Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Poll: Do you use a gmail.com address for your primary personal email?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–77 of 77 posts

Re: Poll: Do you use a gmail.com address for your primary personal email?

#71

Post by Bjoern »

kibwen wrote: post #65
yuvadam wrote: post #6

Yes, but not for long. Migrating to a self-hosted mail server is one of my top priorities [1] for 2013. [1] - http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/03/26/andrew_we...

I'm highly interested in doing the same, can you recommend any resources that describe the process of setting up a self-hosted mail server?

Depends how much flexibility you want/need. Dovecot is pretty easy and straight forward.

Here is one with virtual domains, etc. might be overkill for your usecase though.

http://workaround.org/ispmail/squeeze

I personally run a stack over courier and some other hacks ontop of rdeliver, which works really nicely.

Important: Please always make sure to check that you don't run an open relay.

Re: Poll: Do you use a gmail.com address for your primary personal email?

#72

Post by sirn »

addandsubtract wrote: post #69
sirn wrote: post #17

No. Using email with your own domain is very important , especially if you use it for contacting a real person: it unties your email address from a provider . The biggest benefit is that you could switch provider very easily without ever changing your email. Once you've done so, it no longer matters which email service you are using. If the service ever decided to shut down or shut you off, you can just switch to ano…

What if you lose your domain?

That's another thing to consider, but depends on the case: if the domain is left expired, there's 45 days after expiration to renew and another 30 days Redemption Grace Period before it's actually deleted. If the domain is "hijacked" (unauthorized transfer), then the registrar is in violation of ICANN policy[1]. If the registrar decided to shut down for some reason, you can still always move your domain to another registrar.

[1]: https://www.icann.org/en/help/dispute-resolution#unauthorize...

Re: Poll: Do you use a gmail.com address for your primary personal email?

#73

Post by davewasthere »

DanBC wrote: post #23

Yes. I don't care at all about the privacy. I do care, very much, that a lot of my digital life is tied to a Google account, and losing that account will effectively kill my online presence. (see, for example, people who've had their Google account hacked and then lost everything else.) There doesn't appear to be an easy way to export all of that stuff. I'd really like a way to export all my logins and passwords to a…

They're pretty good at letting you export everything you store with google.

http://www.dataliberation.org/

Re: Poll: Do you use a gmail.com address for your primary personal email?

#76

Post by nileshgr »

cmsj wrote: post #55
yuvadam wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really care about Gmail 'features' that I will be missing out on, spam detection is probably the thing I'll miss the most, but that's a tradeoff I can live with. Other than that, there's the thing that I need to trust my VM provider, but that much easier than trusting a data mining conglomerate with your private conversations. In the end, self hosting an email server isn't that big of a deal to set up and mai…

Email isn't private unless it's encrypted :)

You can always setup block level encryption using dm-crypt/lvm in a Linux VM.

Re: Poll: Do you use a gmail.com address for your primary personal email?

#77

Post by jpswade »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #48
jpswade wrote: post #16

I used to use a self hosted email address, but it just lead to confusion. It was much easier to pick a team and run with it. I picked Google.

> I used to use a self hosted email address, but it just lead to confusion. Not sure what that means. How does a self-hosted email address lead to confusion? Confusion by who for what?

There's a whole host of reasons, here's a handful:

- Some sites will attempt to use the first part of your email address as your username.

- Foreign domains are difficult to explain to people who don't understand.

- People expect you to say a your username at a domain they have heard of.

- Anything other than .com is confusing.

eg: johnasmith@gmail.com is easier for humans to digest and computers to parse than john@johnsmith.net or john@smith.be or john@smith.me.uk

Post reply on HN