Comment by jentist_retol | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jentist_retol | Hacker News Reader

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!

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!

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...

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?

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