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Moving email addresses out from one provider and creating another one is more difficult than moving phone numbers (in the latter case, number portability could
by newscracker 10y ago
Moving email addresses out from one provider and creating another one is more difficult than moving phone numbers (in the latter case, number portability could help, if available).
What exactly can an average/common end user do for such incidents, even if it is to avoid them in the future? I use different passwords across accounts, with all of them being somewhat complex or very complex.
I have looked at a few different paid service providers before, but they're all very expensive. Expensive for me is anything that charges more than $20 per year, or worse, charges that amount or higher for every single email address/alias on a domain. My use of email for personal purposes is writing about a handful of emails in an entire year, but on the receiving side, I get a lot of emails - most of them somewhat commercial in nature (like online orders, bank statement notifications, marketing newsletters I've explicitly signed up for, etc.). I also have several email addresses, each one used for a different purpose and with some overlap across them.
It seems like web hosting has become extremely cheap over time whereas email hosting has stagnated on the price front for a long time.
- GCA10 10y agoThis hack involves 2012 passwords, according to the Re/code coverage. If you've still got the same password, that's a problem. If you're changing passwords every year or so, your vulnerability drops. Two-factor identification on any account that involves your money is a good idea, too.
- newscracker 10y agoIt's true that this hack was in 2012, but the information lost is not only passwords but also account information like name, addresses, other linked email addresses, etc. So those who changed their passwords after this hack still have something to worry about.
- GCA10 10y agoTrue, but if you've got any internet presence at all, it's already pretty straightforward to associate your name and email address (or addresses). Tools like Datanyze, Spokeo, SellHack, etc. do that routinely. Having 120 million Yahoo records available for mischief (without current passwords) makes things slightly worse, but not much.
- bmh_ca 10y agoI have had good luck with fastmail.com, but at $30/year for the entry-level option it sits in what you classify as the "expensive" category. For a dedicated service with keen developers and ongoing product development (yay U2F support), great and accessible support, reasonable expectations of privacy, it has been well worth it. YMMV, of course.
- newscracker 10y agoThanks. That $20 a year was just an approximate amount. I wouldn't mind paying a little more. I've seen Fastmail recommended multiple times and have looked at it. Considering that I would actually want at least three or four "users" (access wise), the plans are quite expensive. The fact that each user can have up to 600 aliases (which sounds great and is useful) doesn't matter much to me since the billing is per user (as opposed to some kind of mix and match of users and aliases). This makes their business model not suitable for my needs.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 10y agoI've been using fastmail. I don't necessarily like it better than gmail, especially since I use hangouts for most of my conversations. however I outright dislike their mobile app, it won't load with no internet connection, like it doesn't cache anything. so maddening. I've been using it a few months paying $5/mo, but will likely discontinue it soon.
- sucrose 10y agoZoho has a free, ad-free service¹ that allows: 1 domain, 5GB per user e-mail hosting, and 5GB per user document storage for up to 25 users. Pricing seems reasonable beyond that. They provide incentives in the form of additional users for referrals (my referral code: WX7yxEKy). They also support 2-factor authentication. ¹ https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html
- beezle 10y agoZoho is mostly OK though they have had a few outages in the past year and the IMAP flakes every now and then. But for free, it works. My fallback were I to move my group off Zoho to something paid would probably be Rackspace. ymmv
- zobzu 10y agoI love how every time a company is compromised, everyone pops with their own "uncompromised" service offer. As if, this one would never get compromised and they were much better at it. Except they probably aren't. Bet the devs have all keys on their "work" laptop (you know, the one with stickers that they take home, to starbucks, on vacations, watch their movies on, etc.) (like everyone elses is doing) Sooo narrow-sighted.
- Kadin 10y agoI think it's useful information. Many people are not aware of alternatives. Plus, it would be better for all concerned to have 25 smaller companies with 20M accounts each than one company with 500M accounts. Less of a security monoculture, and fewer eggs in a single basket when it does get compromised. From a user's perspective, although it may be less convenient, it's probably healthier to use a bunch of services offered by a bunch of different companies than to work with a single company for all digital needs.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ams6110 10y agoI tried to sign up for Zoho a few months ago. Absolutely nothing in the signup process worked. I just got messages to "try later." So I gave up after about a day of peridocally retrying.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mkj 10y agoBuying a domain name is the equivalent of number portability. Recommended for everyone.
