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Comment by karteum | Hacker News Reader

> I'm paying $5/mo. for that to not be that screwed (I have family who got locked out. It does happen.)

But the article precisely addresses that:

For example, in HN discussions people will often recommend Fastmail or Protonmail, but they've had their problems too (FM: 2017, 2020, 2022, PM: 2018, 2019, 2021). Especially given that these are much smaller services I'm not convinced that the risk is lower there. Any system is going to have to handle this sort of problem, and you're not going to find one that never has false positives.

What I'd like to know is : do FM/PM more easily enable to talk to a human ?

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Talking to a human doesn't necessarily make anything any easier.

Lots of large companies have a bunch of customer support agents who are easy to get in touch with, but entirely powerless to solve these sorts of problems: "Computer says no". They are just, to be blunt, executing flowcharts, and have no scope to escalate beyond that.

The only reliable ways to get decent customer support are, in my experience:

- The CEO is a friend of yours

- Your account is so large that a significant chunk of the company depends on you for their income

- You have an ironclad support contract

- Regulatory requirements enforce a level of customer service

Unfortunately, none of those are likely to apply to an average person looking for an email provider, and running one is usually impractical due to these large companies blocking small hosts. Next best thing is taking regular backups and having your own domain with a low TTL MX record.

Right. Say you forget your password. Say you get to a customer support agent and they tell you how to get a password reset sent to your alternate email or phone number.

"Um, I don't have an alternate email and my phone number changed when I moved countries last year."

They'll probably (and correctly) maybe make sympathetic noises but basically say too bad. Presumably this wouldn't happen with a (non-trivial) company where there's some level of known identity. But for an individual there would presumably need to be a last-resort process that required real-world identity verification in some form.

I'm a Fastmail customer, and it's pretty easy to talk to a human. They don't always fix my issue quickly, but I can at least get a hold of a human within 24 hours.

I submitted a support request to FastMail about passkeys not working properly (enrollment failure) for 2FA and had a human response in under 15 min on a weekend.

The point of Fastmail and similar is that you get to use your own domain. Then if your account is disabled, you can just change your DNS and use your email with another provider.

If I lose access to my Fastmail and they won’t let me back in, I still own my domain name. If my DNS provider blocks me, I’ll change the DNS provider. My main email domain is a ccTLD with a pretty reliable registrar who requires national ID 2FA. Things can still go wrong, but I have control at so many levels compared to having a free email at someone else’s domain.

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