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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?

#51

Post by moreira »

> 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's the safer option. And if you can, use your own domain for email (Google's paid email offering supports this, as does Fastmail and countless other email providers). That way if your email provider decides to flip you off, you switch DNS records and you're up and running somewhere else, and everything keeps on running.

But: If you don't have a copy of emails then you lose all saved emails, so make sure you have a backup strategy in place.

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

#52

Post by montroser »

101008 wrote: post #38
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 tried to do this long ago but I have two main fears: 1. Is it easy to set up the redirect from Gmail to the new account? 2. When I send email from new account (custom domain), how are you completely sure it is not going to be on spam? I send unsolicited emails to people in big corps (journalist asking for interviews/comments, not spammy :-)

You point your domain to Gmail. Then when they ban you, you point your domain instead to the new place, like Fastmail. So it's not really redirecting from Gmail, it's just changing a DNS record.

On sending from a custom domain, your mail provider walks you through setting up a few additional DNS records (for DKIM, SPF) that allow you to send from your domain through their servers. They maintain the reputation of their IPs and so you get their good deliverability.

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

#53

Post by Grustaf »

pjc50 wrote: post #47
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…

> even something as crucial as a banking service Interestingly the problem of people excluded from the banking system has been addressed by statutory regulation in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/basic-bank-account... ; see also discussion at https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201617/ldselect/ldfi... which covers the question of people with inadequate ID. Getting your email account wrongly bann…

Good to hear that you have protections around this in the UK. I know that in Sweden several political, and even ideological organisations have had their accounts frozen because of things they said or held true. Entirely legal things I should add.

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

#54

Post by jamil7 »

I had my first experience with this recently in which my Netlify account I was using to host a small local community / volunteer project was automatically flagged and suspended after I logged in. DNS for the project was also hosted there and when an account is suspended all DNS records are wiped and sites are immediately taken offline, so even things not hosted there (backend and mail server) were also down. I don't use it for any professional work (and likely never will after that) and was on a free plan so maybe on a paid plan it's different. I'm just glad it happened with that project where it didn't matter and not something critical.

I would also recommend buying a domain for your email, that's what I did a few years ago and point it to Protonmail. It's not self-hosted but at least I can always point the domain somewhere else.

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

#55

Post by londons_explore »

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'…

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 should be no difficulty paying the hosting costs of such a mail server and staff to look after it.

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

#56

Post by throwaway984393 »

nicoburns wrote: post #42
101008 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to do this long ago but I have two main fears: 1. Is it easy to set up the redirect from Gmail to the new account? 2. When I send email from new account (custom domain), how are you completely sure it is not going to be on spam? I send unsolicited emails to people in big corps (journalist asking for interviews/comments, not spammy :-)

> 1. Is it easy to set up the redirect from Gmail to the new account? Yes super easy. You can do this using Gmail's filter service. However, many services will also let you log in to gmail via POP/IMAP (OAuth for auth) and fetch the email from your gmail for you that way. > 2. When I send email from new account (custom domain), how are you completely sure it is not going to be on spam? I send unsolicited emails to pe…

You don't need to set up anything in Gmail either, Fastmail has Gmail connectors that pull all your mail and calendars and even lets you send email through Gmail from Fastmail. It's ridiculously convenient.

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

#58

Post by playpause »

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'm curious, what problem does it create for you, clicking a link you momentarily thought was to an external site before realising it's actually a discussion on this site? Honest question, you might have a good answer, I'm not trying to be rhetorical.

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

#59

Post by weird-eye-issue »

londons_explore wrote: post #55
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'…

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…

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

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

#60

Post by xuki »

londons_explore wrote: post #55
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'…

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…

Some domain registrars provide a catch all email for your domains. Just forward that to your own gmail (or whatever service you are using). That way you are in control of the email addresses and can take advantage of free email services.
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