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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

If there is something people need to understand about online services it's that:

(1) when you pay for an online service, a firm owes you a service.

(2) when you use an online service, a firm owes you nothing. Be OK with the idea that the service may disappear tomorrow.

Email is an increasingly important form of communication, and you should always have a service contract with the firm hosting your emails, with the consumer protections that come with the exchange of money for services.

I recommend fastmail.com or mailbox.org to all my family members when the topic comes up.

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My response to this kind of problem/concern is to have your own domain. For example, Fastmail is my provider, but I have my own domain, which email is currently served through fastmail. But even that, unless you're Nissan or similar, is uncertain; no one owns a domain, they only have use-rights while they pay their registrar bills.

Even Nissan has a registrar, although I imagine the bill would have to get quite overdue before they'd consider canceling their domain name.

Nissan has its own TLD.

And before that, Nissan had the weight of Nissan, and expected that to be enough. But it wasn't quite enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_vs._Nissan_Compu...

Purchasing a service is no guarantee that it will still exist in the future. It seems to me that a brand-name free provider like, say, gmail.com will probably far outlast the for-pay services that you mentioned.

mailbox.org has been around since 1992 and fastmail since 2001. Both of those companies are profitable.

Compare that with gmail that came out of beta in 2009, belongs to a company that is known for serially shutting down much-used and much-loved services, and whose profitability (that of gmail not google) is not entirely clear.

Sorry, but that does nothing to persuade me. Gmail has over a billion active users. Any disruption in service would be felt worldwide. Fastmail and mailbox.org could disappear without even making the news.

History is full of wildly popular things that became irrelevant. Gmail will certainly join that list one day.

Sure, but not before email itself becomes irrelevant.

It's most disappointing that when this comes up in the news they don't mention these facts. A lot of people don't know they can pay for a domain and email service and not have to worry about this kind of crap.

It's not particularly hard to explain to lay people and a story like this is the perfect opportunity.

I recommend getting a domain and running it with whichever service provider you want. Just make it your domain.

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