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Comment by dorongrinstein | Hacker News Reader

Email is portable. You need to use your own domain. If you use Gmail.com as the domain it isn't reasonable to expect yahoo can serve a Gmail domain. That's not how the internet works. There's a very easy and common solution - buy a domain for $10/yr and use email providers that let you bring your own domain. It is portable by design.

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I second this. If you are using @gmail or @yahoo, you dont own anything; rather, you are renting an address on their server. @gmail.com is Google's property. But if you own your domain, it's your property. You can change the Domain registrars just like you port your phone number.

You could have said the same about using a GSM provider's SIM card back in the day. Yet, now we can easily switch the provider without changing the number.

Not the same thing at all. An email address is a hierarchical construct with different ownership at each level, and a phone number isn’t.

It used to be before government regulations were put in place. I don't care much about the technical feasibility currently. When and if a law is put in place it becomes up to the developers to create a solution.

Ownership isn’t a problem developers can solve, but lawyers will line up for it. After 50 or whatever years there is a lot of calcification around email.

"That's not how internet works" is as powerful an argument as "That's not how GSM works". Buying a domain and setting up a new email address won't help you when you have been using your @gmail.com for the past 20 years and want to stop being dependent on Google.

I have bought my personal domain and started using my email address 8 years ago and I still haven't managed to move everything away from my old gmail because sometimes it's impossible without recreating some accounts from scratch.

It would be like each telcom having its own area code and expecting to be able to move a seven digit suffix from one to another. That’s a closer analogy to how email works.

I have gone the opposite way. I got my personal domain email before Gmail. Having mail coming into various other places I centralised them by automatically forwarding to a Gmail account. Now Gmail has become the account that gets used! Ah well.

I got my own domain maybe 15 years ago when Google gave out free workspace accounts for personal use.

Saturday marked the second or third year I had to pay for Google workspace because they did an about face and got rid of there for personal use program.

Do I feel duped and resentful? 100% Could I move elsewhere since it’s my own domain? 100% But am I hooked since I like Google’s tools better then anything else out there? 100%

But honestly, I could see the day someone comes out with competition to Google mail, sheets, docs, and calendar that is good enough to convince me to switch. Wouldn’t be that hard and since I own my domain I can do it.

In summation, even if Google totally pulled the rug out from under me, guess it could be worse

What services have you not been able to change your email address for?

I have done the exact same process over the last few years --- moving from Gmail to a my own domain --- and I have found only around 10 services that did not let me change my email address. I view that as a success personally.

Mostly niche services of local relevance such as local online shops. I could probably email their support and ask to update my email address but often it's not worth the effort because I can still keep my gmail for low importance mail.

one is the cell phone you got from work, change employer, change phone number. The other is your private cell: it costs more, but it is your number.

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