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Comment by baggachipz | Hacker News Reader

Gmail is really the only thing keeping me in the Google tent. Switching my address after over a decade of use is nigh-impossible. I also use Chrome for development because the debug tools are superior, but everything else Google is an easy switch for me.

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No it's not. You get a new email, set all incoming mail from the old one to forward to the new one, tell the people you are in contact with about the new email, and then just change the email on the services you use when you use it. Don't go around to all the services at once. Just the next time you open up GitHub, change it, next time you open up your online bank, change it, and so on. And after a couple of years, shut down the old one. It's not hard at all.

Yea this is what I did. Little by little. If you make a plan, and are dilligent you’ll be totally off @gmail.com in under a year. Make sure you switch to an email address on a domain you control, not @some_other_cloud_service.com that you’ll want to switch off of later.

Indeed, its not hard. I went through it this summer. However, I switched from a personal domain to a fastmail domain. Why? My domain registrar fucked me over.

At that point, I had used my personal domain for close to 10 years when suddenly it stopped working. I contacted them and they said that it was put on hold because I hadn't paid the yearly expense. It would cost 16 times the normal cost to get it back, or I could wait a couple of months until it was released and see if I was able to buy it again at the normal rate before it was taking by someone else. I asked what they meant by expense? I usually get a reminder from them on email a month before due date, every year for the last 10 years, but my latest expense reminder from them was dated a year back. They explained that they have had trouble sending out reminders for this particular TLD for a while now. I asked why they hadn't contacted their users about these problems, to which they replied that it's my own responsibility to get the expense paid in due time, and that the reminders are just a friendly reminder, nothing more, nothing to be relied on, and I have to pay 16 times normal cost or it will get released in a couple of months.

I decided that I was not going to pay that, and that I wouldn't be using them as a domain registrar again. Luckily I wasn't that happy with the domain anyways and have never been. I have been fiddling with ideas for a new domain name for years, but have yet to find one, so it wasn't that big of a loss. But I sure as hell think it's shitty service from my domain registrar.

What domain registrar was that?

http://gratisdns.dk

It's a bit weird to say it's not hard at all after describing a multi-year effort.

But see, it's not a multi-year effort. It's at most a couple of hours spread over a couple of years with 99.9% of the effort put in today and the next couple of days.

This is how I did it twice over the years.

>Switching my address after over a decade of use is nigh-impossible.

This is why you should have your own domain. You can switch providers trivially.

Doesn't work in all cases.

Here's my story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18130832

I wouldn't say it "doesn't work". I would say "Be extremely careful in renewing your domain on time". I do think what your registrar did is lousy, but when it came to domains, lousy is what I expect. There are plenty of stories out there like yours

Easy to say now. But when gmail first came out and I snagged an address, the last thing on my mind was "this company could become evil in 15 years, I should set up my own domain and route to it from this new email service." I'm currently looking into making the switch, but it's going to be painful. Finding a good domain these days for personal email is also challenging.

>But when gmail first came out and I snagged an address, the last thing on my mind was "this company could become evil in 15 years, I should set up my own domain and route to it from this new email service."

It was already in my mind when Gmail came out. Some months prior to their launch, I got my own domain. I was already sick of free online providers - be it email, photos, etc. I'd had to move multiple times due to their either disappearing or suddenly asking for money. So even though I always liked Google, and still do, I never allowed myself to believe that things won't change.

Regardless, the past is the past. The key point is not to make the same mistake going forward.

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