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Comment by ryanmarsh | Hacker News Reader

By your logic Apple completely owns me. I have no idea what to do about that. To start with I could run my own email server on my own domain (something I did years ago and have no appetite for in the modern mail deliverability cesspool). That’s just email. If they wanted to disable my phone or apps I rely on I’d be equally screwed. Is there a way to live digitially today that isn’t at the pleasure of some large tech company?

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When was the last time you backed up your email? I recently moved off of Gmail to Fastmail just to make it easier to have a backup copy outside of Google's control. I keep most of my photography (500GB) in OneDrive spread across three machines and yet I still have multiple external hard drive copies just incase OneDrive does a complete wipe across all my systems.

For the apps, couldn't you create a new account (sure you'd have to buy the apps again) and be back up and running?

It's funny. I go through great lengths to encrypt and back up most things of mine but the one thing I just realized I was overlooking? Fastmail. It exists on their server and on my phone in their mobile app but I never thought to just setup Thunderbird/IMAP and keep a local copy updated every so often. It's easy to overlook something.

Does Thunderbird keep a local, accessible copy of whole accounts when using IMAP? Since the traditional way of using IMAP is by keeping the mails on the server and interacting with them via the server, I would think it doesn't.

Personally, I'm using nodejs-notify[1] to watch all mailboxes of all accounts via IMAP IDLE, and have it execute mbsync[2] when it receives an event to sync the account with a local Maildir. I got my MUA (mu4e[3]) configured to use those Maildirs without doing any IMAP itself.

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nodejs-imapnotify/

[2] https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/isync/

[3] https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/mu/

thunderbird can be configured to store mail locally. look at the folder properties /synchronization. has an option for offline use

I think the idea is to realize if you have data on Apple, is it also synced and available offline on your computer?

I have all my photos on iCloud. But they are also in the Photos library with full resolution on my computer. If apples locks my account, I don’t lose my photos.

Same thing with Dropbox. Synced but still available on my computer.

Same with Gmail. Synced with Mail on Mac. Downloaded regularly.

I simply try to make sure my data is always on my computer and migratable. Not the application itself.

I would start by:

a) buying my own domain

b) ensuring that the authoritative ns1/ns2/ns3 records for that domain are hosted at a diverse set of geographically diverse nameservers, for example an ns1 that you run and then using route53 and another non-route53-service for authoritative slaves.

c) setting the MX records for it to either a mail server that you run, or a third party mail server. This is sort of a compromise approach. You can use office365 or google if you don't want to fully host your own mail. You say you don't want to deal with the hassle of mail deliverability, so use either of those and let them handle the spam filtering, SPF and DKIM. Mail that's hosted by office365 is trusted by just about everything out there, in terms of not having other peoples' SMTP daemons reject or blackhole your mail. If either of those cuts you off for some arbitrary reason in the future, you at least have the ability to change the MX records to another service as you see fit.

I had this same thought when I was heavy into Google/Android. I was running on G Suite, and frankly didn't like the way Google was going. I own my own domain name, run off of Zoho which gives me more features that I use for the same/less money, but the system hasn't been without weirdness. Syncing between all of my different devices doesn't really work right using their ActiveSync option. i.e. my iPhone doesn't sync deleted emails back to the main server and unless I run the sync tool my desktop doesn't either. There are options though, but everything is a privacy/ease of use trade off. Things that give you more privacy and control tend to come with more actions you personally need to take.

Edit: A Plex server is a really easy way to back up photos from multiple devices as it syncs and you can control that entirely in house.

Usually having your own domain and letting someone else run the mail server is enough. In case your provider (Fastmail, Google, etc.) starts acting strange you can just update your DNS records.

If you choose to become completely dependent on a corporation for convenience, as it seems you did with Apple, you should be aware of the tradeoffs you are making for this convenience.

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