some services have f-d up the change process. One had a non-working change email button and the CS rep just deleted my old account and told me to create a new one.
One just plain doesn't let people change their email. At all.
Combined with regular backups (maybe to an offline client, using IMAP?), sounds like a good idea to me.
Actually, I've been thinking about doing the same thing.
But i don't know much about emails.
That fi TLD and "1995" jolted a name out of the old memory unit: anon @penet.fi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer
I pay Apple for my email address, although I’d prefer to run email off my own domain.
Why don't you just do it? It will cost you like one or two coffee a month, but the feeling of security (as in "they won't close my account for nothing") is worth a lot more.
I think AWS dumping Parler shows nobody is above getting dumped.