(no subject)

[contrarianarchon]

What's a good, honest, god-fearing netizen supposed to do if they should happen to want to keep contact with various friends and government departments into the long-term? Gmail is not looking like I can rely on it into the medium-term future. What does one do if one wants a stable email?

Comments

[thedarlingone]

oh, what's going on with gmail? I rely on my gmail pretty much exclusively, so if something's happening to it I'm definitely interested in the search for a stable alternative.

[brin_bellway]

Buy a domain name. Create an email address @ that domain name. Redirect emails sent to it to Gmail, and have outgoing emails displayed as being from it (here is a guide with a high DuckDuckGo search ranking).

You now have a black-box interface for your email: you can switch email providers at will, and as long as you keep the redirects updated nobody else ever has to know or care which provider you are using at any given time.

(of course you'll still need to do the *initial* update of telling everyone and everything to use the custom domain instead of [Bad username or site: gmail @ com], which is a pain in the ass, but at least it's one-time-only and not done under the time constraints of an impending shutdown)

(For readable archives of former-provider emails, you can probably just keep them in Thunderbird (for more than one copy, a guide to backing up Thunderbird for Windows; to back up Thunderbird for Linux, literally just take a copy of the ".thunderbird" folder in your home directory, it's that simple). I'm sure there's other ways, though.)

Transitioning to doing this for my primary legal-name email, and thereby weaning myself off dependence on my (expensive) ISP, will be my New Year's resolution this year. (I plan to bring it up at the annual household-finance review, see who else I can talk into joining me. I've already talked about it privately with Dad, and he's in favour.) Haven't decided yet if I'm going to do it for Brin too, at least right away: Dad will have a domain name regardless (and I'd far rather be dependent on him than on Rogers), but I worry that "can't afford Brin's email services" is a more likely source of email linkrot in the next couple of years than "Gmail shuts down". Perhaps when I am more financially stable.

[contrarianarchon]

Yeah, I agree with the general principle that hosting my own email just shifts the lynchpin of failure from "My provider nukes me" to "I fuck up something" (my financial situation is better than yours, so I'm less worried about that, and my mother is def onboard with that kind of plan, so I think I'm somewhat less likely to fuck up, but it's still a worry). But I'm more worried about "Google decides I am breaching TOS for using an ad-blocker or re-selling my smartphone and nukes my account" then "The service shuts down", since the former seems more likely and also the former is much more disastrous, re: convincing tax departments, discord accounts, etc, that I need to be contacted via a new address.

[contrarianarchon]

Youtube recently updated it's terms of service such that they can delete unprofitable accounts, and while this is probably about unprofitable uploaders, the wording allows them to delete the entire google account, and allows them to also delete unprofitable watchers, theoretically. Even if they're not doing it now, I'm still highly worried.

(Also google has a history of deleting google accounts for minor offences (in the sense of "stuff I can imagine me doing without noticing it was against TOS", like re-selling my pixel), so being dependent to them is a big issue.

[contrarianarchon]

Also the email redirection tutorial seems to be functionally an advertisement for google suite, I'm not sure if that was intentional.

[contrarianarchon]

(I keep thinking of things to say a few minutes later.)

Also that appears to be a blog about blog-making. Does she have any chops in the blogging world or did she launch straight into it? On examination she seems to have transitioned from "Blogging about nothing because boredom" to "Blogging about blogging to extract money from lesser bloggers" at some point but archive crawls are hard enough when people aren't trying to sell shit/rebrand away from that era, and I'm not that invested.

[brin_bellway]

*shrug* I'm not invested in that particular guide either: it was just an example.

It does look like a lot of the easier-to-find guides are advertising small-business stuff, possibly because sites like that put more effort into SEO. I looked for a more generalised and less G-Suite-y one and next found a site that made a snide remark about "you have the right to use an ad-blocker, but *we* have the right to ~protect the integrity of our content~" and shut me out. I *do* generally turn off my adblockers for sites that ask nicely, but that was *not* a *nice* ask, so I circumvented it instead. (It does seem to have some useful information buried in there.)

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I'm pretty sure I'd feel safer relying on myself and my in-house tech support than relying on Google (who does not care about me) or god forbid Rogers (who cares about me for only so long as we continue to pay them $90 - $130 per month, depending on how many currently-toothless threats to leave we've made lately; pretty sure I could get roughly-equivalent Internet service for ~$70).

Like, the fact is, I have (for example) diary entries from 2003, and a picture of a puppy that has since died of old age (wait, did I not make a post about that one? fixed), because it was on me to maintain them and I *did*. Faithfully carried from one computer to the next (and later to several computers at once), surviving an international move and an abrupt motherboard failure and in some cases the cessation of support for their original file formats. I don't have my emails from 2003, because Comcast kicked me out when I moved out of their service area and I was 13 and didn't know how to make local backups of external emails, and the prospect of trying to maybe learn how was overwhelming while dealing with a new country.

Also, it seems like the more likely custom-domain fuckups--failing to renew your domain hosting, failing to update redirects when you move to a new email provider--would result in *temporary* email bouncing until you realise and fix it (unless somebody snipes your lapsed domain, I suppose: might be best to avoid getting a name that anyone else is likely to want), while disasters caused by other people deciding to kick you out would tend to be harder to come back from.

[contrarianarchon]

This is all fair but I don't actually have time to think about it right now, and probably need to do more serious research before venturing a technical opinion. But exams will be exams.