I use different email accounts on different providers for different purposes. Most purposes, gmail or outlook.com, both of which I'm sure if they do go away, this will be announced well in advance.
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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I’d be fine. If my email provider goes away, my troubles are over, because my email provider is me!
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.
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.
Fi isn't that great. We were on Fi for years; I switched to Mint, my wife stayed on Fi until I was sure it was going to work. So far, I pay less for more, no gotchas.
It was amazing when it first came out; now it has a lot of competition that beats it.
How is Mint internationally?
I haven't tried it yet, and I haven't had a reason to look into it. My experience with Fi was that you pay $10 per Gb - it didn't come out of your normal bank - and per-minute charges. When I was traveling, I used my company phone, or if on vacation, purely data with heavy up front-caching as much as I could at the hotel. I really don't like surprise bill sizes.
But to be honest, I haven't tried Mint internationally, so I can't say.
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.
Using your own domain definitely makes it easy to get back up by just switching providers. But what about all your historical emails? If your original provider goes poof, what's the plan? I connect via IMAP, so all my emails are stored on the provider's servers, right? Or do email apps keep local copies, too?
Are there backup services for emails? I seem to recall Outlook having some kind of archive feature (I haven't used outlook in decades), but I think I remember it was only recoverable in outlook and even then, it was a pain to search for a particular email.
The proper email programs have an option somewhere in the settings to either store a copy of the mailbox on the computer, or not do it. I'm pretty sure that's in Thunderbird, Evolution, etc. I'm not sure about Outlook.
You can create an archive of your emails using Mail in MacOS also.
If you have access to some sort of basic Linux system (cloud server, local server whatever works for you) you can run a program on a timer such as https://isync.sourceforge.io/ (Debian package: isync) which reads email from one source and clones it to another. Be careful and run it in a security context that meets your needs (I use a local laptop w/encryption at home that runs headless 24/7, think raspberry Pi mode).
This includes IMAP (1) -> IMAP (2) as well as IMAP -> Local and so on; as with any app you'll need to spend a bit learning how to build the optimum config file for your needs, but once you get it going it's truly a "set and forget" little widget. Use an on-fail service like https://healthchecks.io/ in your wrapper script to get notified on error, then go about your life.
Edit: @[email protected] glanced at your comments and see you have a lot of self-hosting chops, here's a markdown doc of mine to use isync to clone one IMAP provider (domain1.com) to another IMAP provider (domain2.com) subfolder for archiving. (using a subfolder allows you to go both ways and use both domains normally)
----
Sync email via IMAP from host1/domain1 to a subfolder on host2/domain2 via a cron/timer. Can be reversed as well, just update Patterns to exclude the subfolders from being cross-replicated (looped).
- Install the
isyncpackage:apt-get update && apt-get install isync
Passwords for IMAP must be left on disk in plain text
- Generate "app passwords" at the email providers, host1 can be READ only
- Keep
${HOME}/.securecontents on encrypted volume unlocked manually
The mbsync program keeps it's transient index files in ${HOME}/.mbsync/ with one per IMAP folder; these are used to keep track of what it's already synced. Should something break it may be necessary to delete one of these files to force a resync.
By design, mbsync will not delete a destination folder if it's not empty first; this means if you delete a folder and all emails on the source in one step, a sync will break with an error/warning. Instead, delete all emails in the folder first, sync those deletions, then delete the empty folder on the source and sync again. See: https://sourceforge.net/p/isync/mailman/isync-devel/thread/f278216b-f1db-32be-fef2-ccaeea912524%40ojkastl.de/#msg37237271
Simple crontab to run the script:
0 */6 * * * /home/USER/bin/hasync.sh
Main config for the mbsync program:
${HOME}/.mbsyncrc
# Source
IMAPAccount imap-src-account
Host imap.host1.com
Port 993
User user1
PassCmd "cat /home/USER/.secure/psrc"
SSLType IMAPS
SystemCertificates yes
PipeLineDepth 1
#CertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
# Dest
IMAPAccount imap-dest-account
Host imap.host2.com
Port 993
User user2
PassCmd "cat /home/USER/.secure/pdst"
SSLType IMAPS
SystemCertificates yes
PipeLineDepth 1
#CertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
# Source map
IMAPStore imap-src
Account imap-src-account
# Dest map
IMAPStore imap-dest
Account imap-dest-account
# Transfer options
Channel hasync
Far :imap-src:
Near :imap-dest:HASync/
Sync Pull
Create Near
Remove Near
Expunge Near
Patterns *
CopyArrivalDate yes
This script leverages healthchecks.io to alert on failure; replace XXXXX with the UUID of your monitor URL.
${HOME}/bin/hasync.sh
#!/bin/bash
# vars
LOGDIR="${HOME}/log"
TIMESTAMP=$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H%M)
LOGFILE="${LOGDIR}/mbsync_${TIMESTAMP}.log"
HCPING="https://hc-ping.com/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
# preflight
if [[ ! -d "${LOGDIR}" ]]; then
mkdir -p "${LOGDIR}"
fi
# sync
echo -e "\nBEGIN $(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H%M)\n" >> "${LOGFILE}"
/usr/bin/mbsync -c ${HOME}/.mbsyncrc -V hasync 1>>"${LOGFILE}" 2>&1
EC=$?
echo -e "\nEC: ${EC}" >> "${LOGFILE}"
echo -e "\nEND $(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H%M)\n" >> "${LOGFILE}"
# report
if [[ $EC -eq 0 ]]; then
curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 5 -o /dev/null "${HCPING}"
find "${LOGDIR}" -type f -mtime +30 -delete
fi
exit $EC
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.
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.
You'd be fucked like a choirboy at a Viagra-sponsored catholic-con.
Especially if they let the domain expire and you didn't have time to migrate all those accounts that can be reset with just an email and a bad actor then registers the domain - or even just a slightly dumb actor that allows someone else to use what was your old email address.
This might be the single most hilarious “you’d be fucked” statement I ever heard and I’m definitely stealing it for future use lmao
very, since most online services and government agencies depend on you having an email address to contact/let you use their service.
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.
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
Write down all your accounts and hope they'll send you a warning in advance, once they decide to go out of business. Then you're going to have to change all the accounts to a new email.
I'm pretty sure the big paid providers aren't going to fail you withoit a warning. And gmail etc are too big to fail. That's going to wreak havoc with a lot of other users... Though: If they decide to ban you or delete your account... You're going to be in big trouble. That regularly happens to people.
Only alternative I can imagine is to run your own email service. If you own the domain and server, it's your call. But you have to pay attention to maintain it and not get hacked etc. That would be another way to lose email accounts. (Running a mailserver is more complicated than hosting a website.)
Not so bad. I use gmail as a backup for some accounts in case something happens to my VPS or domain, and my Amazon account is still linked to it out of laziness, but otherwise I never use it.
Oh. Except that I have an Android phone, and that's linked to my gmail, although I don't use any Google apps or services beyond Play. So I suppose my phone would stop working. Everything's backed up, though, so maybe it'd be a good thing; maybe it'd motivate me to pull the trigger on a Light Phone. I kinda want a Minimal Phone because my F&F uses Jami, but that'd still be an Android phone, so it wouldn't work either.
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 suppose if my email provider shuts down I would need to know if I had shut down my server, my server host went out of business, or someone has taken control of my domains