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Comment by mahyarm | Hacker News Reader

Time to start transitioning to your own domain name email address!

(It's going to be a big pain...)

https://mailinabox.email/ is pretty good.

Yeah it's good option for those wanting to get into self hosting. Another option is https://mailcow.email which is a more recent entrant to the email self hosting space.

i very much suspect this story is to try and shut the stable door on exactly that bolted horse.

with gmvault now floating at the top of the page i can imagine the gmail adminstrators on the phone to the account managers every few minutes relaying just how many hundreds of terabytes a second in backup bandwidth closing the accounts is now costing them.

Bandwidth costs are trivial to google. I doubt that any of this will put two and two together considering how big cos work.

100 million users downloading 15Gigs of email each is not "trivial", even if its $0.00000001 per MB

And gmail has 1 Billion monthly active users, so that is quite likely a conservative guestimate.

I don't think its implausible that shutting down these guys accounts will cost google a 7 or 8 figure sum in (non budgeted) backbone bandwidth charges alone.

This isn't going to make anywhere near 100million people "quit google" nor do many people have 15GB of mail, or anywhere close.

And you don't pay per megabyte at the peered networks scale, or even 95% percentile.

I didn't say anything about "quitting".

Just a significant number deciding it is time to back up their content.

And at the backbone level it is all charged by the Mbps for example http://www.level3.com/en/legal/ip-traffic-exchange-policy/ http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/02/transit-works-costs-i... So a jump in a significant portion of the user base from a few MB per user per day to several GB will be several thousand times more expensive for that day.

That information, while factually correct, isn't applicable to Google in the same way it is to say [insert most other websites].

Google is not a tier 1 provider, there are only 6 of them.

Putting traffic into a tier 1 network costs, taking it pays.

A massive surge from Googles hardware onto the tier 1 networks will be very, very expensive.

Last time it came up was as the BitTorrent protocol started blowing up ISPs that couldn't pay the bills.

Google peers with many national and regional ISPs at exchange points. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'm guessing a fairly significant portion of their traffic does not go over traditional "tier 1" networks and rather is handed off directly to ISPs.

Not a big one if you e.g. have someone else provide the backing email service.

I bought my own domain back in 2002 or so, and note it's important that you own it*, and then set up email with a quality shared hosting service company. At some point I noticed this well recommended Fastmail company, which was lots cheaper than the shared hosting, the other features of which I no longer needed. Which has now been providing my email service for years, and I note they also do contacts and calendaring. And have really good customer service. And are reliable, including not having GMail's sometimes too aggressive spam filtering. Etc.

Although if I remember correctly they were pants at accepting notifications from Fanfiction.net, which is not something I really worked at fixing since it prompts me to regularly check my backup Hotmail (Live, whatever) account. Which emphasizes one thing, if you do this, make very sure to maintain another email account in case you have any problems with your personal domain.

You also ought to get treated more seriously by various important others if you have your own domain instead of a generic GMail or other big free email provider account.

For me the big pain is moving off all the stuff referencing a *@gmail.com address to something else. There is no real such thing as 'phone number portability' in email. Even if you forward everything, you can still lose the forwarding.

And that's why you do it sooner rather than later -- as time passes, it gets harder.

I set up my new domain email address as an email forwarder to Gmail, and used it like that for nearly a year. When signing up for things, I'd just use that address instead of the Gmail address.

When I moved to FastMail, I set up that email address to go to FastMail instead. Most of my inbound mail instantly came with it. It's been a couple weeks, I still get stuff on my Gmail. So I check it once or twice a day still at the moment, and when I get something from some website, I go log into that account, and change my email address.

Fastmail can also pull in from your gmail account. You could do that and tag the emails. It might be a good time saver and save you from having to do manual checks.

Yeah, I know. But my concern is if it's 'too easy' to just handle my Gmail messages in Fastmail that I'll procrastinate changing over the accounts properly.

Once I get down to a minimal amount I'll forward and tag.

The 'phone number portability' of email is you owning the domain, and pointing the mx record to whatever mail provider you like. To switch providers you simply register an account somewhere else and change your dns record.

By starting with an "@gmail.com" address you willingly give that up, but that's not the system's fault.

I did this a few years ago. I don't know if I'm 100% transitioned but I'm just about.

I setup the forward from <name>@gmail.com to <name>@<mydomain>. I then flagged things that are coming from gmail and slowly updated addresses on those websites to point at <name>@<mydomain>. You don't have to be in a hurry to get it done you just have to be working towards the end goal.

Yeah it's just a matter of making a start and doing a bit each day/week. It's surprising how much you will achieve over time.

I can also vouch for Fastmail.

On top of everything mentioned by hga, as the name implies, the web UI is fast, and their calendar is good.

Another nice thing with owning the domain is that you can set up a catch-all, then use unique addresses to sign up for stuff. I sign up with <service>@mydomain.com now, so when <service> sells my address, I know who to blame.

I still receive stuff on my old gmail, so I do POP retrieval from Fastmail.

I did it, and it's less pain than you think as long as you have a year or two to do it. Try fastmail and just start replying to all emails from your personal domain.

I use a dot io domain name for one of my email addresses, but I've always been slightly worried about the possibility of my domain registrar being socially engineered. If someone gets into my domain account, that could lead to ATO and change of the MX records. Should I be concerned? Is there a "best practices" dot io domain registrar that won't allow this to happen?

There is something called "locking facility" that some registrars provide. That is changes can be made only with a 2 factor auth.

Might also be worth using a very long (1 week - 1 month?) TTL for your DNS MX records. This is no guarantee but it should buy you some extra time over the default which could be only an hour or so.

One trick is to set a very long TTL on your MX records to mitigate any damage if your account is compromised.

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