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This is an excellent argument for setting up e-mail using your own domain name, though, and for using that for all new accounts and transitioning existing accou
by Silhouette 10y ago
This is an excellent argument for setting up e-mail using your own domain name, though, and for using that for all new accounts and transitioning existing accounts to your new e-mail address as soon as possible.
The Internet works just fine when it's decentralised, but particularly with e-mail, relying on the big service providers (or an ISP-provided address, for that matter) immediately locks you into someone else's systems for no particularly good reason.
Registering your own domain and setting up mail forwarding can be done with any number of services and costs less for a year than many people pay for a week of their cell phone service, and crucially, the domain is registered by some specialist service but is your domain and can be transferred to another service any time you want.
Unfortunately it can be a scary-looking process for non-technical users, but for those with enough confidence to arrange it, I highly recommend it.
- dredmorbius 10y agoAlthough that also introduces risks. Losing control over your domain would be problematic. It happens. The argument for individual domains suggests itself, or an equivalent follows-the-person mechanism.
- sk5t 10y agoYes! Reducing the risk of losing control of the domain is a great reason to prefer gmail.com, outlook.com, or another similarly theft-hard mail domain. Otherwise, if an attacker can trick the registrar or nameserver, it's game-over for all accounts that use mail or mail-dependent factors for authentication.
- Silhouette 10y agoOtherwise, if an attacker can trick the registrar or nameserver That's a mighty big "if", though. For any of the TLDs I'm familiar with, there are significant protections against unintended domain transfers, and that has been the case for a long time for the major ones.
- Silhouette 10y agoLosing control over your domain would be problematic. It happens. It is extremely difficult to unintentionally lose control of a domain that you legitimately register with a respectable registrar. Any centralised service you use for free can terminate your account on a whim any time they like, give access to an account you used to use to anyone else they like, and so on. There is some non-zero level of risk in any dealing with a remote service, but I don't think the scale of risk in these two scenarios is even remotely comparable.
- blakep 10y agoMail in a box makes this easy. https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/ Or something like sovereign. https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign