What if protonmail, gmail or whatever email provider you are using goes belly-up? Are all your accounts doomed?
If so, what are some preventive measures? Adding backup emails to your registered accounts?
This happened to me.
Hotmail was my email from 1997 until last year. I still know the password. But it wants me to do a security check. By sending a code to my backup email.
Problem is, I haven’t logged into my backup email in forever. So it wants to send a security code to my hotmail account.
…
…
You see the problem, right?
I figure I’d be mostly ok, the email I use for things I’d need to save is stored locally by thunderbird so I could still access those emails, the only problem would be changing the email on a few services.
The hardest part would be replacing that email address. That said, anyone have a rec for a good email service, preferably free, with IMAP/POP3 for use with tbird, that is at least ostensibly private (I know, email is inherently not private, but ykwim), and doesn’t just get shoved in spam on gmail (since that’s what everyone else has)? Riseup would be cool for instance but it’s impossible to get an invite. I’m thinking I may just pay mailbox.org but I’d prefer not to. Unwilling to self host, evidentially it’s easy to fuck your shit up by self hosting email.
Not at all, since I run my own. https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver
If Gmail goes belly up, you won’t have a problem. Every service will have a problem. You can just ride along with all the other customers.
It’s not my problem if it’s also everyone else’s problem
If you owe the bank $100 that’s your problem. If you owe the bank 100 billion dollars, that’s the banks problem.
All my shit is in the Google ecosystem. I am fairly confident that Gmail is not going away anytime soon. However, I am more afraid that some obscure ToS violation will forcibly disconnect me from their ecosystem, and I will have to scramble to make sure all my contacts have my alternate info. I am doubly screwed, as a Google Fi customer. If we all get suddenly degoogled, I lose a phone number that I have had for over 20 years.
As good a deal that Fi is for me (I normally don’t use bandwidth unless I travel internationally), I may switch soon just to reduce my exposure to Google.
This is why I’m migrating off Google to a custom domain. I have no fear Gmail is going away, but I fear if they ever block my account for some inscrutable reason there will be no way to appeal or get actual customer service.
Fi isn’t that great. We were on Fi for years; I switched to Mint, my wife stayed on Fi until I was sure it was going to work. So far, I pay less for more, no gotchas.
It was amazing when it first came out; now it has a lot of competition that beats it.
How is Mint internationally?
I haven’t tried it yet, and I haven’t had a reason to look into it. My experience with Fi was that you pay $10 per Gb - it didn’t come out of your normal bank - and per-minute charges. When I was traveling, I used my company phone, or if on vacation, purely data with heavy up front-caching as much as I could at the hotel. I really don’t like surprise bill sizes.
But to be honest, I haven’t tried Mint internationally, so I can’t say.
Some years age when I was still using some more google stuff (like an account for calling out from my PBX) I had each service assigned to its own google account to limit the impact of google doing something crazy to an account.
Apart from playstore youtube red is now the only service left - and that’s about to go as they now made it too expensive, especially taking into account that they enshittified it so much that we’ve blocked it on the TV, and “adfree on TV” was the main use case there…
Buy your own domain and use it for e-mails (there are many providers that support custom domains). If your provider shuts down, just switch to a different one and keep the same address.
This isn’t without its own problems. If you fail to renew your domain and someone else picks it up, they now have access to all your accounts. At least with a popular provider like Gmail, they don’t allow emails to be reused, and if they ever discontinue email services and drop the gmail.com domain, everyone will know about it and know that password reset requests should not be sent to these emails.
This is a terrible argument, IMO. Domains are almost always auto renew, and there are typically grace periods.
Using your own domain definitely makes it easy to get back up by just switching providers. But what about all your historical emails? If your original provider goes poof, what’s the plan? I connect via IMAP, so all my emails are stored on the provider’s servers, right? Or do email apps keep local copies, too?
