One of the reasons I stick with Big Email for my primary email is cases similar to this. If I host email and lose the domain one day, I’ve lost two factor on a thousand different services (the single factor on some). Big Email’s policy is to not reissue my address, should I lose it or die.
The .name scenario is even worse. One domain gives you access to tens of thousands of users email. It seems like a privacy nightmare.
I’m not sure how future auth and privacy will work, but my child lost a tracfone phone and some mixup had separated it from my account. There was no way to recover the number. If that was my personal phone, how difficult would it be to restore banking, medical, and government access to things that assume I’ll always have that number.
Doing the same with personal email seems like too big of a risk.
You can look through my history how many times I’ve brought this up to people and they just don’t seem to care. A defence is that they’ll buy the domain for a century and not care once they’re dead which is fair but the situation in this article is a valid one. I will always stick with Big Email for accounts.
I moved to a third-level .name domain in 2005 precisely because one of the Big Email providers (Google) locked me out of my account with no recourse; presumably because I had a very common email address that was getting a large number of login attempts from other people which had triggered some abuse automation.
At the time - before the explosion of new gLTDs - third-level .name domains were advertised as the 'correct' domain to register for individuals wanting personal email addresses.
Your response seems to imply those people are irrational, but it's really just different priorities. Yeah, you need to make sure you don't lose the domain. With Google/etc, you need to make sure you don't break any of their usage policies across their suite of apps, etc. Neither are super likely to happen. Neither are impossible, either.
(Update: as it happens… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49548452)
Personally I like having a custom domain as I like the idea of being able to move between providers. So far, over the past decade, I've hosted my email with Google, Fastmail, Hey.com and then Fastmail again. I like being able to move it around if I find one provider better than another. Others won't care, that's fine too.
I don’t see the problem if you stick with .com or the ccTLD for the country you live in.
To me, the risk these registries screwing me over is smaller than Big Email deciding I broke their ToS and shutting down my account.
I wouldn’t use these novel TLDs either.
By Big Email are you just referring to the biggest providers (e.g. Google and Microsoft)? or is there another meaning?
If they're talking about Google or Microsoft, putting more trust in the worst tech companies than in the TLD of your country seems crazy to me.
I think it's pretty reasonable. The percentage of email accounts Google & Microsoft terminate seems far far lower than the chance I misconfigure my email or lose my domain
I was talking about one of those. Specifically they have a policy of not reissuing email addresses. Once it’s registered it’s burned. If they were to reverse that policy, the sky would fall.
I'd rather trust myself.
If you walk around all day with your wallet in your pocket, it might fall out and you'll lose it. Would you like me to hold onto it for you to make sure that doesn't happen?
I agree with you and other selfhosting fans in spirit, I really do.
On the other hand, it's email. I was at a hospital to do a blood draw, and needed them to receive an email (insurance info). I sent them an email from my Gmail. We wait 4-5 minutes. I notice they're checking an office 365 outlook. So, I re-send the same message from my @outlook.com email. Arrives instantly.
Deliverability between MS and GOOG is normally really good, and even that wasn't working right that day. My self-hosted email server being able to deliver to them reliably every time is hopeless. "Big Email" has made it excruciatingly painful to not be on sending from one of their platforms, unless you're one of the big 5 or whatever platforms that send bulk email or bulk transactional email. The SendGrids, Amazon SES, etc.
There's a difference between controlling the domain and self-hosting. You can still use Gmail and Outlook (I assume, I don't know for a fact) with a custom domain. But the difference is if any of those services become less reliable or whatever, you can move your email across to another provider. You can't do that if you're stuck on an @outlook.com address.
But also, even if you're self hosting on a server in your basement, you can still use SES to deliver your mail. Delivery is not an issue here.
The reason we happily walk around with our wallets is because Big Finance and Big Government are willing to invalidate and reissue our credit cards and identity documents, maybe even help us out with the fraudulent transactions after it was stolen.
I trust myself a hell of a lot more than I trust Google (or other big tech companies) to not terminate my account because of an automated process gone wrong. Not only are my own mistakes less frequent than theirs, I actually have recourse if I screw something up. Not so when big tech does.
Came to the same conclusion. With primary email I do not need multiple points of failure. The optimal solution is a contractual - paid - relationship with a single reputable email provider. There are a bunch of them.
The risk of losing your big email account is higher than losing your domain. Furthermore, if you happen to lose your domain, it will in most cases be easier to recover than a restricted account.
> if you happen to lose your domain, it will in most cases be easier to recover than a restricted account.
I used to think this, until I inadvertently let a registration fail to renew because I didn't update my expired credit-card's billing details with NameCheap - they did send me automated emails about it but I missed them, unfortunately. Their grace-period is only 30 days and I didn't notice the problem until 45 days had passed when my domain-name was bought-up by a spam-site-scammer and redirected the site to a porn/virus-downloader site (yes, those still exist).
I paid $1500 (uugghhh) for the UDRP process to get the domain-name back ($1000 UDRP fee, $500 for the lawyer to do the paperwork), and the UDRP panel ruled against me: their response reasoning made it clear that they never actually looked at my submitted evidence - and unfortunately that $1000 is nonrefundable, gaaaaah. I still haven't gotten that domain-name back. (I will say that my previous other UDRP cases all ruled in my favour; I don't know why/how I somehow drew a crappy arbiter in this case, I'm just vexed that they can rule against me without any right to appeal; I expected better).
The ratio between people who lost their "free big provider" account do to arbitrary algo decisions and people who lost their domain because they ignored provider's invoice for over a month must be 1.000.000 to 1. :-)
I use a prepaid provider. If at the day of the renewal there is no money "in the bank" they immediately release the domain. So yeah, I treat their reminders with priority. I really should change providers...
one neat thing having your own domain lets you do is have ANY <string>@domainyouown be sent to your inbox so this gives you unlimited email aliases. I often prefix the SOURCE of the email, like toyota@domainIown
I understand the advantages and have run email on my own domains for decades. Those aliases are used for business or partitioning senders. If they fail, my life goes on.