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Ask HN: How do you manage the risk of losing access to your email address?

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11–20 of 37 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage the risk of losing access to your email address?

#11

Post by c0balt »

I own the domain and delegate hosting to a trusted, local provider with known human support. Of course it's also backed from my side up to avoid data loss.

If an issue occurs then I can call a human and will likely be able to regain access. If the company ceases to exist, I "just" need to reconfigure my DNS records and import my backup into a new provider. It's not the cheapest and certainly not free solution but it will be works for me, it has survived at least two migrations between providers.

I can highly recommend mailbox.org and mbsync. Fastmail and other providers who support custom domains will also suffice, pick your poison. If you want (human) support, be ready to pay a small bonus for it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage the risk of losing access to your email address?

#14

Post by mmh0000 »

Here's how I do it:

* Buy your own domain, (Through a reputable registrar that has existed for a long time (enom; joker; namecheap; aws).

* Host DNS through a 3rd party (Cloudflare in my case)

* Use Fastmail for email hosting on my custom domain

* Run a nightly cronjob using offlineimap (https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap) to sync all hosted email to my local NAS.

This protects me from:

* Fastmail bans me: I'll pay for email hosting elsewhere, update DNS records, and upload all my backed-up email.

* DNS host bans me: I'll move to a different DNS host.

* Registrar bans me: I'm a little fukked; old emails are backed up, but new emails would be tricky. Though, this is much less likely

* House burns down: Buy a new house and NAS and redownload all my email.

* Nuclear war: I'm dead and email doesn't matter anymore.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage the risk of losing access to your email address?

#15

Post by eddd-ddde »

mmh0000 wrote: post #14

Here's how I do it: * Buy your own domain, (Through a reputable registrar that has existed for a long time (enom; joker; namecheap; aws). * Host DNS through a 3rd party (Cloudflare in my case) * Use Fastmail for email hosting on my custom domain * Run a nightly cronjob using offlineimap ( https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap ) to sync all hosted email to my local NAS. This protects me from: * Fastmail bans me:…

What if you survive nuclear fallout? I don't think this has enough protections...

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage the risk of losing access to your email address?

#16

Post by ramtatatam »

fph wrote: post #10
ramtatatam wrote: post #2

I self-host. And then I backup everything to my RAID6 NAS. And then, though irregularly, backup to offline media. I sometimes read comments on this very forum, that hosting your own email server is risky and requires lots of work. I agree it's not for everyone - you need to have some knowledge of how to run and secure your service on the internet. I self-host since roughly 2011-2012 and cannot say I spent tons of tim…

All your backups are on-site then?

I assume when you mention `on-site` you mean my house - yep, NAS is at home.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage the risk of losing access to your email address?

#19

Post by toast0 »

Don't do anything important with a domain that's not in a juridiction you can expect to lawyer in.

For me, as a US person, that's easy. I've got some stuff on a .org, and some on a .us.

I actually let the .org go for a while when money was tight and hosting was hard, but managed to get it back later cause whoever had registered it and gotten it signed up for lots of Japanese spam had some problem and it became available again in the middle of the registration year.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage the risk of losing access to your email address?

#20

Post by snowwrestler »

Managing risk is more complex than just prevention by technical means.

First you try to quantify the likelihood. For major email providers my estimation is the likelihood is actually quite low. Hundreds of millions of people have Gmail accounts and use them everyday. Same with Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. The vast, vast majority of people who use these services do not get locked out.

In terms of prevention, understand what the service provider considers risky and compartmentalize. My personal Gmail accounts do not touch stuff that Google considers sensitive, like Ads or payments or IP (e.g. uploading to YouTube). For that work, I use other accounts. My professional Google accounts are tied to my work email domain, not Gmail.

Finally, understand what recovery looks like. Seems like people often forget or underappreciate recovery (vs prevention). I use a password manager so I don’t need live access to email to log in. And for important services I log in regularly and/or use apps so chances are I’m authenticated right now. So in all those cases if I lost one email address, I could change to another in my account.

And for anything truly important, like financial, I have others ways of contacting them. If I get locked out of Gmail I can still call my bank or broker, etc and re-establish access with a new email.

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