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Comment by aleksis | Hacker News Reader

I just lost access to my primary email account.

Me too. It took a long time to update all of my account information for every website and service I use. It took me a long time to get all of my friends, colleagues, etc. notified that I had switched.

I now have a trail of being under my Lavabit account. Commits, patches, websites, services, friends all thinking I'm still under that account. Now I've got to do it once again, only a few weeks later.

Sigh. I can't blame Lavabit really. Just a situation I'd hope to avoid.

That's a nightmare. However, I do feel strongly that lavabit made the only right choice. The US government is entirely to blame.

Do what I do!

I have my own domain name, currently hosting with Google Apps. If I get the motivation to move to another host like myself, I can do it without changing contact information.

Oh good, because Google will never be subject to an NSL.

At the moment, I accept the danger and resent myself for it. Moving to a custom domain is one step in the process, though.

And really, since all your email hops through relays constantly, the only truly effective anti-spy technology is message encryption, which wouldn't depend on where the messages end up.

Everyone you converse with uses gmail.

At least they're transparent (as one can be) about it: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/transparency-report-s...

Yes, absolutely. Everyone here should do this.

Never have your identity tied to a mere provider.

Yeah, I thank my stars that I had the sense to do this almost 2 years ago. It really is much better. Another neat hack of using your custom domain is when people ask for your email address you can make one up without you appearing in their chat list. So for instance on Google Talk you're registered as iam@firstlastname.com, you could simply give them i@firstlastname.com so they can still converse with you (catch-alls ftw) yet they don't annoyingly appear on your Talk list.

And yeah, changing providers is just a matter of altering a field or two in the host records page.

Did you get a refund?

I did pay in advance for few years but I wont ask for a refund, I will consider it as a donation for those legal battles.

Ok thats your choice however the company wasn't liquidated so they should refund their customers who are asking.

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