Are there backup services for emails? I seem to recall Outlook having some kind of archive feature (I haven’t used outlook in decades), but I think I remember it was only recoverable in outlook and even then, it was a pain to search for a particular email.
The proper email programs have an option somewhere in the settings to either store a copy of the mailbox on the computer, or not do it. I’m pretty sure that’s in Thunderbird, Evolution, etc. I’m not sure about Outlook.
You can create an archive of your emails using Mail in MacOS also.
If you have access to some sort of basic Linux system (cloud server, local server whatever works for you) you can run a program on a timer such as https://isync.sourceforge.io/ (Debian package:
isync) which reads email from one source and clones it to another. Be careful and run it in a security context that meets your needs (I use a local laptop w/encryption at home that runs headless 24/7, think raspberry Pi mode).This includes IMAP (1) -> IMAP (2) as well as IMAP -> Local and so on; as with any app you’ll need to spend a bit learning how to build the optimum config file for your needs, but once you get it going it’s truly a “set and forget” little widget. Use an on-fail service like https://healthchecks.io in your wrapper script to get notified on error, then go about your life.
Edit: @[email protected] glanced at your comments and see you have a lot of self-hosting chops, here’s a markdown doc of mine to use isync to clone one IMAP provider (domain1.com) to another IMAP provider (domain2.com) subfolder for archiving. (using a subfolder allows you to go both ways and use both domains normally)
----Sync email via IMAP from host1/domain1 to a subfolder on host2/domain2 via a cron/timer. Can be reversed as well, just update
Patternsto exclude the subfolders from being cross-replicated (looped).- Install the
isyncpackage:apt-get update && apt-get install isync
Passwords for IMAP must be left on disk in plain text
- Generate “app passwords” at the email providers, host1 can be READ only
- Keep
${HOME}/.securecontents on encrypted volume unlocked manually
The
mbsyncprogram keeps it’s transient index files in${HOME}/.mbsync/with one per IMAP folder; these are used to keep track of what it’s already synced. Should something break it may be necessary to delete one of these files to force a resync.By design,
mbsyncwill not delete a destination folder if it’s not empty first; this means if you delete a folder and all emails on the source in one step, a sync will break with an error/warning. Instead, delete all emails in the folder first, sync those deletions, then delete the empty folder on the source and sync again. See: https://sourceforge.net/p/isync/mailman/isync-devel/thread/f278216b-f1db-32be-fef2-ccaeea912524%40ojkastl.de/#msg37237271Simple crontab to run the script:
0 */6 * * * /home/USER/bin/hasync.shMain config for the
mbsyncprogram:${HOME}/.mbsyncrc
# Source IMAPAccount imap-src-account Host imap.host1.com Port 993 User user1 PassCmd "cat /home/USER/.secure/psrc" SSLType IMAPS SystemCertificates yes PipeLineDepth 1 #CertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt # Dest IMAPAccount imap-dest-account Host imap.host2.com Port 993 User user2 PassCmd "cat /home/USER/.secure/pdst" SSLType IMAPS SystemCertificates yes PipeLineDepth 1 #CertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt # Source map IMAPStore imap-src Account imap-src-account # Dest map IMAPStore imap-dest Account imap-dest-account # Transfer options Channel hasync Far :imap-src: Near :imap-dest:HASync/ Sync Pull Create Near Remove Near Expunge Near Patterns * CopyArrivalDate yesThis script leverages healthchecks.io to alert on failure; replace XXXXX with the UUID of your monitor URL.
