Comment by tptacek
3 years ago
You mean, like every other service anybody stands up ever? The ones that charge money are the ones that stand any chance of surviving.
3 years ago
You mean, like every other service anybody stands up ever? The ones that charge money are the ones that stand any chance of surviving.
The longer something has existed, the longer it is likely to continue existing. Going with Gmail or a custom domain is a really safe bet. There is no way I’d use an email service that’s less than 10 years old now.
My gmail account from when I was a kid is still active and working while most of the vanity/foss/privacy focused ones I signed up for have since died.
> The longer something has existed, the longer it is likely to continue existing.
aka the (postulated) Lindy Effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Just a different way of looking at survivorship bias (“all of these old buildings were built really well!”).
With the way Google and other providers have shutdown accounts with impunity, it’s hard to think of anything but a custom domain being a safe option.
You can move a custom domain easily enough. I am about to do that to move away for the GSuite’s fees. Worst case, I’ll invest into running a service on my own. Best case, I’ll just use Proton or FastMail, etc.
I guess registrars can go down too but it seems less likely.
Gmail isn't old enough. Go back another generation, AOL, Yahoo mail, etc. Best bet is probably some university email address. Now those are long-lived, if they let you keep it.
> The longer something has existed, the longer it is likely to continue existing
horses for carriage seem to defy that kind of assumption
Gotta love these kind of sayings that have virtually no connection with reality.
It’s a probability thing. Obviously everything old was once new. And everything dead was once old. But take any thing that exists right now and the most likely outcome is based on this rule.
If we take the C programming language, and one created last year, which one would you expect to still be used in 10 years? You can do this comparison for any two things where there is no inherent end date.
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On the contrary, it is solidly rooted in math. On average, and without other context, a random sample will be close to the middle.
Given a random sample of any thing at an arbitrary point in time, on average it will be in the middle of its lifetime. Something that is X years old will on average, continue for X more years. Of course, additional information lets you refine that estimate considerably, but it is mathematically sound and surprisingly applicable to everyday life (e.g. using a single serial number on a product to estimate total production).
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Kind of a bad analogy because if Gmail is the horse, it can also become the carriage.
There is a sad irony behind that link…If I had to pay for bookmark management, it’d be Pinboard. What are the advantages?
I agree. I trust this one more than if Google would launch a free, customizable "start page" service like it. They're killing their free services like no tomorrow.
I'm generally in favor of owning your data and domains so yes. There is so much good open source stuff now.
It's unlikely that Gmail will shut down though so there are a lot of reliable exceptions