Ask HN: How do you manage the risk of losing access to your email address?

I sometimes read comments on this very forum, that hosting your own email server is risky and requires lots of work. I agree it's not for everyone - you need to have some knowledge of how to run and secure your service on the internet. I self-host since roughly 2011-2012 and cannot say I spent tons of time on it.

It does cost some money though, I pay $5 monthly to run my Nanode (on Linode), and then something around $30 a year to keep my domain.

If that risk is: my 'free email' provider decides to shutdown my email with no notice, then the risk mitigation is: "buy a domain name".

Do note that "buy a domain name" and "host your own email server" are orthogonal. You can "buy a domain name" and pay someone somewhere to "host an email server".

If your risk is: my domain name provider will terminate my domain name arbitrarily, well then, you are getting into very expensive territory where you'd have to become your own registrar, buy a TLD, and so forth. But then you just moved the risk up to "my TLD provider might terminate me".

Eventually, you realize that there is no way you can mitigate all the possible risks (not without personally owning all the world wide internet infrastructure), so you stop worrying about the "what ifs" that are so remote that they will never happen.

The simplest, lowest cost, and most risk removal is simply: "Buy a domain name". You eliminate so much of the risk there that the remainder becomes "very unlikely to happen territory".

If you own the domain name, then you get to move it around to different servers (and, as email natively supports 'backup servers' you even get to have multiple servers hosting it, provided you want to pay for the expense of doing so). This mitigates all the risk of any given "server provider" dropping you. You just move the domain to another and you are back in business as if nothing happened.

Your second step to mitigate risk is to never, ever, leave the only copy of your email archives on any of the servers you pick to host the email. For all of them, as soon as they receive the email (or as soon as you poll for an email) you download it to your local machine that you control (and backup). That way, any given server closing shop tomorrow, or canceling you tomorrow, has zero impact on your ability to access your archives of past emails.

Once you take those two steps, the remaining risk possibilities become remote enough that you really need not worry about them.

I have a personally-owned domain name connected to my [paid] account with a smaller email provider.

The domain is managed at a large well-known registrar, I keep it paid up 3+ years in advance, and make sure to keep my contact information up to date.

If anything goes wrong with the email provider (including going out of business), I will just redirect from my DNS settings. If I get locked out of my domain for some reason, there are clear next steps for me to open a ticket with the registrar and move towards resolving the issue.

I got it all hooked up in an afternoon, many years ago, and it was completely set-it-and-forget-it, besides logging into the registrar occasionally to extend the domain ownership.

(continuous backups are another matter - mine aren't fully automated yet)