- snowwrestler 10y agoI would hesitate to recommend using a personal domain for email. It's more complex and worse for security. In addition to securing access to your email provider (Gmail for example), you now have to secure access to your domain provider too. And even if you do your best, they might fall for social engineering because they take phone calls--like in the famous @N hack: https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-24eb09e026dd#.4qyqi1oe7 https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...
- blawson 10y agoOn the flip side, I did that and while generally it's been a positive experience, providing your email address over the phone has become huge pain! I definitely took for granted how easy it is to say to someone "first initial + last name at major email provider . com", instead of "really easy first part at custom domain, wait let me give you the phonetic alphabet equivalent, no just the letter b, not actually the word bravo... . io - yes io, item oscar, it's the indian ocean. Yeah I'm sure it works" Then pray you actually get the email.
- jrockway 10y agoNobody seems to have any trouble with "jon@jrock.us", other than spelling "jon" wrong. I think one time someone at American Airlines said "oh, that's neat". Otherwise, nobody cares.
- throwanem 10y agoCongratulations on being the outlier!
- JeremyBanks 10y agoI never have trouble either. You picked a particularly weird domain.
- nicoburns 10y agohttps://www.namecheap.com/hosting/email.aspx https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/email.aspx I personally use Gmail as an IMAP client for my domain's mailbox. I get the convenience of webmail + the ability to move my data elsewhere if I wish to.
- newscracker 10y agoI've been trying to reduce my footprint with Google, Facebook, etc., for privacy reasons. I love Gmail's spam filter, and am ok with some of the annoyances in the webmail interface. But the privacy part makes me feel uncomfortable.
- marco1 10y agoMoving to a new email address (and taking all your existing mails with you to the new inbox) is actually far easier than changing phone numbers. Almost all (old) providers let you set up a mail forwarding (to the new provider). But even better, several services let you set up some fetchmail-like program where it imports all the messages from the old provider, e.g. via POP3 or IMAP, and even deletes them with the old provider, if you want. Nevertheless, I fully agree with you that email services are much too expensive. Given the current market prices, Fastmail, for example, is great and worth its money. We're told to spend some money on good quality software and services. But: If I (and even more so the average non-technical user) pay 99 USD/year for Dropbox, 50 USD/year for Fastmail (because you want your own domain), 10 USD/year for the actual domain (separately), 100 USD/year for my quality newspaper subscription, etc. -- and all this is just for one person in my famile (i.e. me) -- you soon end up not having enough money for the "real" things in life.
- godzillabrennus 10y agoFastMail has working tech but customer service leaves a lot to be desired. Google is leagues ahead of them there. It's better than Office365 support though.
- cylo 10y agoMy experience has been entirely the opposite of yours. Fastmail has excellent (and personal) customer service whereas getting ahold of someone at Google is nearly impossible.
- monix 10y agoTruth be told, with Google Apps you get phone support and email support usually answers withing 24 hours in my experience. Problem is they couldn't help me much when I had problems. Google Apps has serious limits and contacting support won't help you get around those limits. Most of the time support just tells you what you can already find in their online docs. They only solved two issues for me: (1) when I wanted to change my primary domain, after 2-3 months of asking them repeatedly, they finally enrolled me into this beta programming and finally changed my primary domain. And (2) when I upgraded to the annual subscription and then changed my mind, they reverted me to the flexible pricing. On the other hand they couldn't even help with with an import gone wrong. With FastMail I have had a good experience thus far.
- jeremyt 10y agoTry protonmail
- Sami_Lehtinen 10y agoWhy not Tutanota?
- newscracker 10y agoThanks so much for pointing this out. I had never heard of it before and had a look. It looks good and has a team whose values I identify with. What's more, it has flexibility in billing that looks quite attractive (users, storage, aliases, etc.). Unfortunately, it does not support IMAP or POP, which I prefer just to have local copies of mails as a backup. A paid account looks appropriate (and would help the company stays in business), but it's a bit pricey for my needs (though not as much as other providers who don't have a lot of flexibility on users/storage/aliases). I will try the free account to experience it firsthand.
