Twelve years later, Apple is still trying to erase mac.com email addresses | Hacker News Reader

Twelve years later, Apple is still trying to erase mac.com email addresses

appleinsider.com

50 pointsdoener22 comments

If you don't own that domain that your email goes to, you don't own the email address.

Any number of things could happen to cause you to lose access to that email address:

- the company who owns that domain is sold - the domain is sold during bankruptcy proceedings after the company goes under - the company that owns that domain decided to get out of the email business - the company has a vested interest in migrating you to a new domain (as is here)

I'm surprised at the number of people – even in tech - who are willing to use an email account on a domain they don't have any control over.

Formatting

If you don't own that domain that your email goes to, you don't own the email address.

Any number of things could happen to cause you to lose access to that email address:

- the company who owns that domain is sold

- the domain is sold during bankruptcy proceedings after the company goes under

- the company that owns that domain decided to get out of the email business - the company has a vested interest in migrating you to a new domain (as is here)

I'm surprised at the number of people – even in tech - who are willing to use an email account on a domain they don't have any control over.

It's incredibly easy to move domains between registrars. I've moved mine 3, maybe 4 times in 10 years.

I bounced around a few custom email addresses and finally ended up on gmail. It's easy to tell people (everyone knows gmail) and if gmail closes shop, I'll have approximately a zillion blog posts to look at for migrating to something else...

Migrating your existing messages isn't typically the hard part. Though you should try to keep some backups in case they disappear (or in the case of gmail, lock you out). The hard part is years of updating the rest of the world to your new address.

If gmail closes shop, we're going to have an enormous cyber refugee crises.

The comments on that article (and a few in here), are lamenting the churn and loss of addresses due to the whims of the market. People holding onto email addresses like precious items. It's surprisingly affordable to just have your own domain!

I won't get into other core benefits of paying for mail (no ads, business model where you're the customer, etc). But...

You can

- have a personal domain and email address for as low as $15/yr (weird tld, small mailbox)

- have something more reasonable (domain+email for $45-65 a year with 20-30GB + various PIM functionality depending on provider and price)

- go all the way up to fully hosted personal cloud solution via something like Microsoft365 ($150/yr)

- self host everything yourself - $7-15/yr for the domain

If you use email heavily, and/or if you value having the option to self-host more things, then it's absolutely worth it.

Personally, I self-host my cloud drive with a freenas box in a very close to default configuration, and use Fastmail for mail+PIM.

If my provider starts sucking, I can switch easily. The more paranoid could use the more expensive protonmail or fully self-host! But what's important is that should I ever choose to switch, it will be a one-and-done thing that probably takes me about an hour of work!

Damn I hope I never have to leave gmail and bother with this self setup crap. Would you self hosting guys feel silly if gmail existed in 30 years and you wasted all this time doomsday prepping for nothing?

You could have best of both worlds: Hook up a private domain to GSuite. If Gmail starts sucking the next 30 years you can move it to the next best thing :)

GSuite isn't free anymore for most though (only for grandfathered in domains). For some the cost is negligible, but it depends.

But ya for me the piece of mind is worth it. The serious risk, as you allude, is probably not gmail disappearing, it's gmail getting worse in any number of ways.

No I wouldn't.

But I'd be pretty fucked if google decided to ban me back when my gmail address was the email address I used for everything.

As for self host, you know that person said they pay for email right? We log in to fastmail the same way you log in to gmail. It's no hassle just a low cost instead of free. Iirc getting it to use my personal domain was a copy and paste job that took like 15 seconds.

I stopped using Gmail because I decided email was too mission critical for me to trust Google with. I'm now with fastmail and appreciate the fact I can port my email elsewhere easily should I choose to do so. No regrets!

> appreciate the fact I can port my email elsewhere easily should I choose to do so.

Isn’t that also true with GSuite?

Not sure if this is appropriate but if someone from Microsoft is reading, the domain premium.outlook.com is not working. It looks to be linked from many support docs like https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-your-email...

Another option is registering a domain and setting up an email forwarder to a free email service. I know with gandi.net, they provide free email forwarding services with domains registered on their platform.

This gives you the best of both worlds: - free email hosting - no lock in to a single provider

Obviously, if you store valuable information in your email you want to back it up as well. But for me the concern was always more about losing the address than losing the data.

Unfortunately, solutions such as this tend to break spam filtering in meaningful ways. But, it is a great first step.

And yes, you should be backing up your mail, too!

I agree that you don't own the email where the domain is not yours, but for the majority of people, setting up your own domain & mail is a large technical challenge. Even moving to a different email address may pose an insurmountable challenge (different interface, different workflow, etc.).

I think it's commendable that Apple is keeping the @mac.com for so long and not just simply cut off people's access to it.

I still have my @Mac.com email address, and I have a screenshot of the sign-up message showing a Jan 5 2000 date. (I was working on a contract at Apple at the time and got in when iTools first appeared)

I forgot that you can now use the other domains as well.

I still have and use an Apple ID and developer account that isn’t an email address at all: no @ and in fact has a space and a dash in it. Still works fine.

I still use mine actively. It can only hope it remains usable, even though I no longer use Mac (iOS only nowdays) and the talk of needing to change settings occasionally is disturbing.

I don't see why they need to kill it. As an aside, I still have a Rocketmail address I use that survived Yahoo! buying them out (so, 1996-1997). I'll never give that up either.

How is icloud.com as a mail provider? It has push on iOS, right?

Push isn't exclusive to Apple anymore but others had to jump through hoops.

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