$6/month doesn't sound like much... Till you realise you'll probably have this setup for 20 years, and suddenly it's $1200. That's a lot to protect against a thing that will probably not happen (account being banned)
$1,200 is a lot of money, but... anyone aged 23+ is older than Google. 17+ is older than GMail.
It is an illusion to say we know what will or will not happen to Google over the next 20 years. We don't know how entrenched the tech giants are over decades because we've never had anything like them before.
This is a problem that is obviously not going to happen in the next 12 months. But if a person don't control their email address, they shouldn't be using it for anything that it would really hurt to lose.
Realistically we have little control or have any clue on what's going to happen a few years out in almost every aspect of life.
Look at Kodak (the photography company). They were around for over a 100 years, then digital photography came along to disrupt their market and they pretty much disappeared in a few months.
Kodak and Google aren't that different as being a company that offers a service that tons of folks use(d). Kodak used to be "the" place to buy film and get photos developed.
I'm all for controlling your own email (even tho I'm guilty of not doing so), but I think even if you controlled your own email, you'll still be victim of the company you're using maybe going out of business in the future. I wish nothing but success for Fastmail or any other email service that lets you control your email, but if they go down then you're in the same position as Google going down while using gmail.
Kodak was well aware of digital photography, arguably one of its pioneers. What killed Kodak was cellphones. Kodak was too dependent and attached to making cameras and camera-related equipment. Most people did not need separate cameras once cellphones came along (even the 'dumb' models have a camera), so Kodak had nothing relevant to sell... Doubtful Google could be so stupid. Maybe if the Feds separate gmail from Search there'll be problems?
>I wish nothing but success for Fastmail or any other email service that lets you control your email, but if they go down then you're in the same position as Google going down while using gmail.
Keeping all your mails locally is not difficult if you use a mail client rather than a web client. Copying to a local folder every once in a while is a one/two click operation in typical clients.
* The admin-user.
* The daily/real-user.
In my case I have my real account "steve@steve..", and "admin@steve" which is the gsuite administrator. I only login to make changes to the domain setup, never to send/receive email.
It's annoying to have to pay for that second user, but I feel happier with the privilege separation in place.
I guess I should have started using forname@surname.tld to make it all nice and neat, but I've no desire to change now.
https://support.google.com/cloudidentity/answer/7384506?hl=e...
Edit: nevermind. I see you own the .net tld. I've definitely used that to order pizza too. Sorry about that.
Although very occasionally a service will check for MX records, but that is incredibly uncommon. My go-to email for public WiFi is fuckoff@exmaple.com and have only been denied once (<1%)
A fair number of places will deny that, but I like to think it sends a message. I'm not sure how many, if any, domains still have a working webmaster@ address though.
(I moved from UK to Finland, so I checked the .fi version on a whim. Luckily it was due to expire a few months after I checked, so I setup a script to register it the moment it became available.)
I had an incident a few weeks ago, where my mailbox lost about 1 weeks worth of messages, and were not retrievable.
I have used them for over 5 years, and this is the only negative incident.