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Comment by Erratic6576 | Hacker News Reader

Back in the 2000’s, we were dreaming of what would come next from Google. Then, in the 2010’s, we started to wonder what would be discontinued. Now, in 2020’s, we dread being locked out of Google accounts. I closed mine during the lockdown. My school cancelled my huge Cryptomator backup on Google. Now, work provides me with one but I can no longer rely on Google for anything crucial.

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I have been slowly migrating/backing up everything related to my Google account. I’m just not confident that the ghost in the machine won’t decide randomly one day I’m not worthy of continued access.

In another light, it’s a reminder that Google doesn’t really think of these accounts as ours, but theirs.

What spreadsheet tool do you use at work? I put my company on a competitor for Gmail, but then we still had to open Google accounts for Google Ads and Youtube and GDrive. Now I wonder whether I should officially subscribe, just for consistency.

A few years ago I started getting increasingly worried about my Gmail account being a single point of failure for basically my entire life. Along with Google’s evolution into an evil empire this prompted me to completely excise them from my life. It took a couple of years to transition all my less-used accounts to my new email but the peace of mind is worth it.

So which email provider would you say is more reliable? Self hosting on AWS etc?

Edit:also, how do you replicate access to email/calendars across devices? (smartphones/PC)

If you own the domain then you should still be able to use the account even if you get kicked off of a provider.

And receiving email at your own server is trivial.

For me, it’s cheaper and easier to pay someone else

Yes it's trivial, but I'm asking for a commercial provider one can trust that uses software that doesn't suck horribly and one that doesn't just cut you off immediately if your payment to them fails, or locks your account until you phone them if you try the password too many times etc.

If I wanted to host my own I wouldn't ask about providers...

Email these days is about much more than just email. Calendar integration and sync between devices that lets you access email on said devices as well as resiliency one would want for an essential service mean just "hosting your own" is definitely not trivial.

Then there is antispam etc.

I moved away a while ago. The only thing I still use would be youtube playlists. But even those are trash since they just say we've removed some because of whatever. Thanks I guess I would like to know which song you threw away!

Now I pay 1€ a month for mail.

I am just following the High Availability principle and using both Microsoft and Google equivalents, with most data having a local copy anyway.

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