Hacker News Reader

Comment by catlikesshrimp | Hacker News Reader

First things first: (Parenthesis) From now on, if it is important, pay for it. At least a smaller email provider with real human support, but best is "buying" your own domain and hosting your email. Same goes for backups. And pass the info to your loved ones.

Less importantly: Since you know exactly what phone# is requested, try to contact it. Approach it in a way that doesn't alarm the renter and blocks you. Meanwhile, contact a real human in "telephone company" (maybe said # is free) and explain the situation: you want/need to PAY to get the phone number assigned to you (My telecom offers that service)

Human Is always the keyword

View on HN

I gave up on keeping my main on my own domain a few years back since MS mailservers (both Azure and on-prem Exchanges) started rejecting as spam, spam drove us all to centralization and now that they're running amok we have no good recourse.

Learnt my lesson, already working on taking measures for new data or hopefully the data from the account if I recover it.

I already called the number, it seems it's not in use, called someone (he was selling "pretty" numbers online) to ask if it's possible to get it back and they said that there have been cases and it's currently in something they call "quarantine" and there may be complications as there are two operators involved, the original operator of the number and the one to which the number was ported to. I will follow up on Monday on that front.

Thank you.

Once you've got it all sorted, get 2 yubikeys, use them to secure the account, and keep one on you and another in a safe place.

You can just use the cheapest ones.

> but best is "buying" your own domain and hosting your email

I wish this were still the case. Sadly, if you buy a domain and host your own email, you're going to get stuck in spam filters all the damn time. Your email address will feel broken, sending messages into the void.

The only email infrastructure services that are reasonably reliable belong to the likes of Google (Workspace), Microsoft (365), etc. Protonmail is reportedly okay, but my experience is that they still get spammed an awful lot.

I really wanted not to comment this because there are many better authorities in the topic here. OTOH, I am sure I will learn something:

There will be friction. We are trading convenience for security. Paid smaller provider with human support is more convenient and probably enough for most people.

Also, the own-domain-approach is for an important inbox. Read as: it is business related, it pays for itself. It also allows you to set up as many addresses as needed. The receiving inbox is the critical part of email here, because it is often part of your logins.

Regarding your outbox:

>you're going to get stuck in spam filters all the damn time. Your email address will feel broken, sending messages into the void. I try to remember this: Initially using forwarding. Send the message directly from your address to the recipient, and a ccc to a (more popular) forwarding address that sends the duplicate to the recipient, and starts with a clear: DO NOT REPLY TO THIS ADDRESS, and a "reply to" your own domain address. Your domain will eventually gain traction. This is a time investment to prevent a [another] catastrophe. Other mention this point as an "SMTP relay service", which is a much better.

Others also mention that domains can be seized, which sounds less likely than Google or Apple randomly blocking your account.

Failed Payments and other Domain management tasks, that's something I only know as much as any other passerby.

Edit: inbox vs outbox

You can pay for an SMTP relay service that maintains a good reputation if sending mail is important to you. Also if the email is only for auth purposes to decouple 3rd party account recovery mechanism from services like cloud storage, sending email is not important, so an inbox without a healthy SMTP reputation can still be a valuable tool.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com