In the early days, I was thepimp@hotmail.com. One day, my account was suddenly suspended because of the handle, no other reason, all data permanently gone, no backsies.
Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
111–120 of 309 posts
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#112A lot of us have also been caught out by Google announcing they are forcing free G-Suite Legacy users to upgrade. Here is where I am heading (having given the matter much thought and some testing, trial and error) Free Gmail/Cal account as I enjoy the software My own custom domains with any registrar Paid Fastmail account storing all my emails to all my domains/aliases at Fastmail All Fastmail messages forwarded to G…
Also caught in the Legacy drama. :-( still haven't decided what to do about it. blurg.
Me too. Currently leaning towards iCloud. It’s very inexpensive for email with a custom domain and I trust Apple a bit more than other tech companies.
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
There really needs to be a zero cost custom-domain email hosting solution. I'd love to have webmail on my own domain, hosted by someone else, and with ads on the side. Those ads should generate ~$20 per user per year (after all, they can be targeted based on emails I'm sending and receiving, and I'll be looking at them many minutes every day - the perfect combination for high revenue ads). With $20/user/year, there s…
Something like improvmx but, like $3-4 a month instead of $9 with just bare bones POP3 and SMTP for personal use only would suit me. I'd like to self host data and webmail and pay somebody else manage the headache of delivering and receiving.
Fastmail handles the whole thing admirably as far as I'm concerned.
Get your custom domain, create a mail user with Fastmail: username@mydomain.com
Set things up nicely (do read the docs), particularly look at catchalls, wildcards and aliases
Give out separate email addresses to each and every service you use: service@username.mydomain.com
Bonus: You can easily send emails back from each address you give out and if you create a label called "service" for the example above, mail coming to that address will be automatically labelled without needing to create a rule.
I used to use spamgourmet and used to get some resistance from sites using misguided email validation considering it a spam service (oh the irony) - now with Fastmail, everything just works.
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#114Phone number porting is a thing due to regulation. I'm looking forward to having email address porting legislation, one day. For full porting, there's a long road ahead, starting with regulating domain names, which email addresses depend on. However, as long as the domain name _de facto_ remains in the possession of the original provider, this is technically possible, already. Email address porting might even be poss…
How would you even solve porting without breaking legacy systems? You can point the MX records to another provider's server (or your own), but porting single email addresses won't really work.
Legacy systems will be broken.
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#115When you put it this way, it's really quite remarkable how tenuous our hold is on even paid for digital services. There is really nothing you could do with a car to prompt the car maker to take it from you. And the state will only take it if you break the law in particularly dangerous ways. When it comes to other possessions it's even harder for anyone to take them away from you. If I take a kitchen knife and stab so…
Cars are also digital service platforms which can and do take away things. I am currently playing a safety score minigame to unlock enhanced driving features. If I pay $2000 my software will enable my minivan to have a 0-60 of a Ferrari. This is all premised upon a connectivity package I'm obligated to pay for but have been gifted for a year by the manufacturer. To put it more bluntly, my eyeballs are watched by AI t…
What car is it? In what country did you purchase it? To me that sounds beyond reality…
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#116Free services are fantastic, until they break. Or until you get banned. There's people who get their Microsoft banned for no reason, without notice. The reason is some kind of ML algorithm found (rightfully or not) CP in their data, which could have been some public Discord or WhatsApp group or could have been a troll beating the checksum mechanism (it exists for both the Microsoft and Apple one). Good luck getting to talk to a human, and good luck getting your account back. Which includes your Windows Store acquisitions, your Windows/Office licenses, your Xbox games. Everything. I see Black Friday sales for family OneDrive. You'd have 5x 1 TB for 60 EUR a year, a good deal, right? Except I don't trust my data there, even encrypted. I don't vouch for my backups containing no bogus data, given it also includes something like browser cache or Discord/Telegram/WhatsApp backups. The solution is quite simple for techies: don't rely on cloud; DIY. For the rest of the world, competition would hopefully lead to better product. And this is all about Microsoft. Not Google, they're abysmal when it comes to support (for their free tiers).
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#117In sensible jurisdictions, a tenant cannot be kicked out for non-payment of rent without a court order. That's right, a debtor who owes money to another cannot be booted without an independent government body approving it. So it's not inherently wrong to say a user of a free service should have some rights. In some situations, it's not fair to pull the rug out under people. I think that there will come a point where…
And as always it will backfire on users! Now it is impossible to find unlimited rentals, every contract has yearly extensions! In some countries landlords even rotate tenants every two years, else they would get extra rights from long stay.
I don’t know from which countries you got such pessimistic view, but for me that’s unheard
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just a heads up you could use Cloudflare Email Routing to forward *@foo.com to foo@gmail.com for free It looks like Zoho might have a free plan too but I've never tried it https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html ImprovMX also does email routing for free along with webhooks and such
I use the free plan from Zoho and it's been solid. But... I have been using it for a while and it is my understanding that certain features I have (IMAP) are no longer in the free plan.
Just looked at their pricing and it looks quite sane. How good is their calendar and does it sync to iOS and Android?
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#119A lot of us have also been caught out by Google announcing they are forcing free G-Suite Legacy users to upgrade. Here is where I am heading (having given the matter much thought and some testing, trial and error) Free Gmail/Cal account as I enjoy the software My own custom domains with any registrar Paid Fastmail account storing all my emails to all my domains/aliases at Fastmail All Fastmail messages forwarded to G…
What do you enjoy about Gmail/cal? I don't see the point of that level of indirection in your setup. Fastmail seems indistinguishable from Gmail UI except I don't have crap on the left nav. And gcal is unreliable garbage, in my experience.
These days I pick a provider for each service that lives and dies by the quality of that service. Fastmail has 'mail' right on the tin.
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#120Huh. I would have never thought that was a risk. It’s the sort of thing I would do. Thanks for the warning.
My highest likelihood interpretation is that a bunch of fools marked your email as spam rather than the initial spammer.
I think it’s hard to help most people drawn from the total population in an async context because of the 50% being less than median intelligence problem.