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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

I'm using my own domain for e-mail, but obviously I need another e-mail for registrar, hoster, etc. I used to use gmail for that, but recently switched to icloud as I thought gmail is too dangerous with Google banning people around. Seems Apple's no better.

I have no idea how to untangle this dependency chain. I'm using registrar in my country, so if everything goes wrong, I can just contact them with my ID and hopefully fix things up, but I'd prefer to have 100% reliable e-mail in the first place.

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Fastmail is the best email provider in its own right, plus it's not Apple or Google. Their support is extremely responsive, even in technical matters.

FM support is indeed excellent. But FM service has issues e.g. search faults which mean labels may bring up different results on a different day.

All mail synced locally with local search is still best.

Agreed, but only where local is acceptable.

The only thing you need to own is your primary email address and as long as that’s on a domain you own then you can move it. That’s about the only independence there is these days. If you use @icloud.com or @gmail.com for everything then you’re screwed.

You have to depend on someone somewhere. Just make that dependency less of an issue should anything show stopping happen.

Personally I’d like to see some legislation around identity providers and service levels and account retention.

I think vbezhenar's point was simply that the recovery e-mail at a registrar should not depend on a domain managed by that same registrar. The registrar can update MX records.

Good point! I will look at my configuration for that.

You can have two domains at two different registrars, each hosting the recovery mail address of the other.

Yeah keep your email provider and iCloud provider separate. For password management, use something like 1Password, and you got your main “identities” separated. In case of losing access to either of them, the impact will be relatively contained.

I do this with ProtonMail, that's my root email. Not for any particular security reason. It's just another email provider.

As long as you can change your Mx records, it doesn’t matter who is hosting your email. If Apple had a problem, you could switch it to any other provider and request the reset email again, etc.

Maybe an .edu account from a University or so? That’s my approach to the same issue.

And my email is on Fastmail under a custom domain. They have good support so far

You can't use the edu after you leave the institution

Many places will let you. Many more will let it forward to a new email address.

Anyone who published papers which included their academic email address will want it to persist forever. Paper publishing happens to be a special priority for many educational institutions.

after the education capture race of 2022, every single institution in the world is either google or Microsoft.

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