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

OP - create a new email address and add it to your profile. A Googler might see this and reach out to help.

By doing this you are trusting the .contact gTLD provider. Do you have idea how reliable are they? Would they reclaim your domain for some reason?

One thing to consider is the possibility of using multiple separate e-mail accounts from different providers.

Currently i have about 10 different e-mail accounts:

  - one for development related things and communities
  - one for newsletters, various online platforms and so on
  - one for throwaway purposes, lower importance things like video game accounts
  - one for university related things (it stayed after graduation)
  - a few separate accounts (and corresponding Google account) for various phones or other devices, as necessary
  - some standby accounts if i ever need them, some from different providers to check mail denylisting
  - a personal address that's mostly for contacts through my website or my self-hosted automation messages

There are some others, as well as each platform for automation has a separate account as well (e.g. GitLab, Zabbix, Nextcloud, ...), though most of those are on the same self-hosted mail server. Of course, deciding how to structure everything is one's own choice, in my case it's just historical cruft and loosely defined boundaries of how much i care about any particular item.

That said, mail servers that are easy to set up are a godsend (for example: https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver), as long as you also have one of the larger walled garden alternatives for public communications, should there ever be delivery problems.

It's not like Google deciding to ban all of my accounts at once (though fingerprinting, or based on IP because i don't care to set up some sort of an advanced proxy to access all of them from different VPNs) wouldn't be problematic, but this way at least the impact would be minimized.

Plus, with software like Thunderbird and something like KeePass for strong randomly generated passwords, managing everything is really low effort. Of course, this also lends itself nicely to avoiding social logins and creating a separate e-mail based account wherever applicable, for a bit more control, rather than keeping all of your eggs in the same basket.

As for those who will inevitably say that this is too hard or complicated to be practical: i invite you to try setting up your own mail server with the help of the provided link on a 5$/month VPS, things have really improved in the last few years! Of course, creating new Google accounts (or for other platforms) might be a bit more cumbersome with modern verification steps etc., but it's not like it's impossible either.

Sometimes i wish we could do the same for personal identities, e.g. a list of aliases that could be issued through some government org. for particular purposes and revoked as necessary. For example, i wouldn't want a leak of some shopping site result in my personal data being compromised in regards to my online banking or my physical address, in any capacity whatsoever.

Also, if you're planning to use it as your primary email domain - pick a "normal" TLD. Using something like .email/.xyz/.live etc can end up in spam (especially for newer domains).

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 someone with it I will go to prison for sure, but I don't think they will take the knife away. They definitely won't ban me from buying knives.

But when it's a digital service, even something as crucial as a banking service, it's seen as normal that you can lose them for posting offensive things on twitter. Perhaps it's because we haven't had these digital services for long enough to consider them as really belonging to us, so we accept that they can be taken away at the slightest provocation.