Hacker News Reader

Comment by 101008 | Hacker News Reader

I know losing a YouTube channel is horrible, especially after you dedicated so much time, effort and money - and for some people it may be a source of income as well. It is totally unfair.

But my nightmare in here is that you lose access to your whole Google account and that would devastate me. Not only email access (and thus, access to every service I use because I have my Google account linked to it), but also Google Photos, with memories from the past 15 years with loved ones (even photos of my mom who passed away). And I am sure a lot of other services that I cannot remember now (by the way, imagine you are hired by a company that uses Google Cloud, you couldn't technically work for them?)

View on HN

You have the power TODAY to change that. Do it before you lose access. Start with a Google Takeout and get your email out into your own domain as a starting point. Search "self hosting" for more details, even if you have no interest in running your own servers it gives you lots of good ideas to regain more control over your own data.

My main fear about that is not doing it properly and my email stop working as expected. For the nature of my job (press) I send a lot of emails to people who don-t know me, asking for interviews, etc. If my email starts to fall into spam folder, my job would be impossible. Gmail gives me that and I don't have to worry about if this person received the email or not.

Maybe 1) remove everything else from Google and 2) Start paying for your Gmail account, which will hopefully make it more likely that the appeals process actually works? Gmail's service is clearly something you depend on and that is worth paying for.

It's hard to know what's best in terms of risk management here. The likelihood that you will be hit is small but the consequences are potentially devastating.

I agree the likelihood is small but when you're thinking along these lines[1] I think it's time to start making a move to give yourself some piece of mind.

[1] But my nightmare in here is that you lose access to your whole Google account and that would devastate me.

Something like Mail-in-a-box[1] is easy to setup, you can monitor the spam stuff yourself, comes with all the instructions you need to get the DNS side of setup correctly etc

I've not had any issues with email not reaching people - and I'm not sure that other mailservers would put gmail any higher, especially as they are used for a lot of spam

[1] https://mailinabox.email/

I prefer Mailcow. Mail-in-a-box requires the machine to be running a specific version of Ubuntu. Mailcow runs under Docker https://mailcow.email/

you can somewhat limit the downside just by getting your own domain and setting it up as an email. Even still using this linked to gmail is better than nothing. when things go haywire you still control me@domain.com or whatever so you just take it to another service. I did this, and then a few months felt comfortable enough to move to fastmail. recipients have no idea, it's still me@domain.com, had no problems with deliverability.

I can vouch for Forward Email (https://forwardemail.net/). It's easy to set up if you have your own domain, you can continue using Google Mail if you like (for both receiving and sending), their message size limits are higher than Gmail's, you can set up multiple aliases and (optional) catch-all addresses, and they offer a free tier if cost is an issue. The big advantage of the reasonably-priced paid tier is privacy: paid subscribers don't have to put their real email addresses in the DNS records to configure the forwarding. It also helps to ensure that the service will remain viable into the future.

Oh neat, glad to hear about this. Do they have any blogs/content about why to do this for people like the parent of this thread?

While their FAQ seemed great to me, I'm someone already familiar with why this is important and generally how to do it. I could see it being overwhelming to someone just considering the idea. https://forwardemail.net/en/faq#table-of-contents

I don't believe Forward Email runs a blog, but this article[0] has a fairly good summary of how forwarding works and why one might want to set that up. The short version, in the context of this thread, is that it allows you to accept email on your own domain without running your own email servers. And if you ever want to change email providers in the future (or start running your own servers) you just need to edit some settings either in your DNS records or your Forward Email account; the email address everyone uses to contact you remains the same. Whereas if everyone knows you as username@gmail.com then you need to somehow get word out to your entire contact list—potentially without access to your old email account!—to let them know your new address.

Forward Email does a pretty good job with onboarding new users, in my opinion. Yes, some technical know-how is expected (you do need to know how to update DNS records for your domain, for example) but they give you step-by-step instructions both for setting up the MX and TXT records in DNS and for configuring your Google Mail account (or possible others, I didn't check) to allow sending email using your new address. I found it simpler to set up the forwarding itself than to go around to all my accounts and update the email addresses; that part is still a work in progress.

[0] https://medium.com/hackernoon/when-and-how-to-use-2019s-best...

Telling people to use an email forwarder sounds much easier than "host your own email". I'll try it next time.

It took me a couple years to transfer all important online accounts and communications to a new email, one by one. Set up an auto-redirect, change the email in all accounts when you log in, slowly.

I feel free now.

I have the same fear. It's very daunting. It's not that I don't know how to set up an email server, it's that I know just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be reliable.

There's so much nuance and it's easy to let things lapse, or make a small mistake and silently get all your mail rejected, lose/corrupt a bunch of data, etc.

Dude, I'm a non-tech guy. I just frequent HN for intellectual stimulation.

If I can set up a custom domain, you can definitely do so.

I'm a freelance and my livelihood also depends on cold emailiing people. It's just a false belief that we need Google to handle important aspects of our life. No, we don't

If you really care about deliverability rate, there is often some impact from doing that.

If your email is that fundamental to your job you should 100% have a custom domain, so that you can switch email provider without causing disruption to your day-to-day job. It shouldn't cost more than ~$60 a year.

