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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Local email backups are one compelling reason.

I've had an e-mail address since 1999 or so, back when usa.net was still a thing. Until about this time last year, I was strictly a webmail reader. Never saw the point in configuring Outlook/Eudora/Thunderbird/Geary, etc. HTML email inside my browser worked just fine, and it meant I could check it from any computer, to boot.

Then I read some story on HN about a guy getting his gmail account shutdown and subsequently losing access to his emails, his Drive, his Photos, several websites he had hosted through Blogger, etc. And since these were all "free" services provided by Google, when they decided to shut down his account, he had no legal recourse.

The idea of losing 10+ years of emails at the whim of my provider didn't sit well with me, so at that point I installed Thunderbird on my desktop and started keeping a local copy of all my e-mails. Just in case.

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I've had a similar experience.

From 2003-2008 I used a free hotmail account. Then I got on the gmail train and had all mail forwarded from hotmail to gmail.

Last year I went to check my hotmail account and couldn't find any emails older than 1 year. After some research [1] it seems that if the hotmail account wasn't accessed within the last year, they purge your inbox :(

Moral: Always keep back-ups, don't rely on web-services, especially free ones

[1] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail...

mbsync[0] is handy for snapshotting an IMAP account, either for (local) archival or migration to another account.

[0]:http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html

And you can download everything from Google with Takeout:

https://takeout.google.com

In addition, you should also considering buying a domain for yourself and then using Google Apps or one of the other alternatives to host it. It's such a huge hassle to change email address everywhere, you are better off having control over it as well.

I recently did this, with Fastmail as the email provider, and picked a domain name that is short and has no ambiguous characters when read aloud over the phone.

> short and has no ambiguous characters

Damn, I totally did not think of that. I used my last name which is neither short nor easily pronouncable over the phone (even for French/German native speakers).

Also I used a .org (.com was taken), which regular people do not “get” when telling them in person. This happened a few times now, e.g. in a store and at the doctors office, I had to type it in myself in the end. So I’d recommend choosing a .com domain over anything else.

But for me it’s too late to change it now, as I’ve been using my domain and the associated email address for >5 years.

One small negative aspect about your domain though: It might look like a spammers/spam email domain name to some, because of the impersonal nature of it. At least that was my impression when I first saw it in your profile.

The spammy appearance didn't occur to me until months later when an old friend pointed out that it suits my personality. I had a good laugh.

I've just lived through that, sort of.

I was done with grad school last semester, and the department admins immediately shut down all my department accounts. Seven years of academic communication disappeared overnight.

Luckily, after some emailing (CC: head of dept.), they provided me with the MBOX files, which I can load with Thunderbird and a plugin.

Otherwise, my email client would have been my only offline copy.

USA.NET is still a thing: https://www.netaddress.com/

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