${HOME}/bin/hasync.sh
#!/bin/bash # vars LOGDIR="${HOME}/log" TIMESTAMP=$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H%M) LOGFILE="${LOGDIR}/mbsync_${TIMESTAMP}.log" HCPING="https://hc-ping.com/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX" # preflight if [[ ! -d "${LOGDIR}" ]]; then mkdir -p "${LOGDIR}" fi # sync echo -e "\nBEGIN $(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H%M)\n" >> "${LOGFILE}" /usr/bin/mbsync -c ${HOME}/.mbsyncrc -V hasync 1>>"${LOGFILE}" 2>&1 EC=$? echo -e "\nEC: ${EC}" >> "${LOGFILE}" echo -e "\nEND $(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H%M)\n" >> "${LOGFILE}" # report if [[ $EC -eq 0 ]]; then curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 5 -o /dev/null "${HCPING}" find "${LOGDIR}" -type f -mtime +30 -delete fi exit $ECThanks, @[email protected]!
- Install the
For historic emails, you could setup a forwarding rule from the primary to the backup. This would need to be done in advance of course
The only way to protect yourself from something like this is to own your own domain name.
You can still use something like Google as a provider but you can switch providers and recreate the same email addresses.It’s not really “the only way”. A similar problem to think about would be: what if your primary email account got compromised?
It makes sense to set up alternative means for recovering any account (or changing the associated email address), for example via second mail address, phone number, one-time-passwords, snail mail or similar. Many account providers use a recovery question system - here, I’d suggest using irregular answers, e.g. for “what is your favorite colour”, I would’t use a colour at all to make it harder to guess.
Compartmentalizing would be another approach: use different providers in a mix so that when one goes the way of the dodo, parts of your registered accounts remain useable. Ideally, for “critical” stuff like bank accounts, you’d split them up between different email addresses. But then again, for this kind of account, I’d really expect the bank to provide some other ways of backup access/restoration.
You’d be fucked like a choirboy at a Viagra-sponsored catholic-con.
Especially if they let the domain expire and you didn’t have time to migrate all those accounts that can be reset with just an email and a bad actor then registers the domain - or even just a slightly dumb actor that allows someone else to use what was your old email address.
This might be the single most hilarious “you’d be fucked” statement I ever heard and I’m definitely stealing it for future use lmao
I’d be fine. If my email provider goes away, my troubles are over, because my email provider is me!
What’s a good place to start to learn about self-hosted email?
You can check out Mail-In-A-Box. Its a pretty good self-hosting email solution thats easy to install and maintain.
Awesome. Thanks!
Register your own domain and use that. Then if your email provider dies then you can take your domain elsewhere.
How screwed would one be if the domain they bought was a ccTLD and that country ceased to exist?
A little but not completely. There are defunct ccTLDs that still exist and can be registered, but .io currently doesn’t have a clear future. I suspect that if a ccTLD is eliminated completely then there would be advance notice for you to start updating all your accounts to a new domain. So it would be annoying but not screwed
Get a domain and register an MX record.
If your email provider shuts down, forward the mail somewhere else.
I recently lost my oldest email and I didn’t plan accordingly. Roadrunner email. It’s still a pain in the butt. I’ve managed to change almost everything (that I can REMEMBER) to my newer email, but there are two that haven’t been changed because they require an email to the old email first… It’s gone.
That email was probably 20 years old and I have no idea what services I had signed up through it.
The moral of my story is to read emails from your email provider. Apparently they sent out warnings 6 months in advance, but I always ignored their emails.
Sometimes you can reach out to support and get them to fix it, but not always. Worth a shot, if you can remember the services that need to be changed lol.
Cox just shut down their email services. They did so by transitioning everyone to yahoo and gave yahoo the cox.net email domain. As long as the provider plans accordingly, they can shut down and not screw over their customers. It was hell getting grandparents to understand their email changed but not really, and just to reconfigure outlook for them so they can keep getting those prayer requests. “No grandma, that’s your windows password, what’s your email password? because that doesn’t work. You know what, I’ll just look it up in the registry.” It was a pretty seamless transition all things considered.
I own my own domain and back up my emails. It would be a pain and cost a few $ but I’d migrate to something else or self host.
What do you use to backup?
Synology.
I lost one, sent the emails I might need to another account. So that was ok but I forgot to change the email on every freaking service I use so it was very difficult to recover some accounts.
