161–170 of 309 posts
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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
They should be very aware that this could happen and their customers need a backup, that’s on them.
As for emails, contacts, photos, downloads, that’s on us. We need backups like you have but the vast majority of users wouldn’t even know where to begin with this.
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Social logins only carry your information and a token, and you can enter to your profile and add a password too (99% of the time). So, you can use social login (OpenID Connect in reailty), as an automated form filler and add your password, so your account will be effectively won't depend on that provider anymore. I use a lot of services like that.
Finding the place to enter and save and confirm a password sounds a lot harder than just putting in my first name, last name, email and a password in the first place.
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…
But you can't really download a car, can you? :) Joke aside, I think we are actually going in the opposite direction. Looking at the way Tesla wants/already does keep a score of your driving, maybe self driving cars in the distant future, I would predict that we are going in the wrong direction when certain people and groups will want cars to drive away from you back to their home base or your car to refuse to start…
Phone 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…
I would imagine it takes the form of a government "porting server", where anyone can query an email address and receive back a different target email address. All people sending email will be required by law to first consult the porting server to determine where to send email. It could be as simple as an http endpoint. Total development costs and running costs could be pretty low - low enough that the government can…
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… because POP3 isn’t able to leave messages on the server, it’s such a coarse instrument. You can instruct IMAP fetches to delete too, and that’ll avoid this problem. Better would be to move emails into a new mailbox after fetching them, so that you don’t need to see them again but they’re still there, but I don’t know if anything supports that concept.
> Better would be to move emails into a new mailbox after fetching them, so that you don’t need to see them again but they’re still there, but I don’t know if anything supports that concept. The best way to do this, in my opinion, is to tee the emails to another mailbox as they come in, not as they get pulled from the inbox.
Phone 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…
I would imagine it takes the form of a government "porting server", where anyone can query an email address and receive back a different target email address. All people sending email will be required by law to first consult the porting server to determine where to send email. It could be as simple as an http endpoint. Total development costs and running costs could be pretty low - low enough that the government can…
In the event that an ISP or digital services provider wishes to cease providing email service, they could be required to provide minimal access to enable updated provision of either a forwarding email address (which the provider would forward mail to), or an MX to redirect the sender to use. This would avoid the need for a big central "porting server", and retain the simplicity of doing a DNS lookup for one or more current MX records.
Given spam challenges, the former is likely unattractive (who wants to use their own IP ranges to relay potential spam to former users?), but the latter could likely work, or be made to work.
I realise the MX approach doesn't quite work, and you'd likely need to relay the email, but this is more akin to how the phone number porting system works - you ask the number block owner on each call, and they can either accept the call, or point you towards the correct destination network.
This topic is of indirect relevance and interest to the UK telecoms regulator [1], since many households rely on an email address from their ISP, which could become a barrier to switching, or result in long-term extractive pricing from users who have no real choice other than to pay a former ISP over the odds for email service to retain an old address.
[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/features-and-new...
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Why can't you just go around selling your data to the highest bidders and use the money to pay for the myriad of already-existing hosting providers? I'll tell you why: because you are not worth that much to advertisers. If you are so cheap to the point of asking to get your data harvested, chances are you never going to be a high-value customer.
Sure, let’s do that. Where can I sell my data?
Though I think “high-value bit of cattle” or “high-value mark” are closer to how the stalking side of the advertising industry sees us!
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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.
I assume a similar issue existed for telephone numbers. Was it wrong to require that they be portable?
In essence, in the regulated telecoms space, the number block owner retains responsibility for routing to the new network after a number port.