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Comment by josh_fyi | Hacker News Reader

One alternative is to have your own domain, but run email on a service like CloudFlare, Mailgun, or even Google. If you get cut off, you can change provider and redirect the DNS records.

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> One alternative is to have your own domain

Unfortunately, should that domain ever expire, it'll likely be picked up by a squatter and that's your identity gone.

You could set up auto-renewal. Good registrars also remind you when the domain is about to expire. In any case, using a custom domain is safer than relying on a single email provider.

Do registrars send you warnings when their algorithms detect that you've broken their terms of service? If not, it's equally as at risk as the article suggests Gmail is.

Example from 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31573854

Another one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506581

Registrars can do anything under pressure from the (deep) state. As seen in kiwifrm case.

You can auto-renew the domain. Even better you can manually renew it for the max number of years allowed by the registry (10 years for a .com).

I would think it would be worse to renew for ten years as an individual. I'm not sure how I would even set a reminder for myself that I am confident would alert me appropriately in ten years

Renew it for 10 years, then set an annual reminder to renew it for 1 year to the reach maximum 10 years again. This way you have a 9 year grace period if you miss any given year.

Ah, that makes sense

I like to use email aliases for privacy and security which works better with domain provided by common operators such as duckduckgo, mozilla relay, apple icloud, etc. If you use a custom domain, then it is easy to link all your accounts through data brokers and spam you because all addresses get redirected to your inbox.

You can whitelist only specific localpart patterns, which solves the spam problem. And while it’s in theory possible to link all addresses to your identity, doing so would require knowing that only one person is using the email domain.

Not everyone can manage a domain by themselves. I don't think I know enough about domain hijacking to keep mine safer than Google keeps theirs.

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