7 ms·

Switching email isn't nearly as friction-free as switching your browser. Not only do you have to change your email in every service you've registered for, you

Switching email isn't nearly as friction-free as switching your browser. Not only do you have to change your email in every service you've registered for, you also need to convince your friends and other contacts to use the new email.

theshrike79 7y ago
It's a year-long project in the minimum: 1: Start up new email (for me it was Fastmail) and preferably get your own domain 2: Forward all mail from gmail to your new account 3: Create a rule that flags messages that are still delivered to gmail, go through them at your leisure and swap to the new address
- kadoban 7y ago
  I'd stress the "get your own domain" part. This is a _requirement_, or you're going to be going through the same pain again in a few years. Also, make sure you take backups of your old emails every once in a while. Google Checkout should be able to provide those.
  - colejohnson66 7y ago
    What’s the risk of losing your domain from a forgotten renewal?
    - imhoguy 7y ago
      There is always a risk of loosing an asset, that includes hijacking. However to reduce forgeting of renewal there is the recipe I have once read here on HN: Renew your doman for 10 years now, and then every next year do 1 year renewal. If you forget it then you still have 9 years of buffer.
    - _-david-_ 7y ago
      I would assume most domain registrars send you reminder emails as your expiration gets closer.
    - mrighele 7y ago
      Some registrars let you enable automatic renewal, so in that case the only risk is to keep paying for a domain that you forgot of.
      - trav4225 7y ago
        How is credit card expiration handled? Or do you suggest another payment method?
        mrighele 6y ago
        I think they sent me a notification about the expiring card once. Another alternative is using one that accept recurring payments through PayPal; that way you would have to handle card expiration only with Paypal.
    - ashtonkem 7y ago
      If a domain is important to you, you should have it set to autorenew.
    - rietta 7y ago
      I have all my domains on autorenew, probably many I should have let lapse now, and some of which I have regretted letting go of.
      - tracker1 7y ago
        I feel your pain.. I accidentally let my main blog domain go a long while ago when I decided to drop most of the domains I was holding. Beyond this, I've had a few pretty good ones over the years... right now, I've got about 30 of them, and just keep thinking I should let most of them go.
    - jacobr1 7y ago
      I've used auto-renew ... but it turned out my biggest risk was actually the expiration data on my credit cards
      - DelightOne 7y ago
        I loaded up credits at my registrar to last a couple years because of this.
      - aGeekGoneMad 7y ago
        That's we something like PayPal is nice, your cards can expire and be replaced without interruption to automatic payments. And like the email problem, you don't have to go around changing it every couple of years.
    - littlestymaar 7y ago
      If your domain name provider is serious, almost none: there's a transition period (a few weeks) between the expiration date of your domain and when somebody else can buy it again. So if you forget to renew it, your emails stop working and you'll renew it really quickly ;). Source: it happened to me last month (the provider being OVH).
    - nucleardog 7y ago
      You'd probably have to really work at it. Most registrars are going to send you multiple emails leading up to the expiration, when it expires, and after it expires reminding you it expired. You'd have to miss a lot of emails. And once it has expired, you have (depending on the TLD) over a month of grace period where it's not available for general registration where you can still renew it. You'd have to miss the fact that all of your services were offline for over a month.
    - prox 7y ago
      I only work with a company who’s team I can actually call. i pay a bit more, but that direct access is great. It’s actually hard to lose a domain if you have a good registrar. There is 90 day quarantine period even if you cross the renewal treshold. You can also domain lock, which means you need to manually unlock a domain before moving.
  - thayne 7y ago
    getting your own domain might be fine for tech-savvy people, but for the general population it isn't really an option.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
The most important change you can make for your email is to own your own domain. Once you own your own domain, changing providers is much easier since it is transparent to the people that email you. Even if you decide to keep Gmail, you should switch your email to your own domain.
- cpascal 7y ago
  One worry about tying your identity to your own domain, is the security of your identity (aka your domain) hinges on the security of your registrar. If a bad actor can socially engineer their way into controlling your domain, your entire identity is compromised. Here's a blog post about this nightmare happening to someone: https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-24eb09e026dd https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...
  - ashtonkem 7y ago
    I agree that that would be catastrophic, but I’m not convinced that using custom DNS changes my risk factor. If someone took over <my name>@gmail.com, they could do as much damage as they could by taking over <my name>@<my domain>.
    - Roujo 7y ago
      Yes, but there's still an increase in the attack surface - it's a lot harder to convince a registrar to turn over gmail.com than <my domain>, for most values of <my domain>. It's not a deal breaker, of course, but it's something to consider when looking at the risk factor.
    - cpascal 7y ago
      If you use an email provider to host your domain's email (e.g. Fastmail, GSuite, etc.), I believe you're actually increasing your risk factor. The security of your identity will depend on your registrar, your DNS provider, and your email provider.
  - toohotatopic 7y ago
dsanduleac 7y ago
I recall seeing this recently on another HN post, where they had set up a blanket forwarding rule from their Gmail to another email account. Their Gmail later got dinged but the forwarding rule continued to work.
- pletnes 7y ago
  I did that years ago. The only downside is that every 2-3 years some email gets stuck in gmail’s spam folder.
DavideNL 7y ago
You don't have to switch overnight, i simply forwarded all my incoming Gmail e-mails to my new account, and then reply to all my Friends (etc.) from my NEW e-mail address. That way they will all, eventually, automagically update me in their address book. It worked very well :)
morrbo 7y ago
Have to respectfully disagree here...we tried protonmail for ages and it wasn't good. Wet feature adding it sounds like you got lucky but we ask for several features over the course of a year - ranging from simple things such as HTML signatures (that they fully support, they just hide the button on their editor) to more enterprisey user management 2fa enforcement style features and it just didn't hold up in the slightest. No features got added and we ended up going back to o365..for a personal email it's ok though but I wouldn't tout them as responsive to feature requests as this wasn't our experience at all. We were a sma the on their visionary package if that makes a difference.
ori_b 7y ago
You can set up forwarding rules and switch gradually. It's pretty much painless.