- nylsaar 10y agoI think startmail has a free week trial you might want to check out.
- mi100hael 10y agoI considered both before choosing one. Ended up going with Protonmail because: * The folks behind Protonmail are also heavily involved in the OpenPGP.js project. Interop with plain PGP from non-Protonmail accounts is on their roadmap and a feasible future feature. AFAIK that's not on tutanota's roadmap and they use a different customized crypto library, so all you'll ever get is e2e encryption with other tutanota users. * Proton's mobile app is a top-rated android mail app, and pretty good even compared to iOS's Mail app. * IMAP support is also on Protonmail's roadmap, but not something I miss due to the good mobile app. * The tutanota.com and tuta.io domains are dorky and hard for other people to remember.
- newscracker 10y ago
- easytiger 10y agoBuy your own domain, you control the MX record.
- newscracker 10y agoRight, but it still needs an email service provider to point to (and I wouldn't want to run it myself for various reasons). And the providers I've seen are expensive (for me).
- KMag 10y agoDid Google stop offering a free tier for Apps For Your Domain? I guess I missed the part about being grandfathered in.
- bdcravens 10y agoYes. It's now $5/month/user. (plans are grandfathered however)
- overcast 10y agoYou also get 1TB of storage with that, and unlimited storage with 5+ accounts. I do this for my family, and we all have unlimited backups and custom domain email.
- alphapapa 10y agoWhat client software do you use to access the storage and to backup to it? Is it reliable and cross-platform, by any chance? =)
- overcast 10y agoI use Arq https://www.arqbackup.com https://www.arqbackup.com Encrypts everything, and manages the revisions. Available for Mac and Windows. I use for Mac.
- dailo10 10y agoJust because you move to a paid email provider doesn't mean that provider won't get hacked. In fact, the resources at larger companies like Google could provider better protection. Perhaps the benefit of being at a paid email provider is that they have a much smaller number of accounts, so they are a less attractive target for hackers.
- bad_user 10y agoYou're missing the point. Paying for your email means you own your domain and email address, so you have the freedom to move to another provider if the current one proves to be incompetent. Also, in case you have problems, it's impossible to reach Google's support, unless you're a Google Apps customer. It's also near impossible to reach Yahoo's support too. I know because I've been there. If you don't pay, you don't get any support. "Better protection" is a fairy tail if you can't talk with somebody in case your email goes missing or in case you suspect you've been hacked.
- draw_down 10y agoNumber portability helps you keep your same number with a different provider, I don't think it's relevant when you're talking about switching numbers. Also, email forwarding is easier to set up than call forwarding, and just overall I think switching email addresses is easier.
- tim333 10y agoI've had a Yahoo email for years and then got fed up with it so got a Gmail one and set Yahoo to forward to it. Works for me and I think Gmail is fairly secure. Yahoo seems kind of bad security wise. It's all free now though I used to have to pay Yahoo to forward.
- pfarnsworth 10y agoI create a new email address for every new service I have, with a different password. I literally have 120 different emails that all funnel into the same email address via forwarding.
- xp84 10y agoI tried to do that for a long time. It's nice until you forget exactly what your email is with say, Company X Industries when trying to reset your password. Was it CX@domain.xyz? CXI? CompanyXIndustries? That example is silly but this came up frequently for me. And was super awkward when giving out my email to a CS rep over the phone or "Can you confirm your email address for me?" Me: "something that ends with XP84.cc, I forgot." Password managers have made this somewhat less painful, at least on the Web, as opposed to "Apps" which refuse to implement the API for using the password -- and username -- stored in your keychain.
- 4ad 10y agoThey appear expensive because the expectation in people's minds is that email, and most online services are free. Personally I find email to be the most important online service. Everything depends on email. While I can live a non luddite life without Netflix and Dropbox and cloud VMs, and Facebooks, I quite literally can't live my normal life without email. For me, it's more important than a phone. Because of this, I would expect to pay less for a mobile plan than for email, but even with "expensive" email service, the situation seem reversed. If the idea of paying for online services were more entranced in people's mind, there would be more competition and there would be email providers offering services at any price point. Now we only have free email, and "expensive" email, for "those" people.