(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.