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?
Register your own domain and use that. Then if your email provider dies then you can take your domain elsewhere.
I think email is basically a joke these days. It’s 99.9% spam. Almost everything I actually want in there are automated account confirmations, which don’t have to even come via email. Even in the few professional situations I’ve had a work email, it was almost never used.
Like, I feel the same way about email now that we all felt about snail mail with the invention of 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 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.
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
Get a domain and register an MX record.
If your email provider shuts down, forward the mail somewhere else.
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.
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.
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.
very, since most online services and government agencies depend on you having an email address to contact/let you use their service.
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.
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.
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.)
Don’t run your own mail servers.
-Person who runs their own mail server
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.
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