theshrike79 7y ago

It's a year-long project in the minimum: 1: Start up new email (for me it was Fastmail) and preferably get your own domain 2: Forward all mail from gmail to your new account 3: Create a rule that flags messages that are still delivered to gmail, go through them at your leisure and swap to the new address

kadoban 7y ago
I'd stress the "get your own domain" part. This is a _requirement_, or you're going to be going through the same pain again in a few years. Also, make sure you take backups of your old emails every once in a while. Google Checkout should be able to provide those.
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  What’s the risk of losing your domain from a forgotten renewal?
  - imhoguy 7y ago
    There is always a risk of loosing an asset, that includes hijacking. However to reduce forgeting of renewal there is the recipe I have once read here on HN: Renew your doman for 10 years now, and then every next year do 1 year renewal. If you forget it then you still have 9 years of buffer.
  - _-david-_ 7y ago
    I would assume most domain registrars send you reminder emails as your expiration gets closer.
  - mrighele 7y ago
    Some registrars let you enable automatic renewal, so in that case the only risk is to keep paying for a domain that you forgot of.
    - trav4225 7y ago
      How is credit card expiration handled? Or do you suggest another payment method?
      - mrighele 6y ago
        I think they sent me a notification about the expiring card once. Another alternative is using one that accept recurring payments through PayPal; that way you would have to handle card expiration only with Paypal.
  - ashtonkem 7y ago
    If a domain is important to you, you should have it set to autorenew.
  - rietta 7y ago
    I have all my domains on autorenew, probably many I should have let lapse now, and some of which I have regretted letting go of.
    - tracker1 7y ago
      I feel your pain.. I accidentally let my main blog domain go a long while ago when I decided to drop most of the domains I was holding. Beyond this, I've had a few pretty good ones over the years... right now, I've got about 30 of them, and just keep thinking I should let most of them go.
  - jacobr1 7y ago
    I've used auto-renew ... but it turned out my biggest risk was actually the expiration data on my credit cards
    - DelightOne 7y ago
      I loaded up credits at my registrar to last a couple years because of this.
    - aGeekGoneMad 7y ago
      That's we something like PayPal is nice, your cards can expire and be replaced without interruption to automatic payments. And like the email problem, you don't have to go around changing it every couple of years.
  - littlestymaar 7y ago
    If your domain name provider is serious, almost none: there's a transition period (a few weeks) between the expiration date of your domain and when somebody else can buy it again. So if you forget to renew it, your emails stop working and you'll renew it really quickly ;). Source: it happened to me last month (the provider being OVH).
  - nucleardog 7y ago
    You'd probably have to really work at it. Most registrars are going to send you multiple emails leading up to the expiration, when it expires, and after it expires reminding you it expired. You'd have to miss a lot of emails. And once it has expired, you have (depending on the TLD) over a month of grace period where it's not available for general registration where you can still renew it. You'd have to miss the fact that all of your services were offline for over a month.
  - prox 7y ago
    I only work with a company who’s team I can actually call. i pay a bit more, but that direct access is great. It’s actually hard to lose a domain if you have a good registrar. There is 90 day quarantine period even if you cross the renewal treshold. You can also domain lock, which means you need to manually unlock a domain before moving.
- thayne 7y ago
  getting your own domain might be fine for tech-savvy people, but for the general population it isn't really an option.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

