Become unbannable from your email • Hacker News Board

Re: Become unbannable from your email

#11

Post by iamnothere » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 10:09 PM UTC

Looks like a good intro for people who want partial self-hosting, which is better than leaving it with a megacorp (especially for non-professional email).

In before:

* running your own mail is too much of a burden

* I used to host my own mail but I couldn’t figure out DNS or used a bad IP or something and Microsoft/Gmail won’t accept my mail

* if “they” want to ban you they will just seize your domain or kick down your door and shoot your dog

* it’s good that they can ban you from your email because I don’t like spam

Edit: lol, I was not in fact “in before” the comment about domain seizures. Unbelievable.

Re: Become unbannable from your email

#12

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 10:11 PM UTC

hu3 wrote: post #5

That's good but make sure you don't lose the domain. Ever.

[deleted]

Re: Become unbannable from your email

#13

Post by mobilemidget » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 10:11 PM UTC

Creating aliases for the addresses you are actually using, e.g. a netflix@ signup is preferred over a general catch all, .. and all that spam senders can generate approach.

Re: Become unbannable from your email

#14

Post by mobilemidget » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 10:12 PM UTC

pzmarzly wrote: post #4

Counterpoint: I lost a domain when a registrar went out of business, and another when a registrar bumped the price 10x and refused to give me authenticode unless I physically show up to their office. Sure, I cheapened out and used shady cheap registrars, and this all happened a while ago so things are probably more regulated now, but for comparison I never permanently lost access to hosted email. (Losing access tempo…

I'm surprised to read they had an actual physical office you _could_ show up :)

was it a very distant location to head out to?

Re: Become unbannable from your email

#15

Post by gblargg » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 10:13 PM UTC

I like email forwarding services like mailgw [1]. If my email provider gives me problems, I can just forward to a different one.

[1] https://www.mailgw.com

Re: Become unbannable from your email

#16

Post by fnord77 » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 10:14 PM UTC

Services should allow secondary email addresses.

Re: Become unbannable from your email

#17

Post by iamnothere » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 10:14 PM UTC

IlikeKitties wrote: post #3

TL;DR: Step 1: Get Your Own Domain Step 2: Make Backups This is not sufficient. Even your domain can be seized. There is no way for any service dependent on the DNS System to be irrevocably owned.

I don’t think TFA is talking about hosting email for well-known piracy sites or terrorists. My guess is they are more concerned about arbitrary and capricious account bans for supposed TOS violations, which is more relevant to ordinary people. Your domain won’t be seized by someone because Google doesn’t like your YouTube upload or whatever.

Re: Become unbannable from your email

#18

Post by kibwen » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 10:14 PM UTC

simojo wrote: post #8

There are online services where a bad actor can enter your email to automatically sign you up for hundreds, thousands of marketing emails. In the event that that happens, given that you have full control over the domain, you could just divert whatever @yourdomain.com to a black hole. What will happen when email attacks become more advanced--to the point of signing up thousands of different @yourdomain.com? What strat…

For every crucial service (banking, etc), generate a unique, cryptographically-strong email address, save it to your password manager, and have its mail forwarded to your common inbox. If only phone numbers were so easy to mask.

Re: Become unbannable from your email

#19

Post by marssaxman » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 10:19 PM UTC

I've been doing this for years, though I don't really think of it as "having a backup" so much as "using an IMAP client". Works fine. It's really useful to be able to make up a new email address for every company who wants one; they each get their own folder. If I get any unexpected mail, it's obvious where it came from and easy to deal with, though in practice this rarely happens.

Re: Become unbannable from your email

#20

Post by dotancohen » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 10:19 PM UTC

simojo wrote: post #8

There are online services where a bad actor can enter your email to automatically sign you up for hundreds, thousands of marketing emails. In the event that that happens, given that you have full control over the domain, you could just divert whatever @yourdomain.com to a black hole. What will happen when email attacks become more advanced--to the point of signing up thousands of different @yourdomain.com? What strat…

I already am in that situation. Like onions and Ogres, my email defense is in layers.

1. Specific known compromised TO addresses are sent to devnull.

2. Specific FROM senders are whitelisted.

3. Three or sometimes four heuristics engines evaluate. If any of them pass the mail, it goes to a separate new-senders inbox. I thus get maybe a dozen spam messages per week in that box - and five figures of messages rejected.

I used to tweak it a lot, now I just occasionally add another FROM address to the whitelist.