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Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

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Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#131

Post by norom »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #19

Buy a domain (I bought lastname.contact) and subscribe to Fastmail or a similar paid-for service. You can then use anything@lastname.contact and if your email service provider drops you, you can switch to another and not care about your contacts trying to reach you or updating the email address of all your online accounts. I couldn't be happier with the switch (I was using Protonmail before, and Gmail a long time ago…

> I couldn't be happier with the switch (I was using Protonmail before, and Gmail a long time ago)

I am curious: What made you switch from Protonmail to Fastmail?

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#132

Post by htrp »

Grustaf wrote: post #30

When 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…

This is going to be one of those situations where we will have legislation passed, especially if our digital identities are tied to 3rd party providers.

Alternatively, the government will just take over basic id services (think first.last@yourcountry).

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#133

Post by spaetzleesser »

moreira wrote: post #51

> lost access to paid services that I had set up with social login I signed up to Quora with my Facebook account, back in the day. Deleted Facebook in 2013 and lost access to my Quora account, with no possible way to recover it. I haven't used a social login since. In my case, it was fairly harmless, but it made me realise how dangerous social login is. Every time there's a signup, I look for "signup with email". It'…

I am not that smart but I always thought that using one company's authentication system to log into another site can be a source of massive trouble.

I connect all my logins with my (custom-domain) E-mail and also do regular IMAP backups of my E-mails. I run Thunderbird once a week and sync all mails.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#134

Post by sundarurfriend »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #18

Apologies for going meta here: Could I urge that posters follow the site convention of prefixing the title with with Ask HN, Tell HN, etc. for posts that don't link to an external source? There are currently two such posts in the top 30. HN is primarily for discussing external articles, and I'd suggest that this post should have been submitted as such.

I honestly find the prefixes to be unnecessarily noisy these days, and prefer it like this - the (lack of) domain name next to the title tells me enough about the post, and I much prefer to quickly get to the actual title of the post rather than a couple of low information words at the beginning.

It was fine when it was one post in a hundred that was a "Verb HN", but these days these are much more common, and the prefixes make the front page more noisy and less signal-y than I prefer. If you aren't in the habit of taking a quick glance at the domain name before opening a link, I'd encourage you to start doing that, for more reasons than this.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#135

Post by jgrahamc »

ZetaZero wrote: post #122
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #59

Earlier 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

Cloudflare Email Routing is still in private beta. I'm eagerly awaiting it

It's open now: https://blog.cloudflare.com/email-routing-open-beta/

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#136

Post by sdoering »

sascha_sl wrote: post #78
fxtentacle wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to work well in Germany, though.

Because limited rentals are mostly banned, and being caught on a violation is quite bad.

But isn't that the exact point? That strong consumer protection enables business to earn money in a way that at least prohibits the worst behavior towards the consumers?

So essentially what OP stated?

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#137

Post by mynegation »

maratc wrote: post #95
londons_explore wrote: post #55

Earlier 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…

I use mail forwarders on my custom domain so anything sent to me@mydomain.co is simply forwarded to myregular@gmail.com. Except the domain renewal fees, it's free. If Gmail blocks me, I can readdress the forwarding to hotmail or usa.net or whatever.

That works but to cover your bases you need some sort of regular IMAP backup as well.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#139

Post by polynomial »

profmonocle wrote: post #107
EnKopVand wrote: post #77

Google is simply not a very reliable business partner for tech. I have a decade worth of experience in the Danish public sector, where I’ve had plenty of great experiences with both Amazon and Microsoft. I know that a lot of people would prefer things to be open source, but part of what you pay for in an Enterprise Organisation is availability of support. When AWS first entered the European market, most of what they…

> Google mean while has the same business-to-business support that it does for private customers like the author here. For some services it’s because Google doesn’t care, but they do care about Education and they still can’t figure out how to readjust to be a valuable business partner even when they actually want to sell you something. My experience with Google's business support is that instead of talking to a brick…

The robot hasn't gotten any better, but it's learned how to fake smile.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#140

Post by jventura »

moreira wrote: post #51

> lost access to paid services that I had set up with social login I signed up to Quora with my Facebook account, back in the day. Deleted Facebook in 2013 and lost access to my Quora account, with no possible way to recover it. I haven't used a social login since. In my case, it was fairly harmless, but it made me realise how dangerous social login is. Every time there's a signup, I look for "signup with email". It'…

> Deleted Facebook in 2013 and lost access to my Quora account, with no possible way to recover it.

Did the same but lost my Spotify account. Needless to say, but I haven’t used Spotify since then..

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