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This kind of thing makes picking a personal email address a tricky decision. Do I go with a @gmail.com or other corporate address? Then I risk losing my email

This kind of thing makes picking a personal email address a tricky decision. Do I go with a @gmail.com or other corporate address? Then I risk losing my email if my account is suspended. Do I go with a domain I own? Then I risk losing it if something like this happens. Either way is serious because email is effectively a master key into all my accounts. I'm honestly not sure what's best.

kube-system 7y ago
Do both, and add both email addresses to every account that you can.
- seagreen 7y ago
  Huh, it seems obvious but I hadn't thought of this. I think that's because I was coming at this from the perspective of trying to prevent getting hacked, but really I'm less worried about that than I am about losing access.
URSpider94 7y ago
Option 3: Contract with a mail forwarding service like pobox.com. That way, you can move your mailbox service with the click of a button. Since they are not involved in delivering your mail, the chance that you'll get your account suspended for anything short of doing real crime is essentially zero.
owenmarshall 7y ago
> Do I go with a domain I own? This one, it’s this one. Losing your domain tends to require human action: from someone forgot to pay the renewal to someone messed up and sinkholed it because they thought it was a C2 server. But because humans are in the system there tend to be layers of processes that try to prevent you from getting to this state and can get your world back to normal if you do. Gmail offers nothing like this. When the ML algorithms decide you are too many sigma in the “abnormal” category, you are done. And there is no one to talk to who can fix your problem.
- doublerabbit 7y ago
  Although if your using your own email address, be prepared for emails you send to end up in junk.
  - owenmarshall 7y ago
    This is an unfortunate risk with running your own. Instead, pay someone - my Fastmail subscription is absolutely worth every penny. If it ever becomes a problem I flip my MX record elsewhere.
  - kube-system 7y ago
    That's if you use your own _server_. You don't have to point your DNS records to a server you own.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Maintaining a domain you control, with a couple of privacy-aware (Protonmail, Fastmail) fallback / out-of-band email contacts, and possibly a few online presences (Twitter, Mastodon, Reddit, etc.) which you can use for signalling, helps. Knowing actual postal or phone contact information for key partners is also useful. You can use these to communicate in an emergency as well, and spread word. Operating as a pseudonymous nym online for a decade and experiencing several lockouts / shutdowns over the period ... has been interesting.

kube-system 7y ago

Do both, and add both email addresses to every account that you can.

seagreen 7y ago
Huh, it seems obvious but I hadn't thought of this. I think that's because I was coming at this from the perspective of trying to prevent getting hacked, but really I'm less worried about that than I am about losing access.

URSpider94 7y ago

Option 3: Contract with a mail forwarding service like pobox.com. That way, you can move your mailbox service with the click of a button. Since they are not involved in delivering your mail, the chance that you'll get your account suspended for anything short of doing real crime is essentially zero.

owenmarshall 7y ago

> Do I go with a domain I own? This one, it’s this one. Losing your domain tends to require human action: from someone forgot to pay the renewal to someone messed up and sinkholed it because they thought it was a C2 server. But because humans are in the system there tend to be layers of processes that try to prevent you from getting to this state and can get your world back to normal if you do. Gmail offers nothing like this. When the ML algorithms decide you are too many sigma in the “abnormal” category, you are done. And there is no one to talk to who can fix your problem.

doublerabbit 7y ago
Although if your using your own email address, be prepared for emails you send to end up in junk.
- owenmarshall 7y ago
  This is an unfortunate risk with running your own. Instead, pay someone - my Fastmail subscription is absolutely worth every penny. If it ever becomes a problem I flip my MX record elsewhere.
- kube-system 7y ago
  That's if you use your own _server_. You don't have to point your DNS records to a server you own.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Maintaining a domain you control, with a couple of privacy-aware (Protonmail, Fastmail) fallback / out-of-band email contacts, and possibly a few online presences (Twitter, Mastodon, Reddit, etc.) which you can use for signalling, helps. Knowing actual postal or phone contact information for key partners is also useful. You can use these to communicate in an emergency as well, and spread word. Operating as a pseudonymous nym online for a decade and experiencing several lockouts / shutdowns over the period ... has been interesting.