The most important change you can make for your email is to own your own domain. Once you own your own domain, changing providers is much easier since it is transparent to the people that email you. Even if you decide to keep Gmail, you should switch your email to your own domain.

cpascal 7y ago
One worry about tying your identity to your own domain, is the security of your identity (aka your domain) hinges on the security of your registrar. If a bad actor can socially engineer their way into controlling your domain, your entire identity is compromised. Here's a blog post about this nightmare happening to someone: https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-24eb09e026dd https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...
- ashtonkem 7y ago
  I agree that that would be catastrophic, but I’m not convinced that using custom DNS changes my risk factor. If someone took over <my name>@gmail.com, they could do as much damage as they could by taking over <my name>@<my domain>.
  - Roujo 7y ago
    Yes, but there's still an increase in the attack surface - it's a lot harder to convince a registrar to turn over gmail.com than <my domain>, for most values of <my domain>. It's not a deal breaker, of course, but it's something to consider when looking at the risk factor.
  - cpascal 7y ago
    If you use an email provider to host your domain's email (e.g. Fastmail, GSuite, etc.), I believe you're actually increasing your risk factor. The security of your identity will depend on your registrar, your DNS provider, and your email provider.
- toohotatopic 7y ago

dsanduleac 7y ago

I recall seeing this recently on another HN post, where they had set up a blanket forwarding rule from their Gmail to another email account. Their Gmail later got dinged but the forwarding rule continued to work.

pletnes 7y ago
I did that years ago. The only downside is that every 2-3 years some email gets stuck in gmail’s spam folder.

DavideNL 7y ago

You don't have to switch overnight, i simply forwarded all my incoming Gmail e-mails to my new account, and then reply to all my Friends (etc.) from my NEW e-mail address. That way they will all, eventually, automagically update me in their address book. It worked very well :)

morrbo 7y ago

Have to respectfully disagree here...we tried protonmail for ages and it wasn't good. Wet feature adding it sounds like you got lucky but we ask for several features over the course of a year - ranging from simple things such as HTML signatures (that they fully support, they just hide the button on their editor) to more enterprisey user management 2fa enforcement style features and it just didn't hold up in the slightest. No features got added and we ended up going back to o365..for a personal email it's ok though but I wouldn't tout them as responsive to feature requests as this wasn't our experience at all. We were a sma the on their visionary package if that makes a difference.

ori_b 7y ago

You can set up forwarding rules and switch gradually. It's pretty much painless.