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.
Get a domain and register an MX record.
If your email provider shuts down, forward the mail somewhere else.
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.
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 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
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.
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 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.
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.
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
I’ve had that discussion before, here on Lemmy. From my experience, like >90% of people will tell you not to do mail yourself. And there is a reason to it.
I mean don’t do it if you don’t know about DNS, all the added antispam like SPF, IP blocklists and how the big players handle that. And don’t make any configuration mistakes and become an open relay for spam. It’s certainly doable, though. (With the proper Linux admin skills.)
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