I even wrote a detailed step-by-step HOWTO for people in that spot:

https://sneak.berlin/20201029/stop-emailing-like-a-rube/

That is why I have completely degoogled my life. Backup your photos ASAP!

I'm using nextcloud as a google photos replacement. It's not quite as smooth as google photos but it works well enough and I control my data. The official app handles auto-upload of my photos. Yaga is a nice android client for viewing the photos on my degoogled phone. The web app works well for that too and there are even sharing features, so I can share an album or photo with friends, family, or whoever. Nextcloud has suitable replacements for notes, drive, docs, contact backup/sync, and more. It's a little bit of effort to set up but totally worth it to control my data and get privacy.

Fastmail is a great paid replacement for gmail. It has calander, notes, and file storage features too.

There are so many cloud storage options, really no excuse to use google drive.

There are other turnkey google photo replacements as well these days, amazon and flickr come to mind. Google has nice apps but it's just not worth being their product, especially since they nerfed the free storage.

I've thought about the same. I rely on Google too much. But "too much" is really only e-mail and cloud storage (Google Drive) for me. I only rely on cloud hosting for photos for a select few albums I intentionally want to share a link to, not as a full cloud of all my photos that I then rely on being there. I offload my phone and camera every now and then to local storage (NAS) at home, a hard drive in a safe deposit box at my bank, and then my Synology NAS runs an automated Backblaze backup which is very cost efficient for this use.

So I would only really need to switch

1) my mail provider to something else, which is easier today now that I rely on "messengers" more than mail, so not many people that I need to inform. Just subscriptions and account details that I can update one at a time.

2) cloud storage to something else, and there are oceans of alternatives there, many very capable.

for #1 you can take it step by step. get your own domain, name@domain.com for $10 a year. hook that address up to gmail so you can send as name@domain.com. then get comfortable with that, set it as your default reply from, tell friends, etc. then 6 months later, a year later or whenever youre comfortable you can move off gmail. only send from name@domain, and have gmail forward all your emails to that account. no one you contact will see anything different. then if you ever need to again switch in the future you're free to do so, and you're always name@domain.com.

At least there's Google takeout where you can download a data dump of everything they've stored for you, so probably a good idea to do that for your precious photo memories.

Yes, I am thinking in doing that, at least every X months or something like that. Thanks.

You can schedule that from within Google account settings, and even have automatic uploads to different third party providers ( like OneDrive, Box, Dropbox).

I download a new Takeout every six months. One thing to be aware of if you plan on storing these long-term is that their archives are not very efficient. In particular, there is no incremental backup option—each Takeout is a full copy, and there are often many duplicate files even within one download. I take two post-processing steps with each download which significantly reduce the storage space required: (1) I convert the Google Mail data from mbox format to maildir (with mb2md[0]), so that each email is a separate file which can be deduplicated, and (2) I append the new takeout data to a SquashFS[1] filesystem with xz compression. This automatically deduplicates identical files, both within the new archive and against previous archives. The end result is that I now have three ~50 GiB Takeouts stored in a single ~25 GiB SquashFS filesystem image.

My (Linux-based) process also involves ratarmount, bindfs, and fuse-overlayfs. These tools are not strictly necessary but they do reduce the amount of temporary space required, since there is no need to unpack the .tgz files. Access to the resulting filesystem image is through either squashfuse or for better performance (but requiring root) a native loopback mount.

[0] http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SquashFS

Do not use the cloud as a storage system. Use it as a distribution system only and keep multiple copies of precious data with you, on media that you control.

I use Smugmug but if they go out of business today I couldn't care less, not only do I keep copies, I also keep the structure of the galleries and could recreate them elsewhere with little trouble.

> Do not use the cloud as a storage system. Use it as a distribution system only and keep multiple copies of precious data with you, on media that you control.

Also unless you are paying for it Google are not storing the full un-recompressed copies of the photo files from your device, so if you rely on them for backup what you restore when your primary copy is lost/damaged is not the full quality you originally had.

I do have my stuff go up to Google but only for easy access. For backup, I rsync (currently via termux) to home and from there the data is copied elsewhere as part of my offsite/offine backups with everything else I can't reobtain easily if lost/corrupt.

I set up my own mail server following the guide here: https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/mail-server-guide/

I also referred to https://www.gmass.co/blog/smtp-server-linux/

I also looked at OwnCloud, but ended up just syncing from my phone to local Mac and doing backups off that regularly.

You could also rsync to other devices. A raspberry Pi with a SSD at home would work fine. If you have a VPN set up on your own network (eg. an ASUS router), you could use it to host photos/backups/music. If you home IP address is dynamic, use a free DDNS provider so you can always connect to your home site.

Just make sure you get a copy of those photos sooner than later!!

The simple solution is never use the same google account for YouTube and Gmail/Drive.

Google correlates all of the accounts that you log in to from the same devices. If you have YouTube on iOS logged in to one account and Drive on iOS logged in to a different one, Google is aware that those accounts are used by the same person.

TOS-violation suspensions are likely to involve all of your accounts at once.

The simple solution is to stop doing business with Google.

They'll also hand all of your shit over to the CIA without a warrant even if you aren't doing anything wrong, so there's that, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com