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I'd be curious to read what people on HN think of one particular aspect of the story: she's not planning on using her old Gmail address anymore, which made me t

I'd be curious to read what people on HN think of one particular aspect of the story: she's not planning on using her old Gmail address anymore, which made me think of the longevity of one's email address and what one can do to keep control of it. In particular, I'm thinking that backups of all your "cloud" data mostly takes care of the fear of losing it like written in the OP. However, to not lose your email address itself, you have to have your own domain, but is that really sufficient? In the end, you mostly lease it rather than owning it, so can it just be assumed that a .com address won't be messed with (as long as there aren't any trademark issue)? (as opposed to, say, a .ly) Do you use your own domain for email? Do you think that email addresses have some inherent risks that make them potentially disposable after 5-10 years? A bigger question is how could anyone (that is: people who have currently no idea what a domain really is and how to get one) take control of their addresses in a similar way? As far as I'm concerned, I haven't used my own domain yet for emails but my alumni association gives me a lifelong forwarding address. I haven't been super strict with using it everywhere though, so it's a bit all over the place. The truth is too that my Gmail address is much easier to type and give away than either my alumni one or my own domain…

sneak 15y ago
I think that at some point in the future (after DNSSEC takes hold), FQDNs will be used both for identity and messaging (both realtime like IM/voice and non, like email). We're already seeing some of this in the form of *@personaldomain.com addresses. I wrote about this a while ago: http://sneak.datavibe.net/20100227/the-future-of-the-internet/ http://sneak.datavibe.net/20100227/the-future-of-the-interne... I think that most people's FQDNs will be third-level or deeper, granted by some identity provider, though once the whole user@host format is abandoned I'm guessing that there will be lots of identity/email providers that allow one to one-stop register a domain and integrate it with the service (something that's beyond most casual users of email today).
- jaylevitt 15y ago
  I thought one of the big lessons of OpenID is that the non-technical world thinks FQDNs are for web sites (or something you type into Google!) and user@host is for identity? I still have trouble explaining that jay@jay.fm is my entire e-mail address, and that there is no .com at the end of it. I think there was a point where everybody wanted to blog, and thus might have an URL that they considered "me", but that's gone away with Twitter and Facebook. Come to think of it, many people have a Facebook claimed URL, but I've never typed or clicked one, and I don't even know my own.
dools 15y ago
I have my own domain for email which is iain@workingsoftware.com.au but I also have iaindooley.com (although I haven't used that for email for some time). I run a DTC server (like open source CPanel) on which I manage email addresses for my workingsoftware.com.au domains, but I just forward all mail from there (for multiple accounts) to a single gmail account, iaindooley@gmail.com. I have setup that account to allow me to send email as multiple different accounts, and send using my own, external SMTP server so that it looks "real". I then have fetchmail running on one of my servers which downloads everything from gmail (except the spam) and I mostly read my email with alpine although using gmail as a waypoint has the advantage of lots and lots of free storage, excellent search and very easy accessibility from the web and multiple devices. I periodically archive this when it gets too big onto the same server that holds my nightly backups (a 5.3TB RAID-Z NAS in the same rack as my primary development machine). If my gmail account got hacked and all my messages were deleted, I'd still have them (because I POP them off) and the email address that I use publicly is not associated with my gmail address, so I would just be able to open a different gmail account and forward my mail there. I'd lose the ability to search a crapload of messages, though, without un-archiving all my old tarballs that I'd popped off of gmail but that's more of an inconvenience than a catastrophe.
guelo 15y ago
I think it's dangerous to rely on some corporate owned address as your long term identity. Even a company as big as Google or Microsoft could disappear in 20 years. It is much better to own your domain and be able to switch out the underlying service provider as needed. Though DNS wasn't really designed for that and it is probably beyond the capability of the average user, I do recommend it for the technically inclined.
- eli 15y ago
  Namecheap will let you set up forwarding email addresses for free if you register the domain there. No need to screw with DNS. I'm sure others do too.

sneak 15y ago

I think that at some point in the future (after DNSSEC takes hold), FQDNs will be used both for identity and messaging (both realtime like IM/voice and non, like email). We're already seeing some of this in the form of *@personaldomain.com addresses. I wrote about this a while ago: http://sneak.datavibe.net/20100227/the-future-of-the-internet/ http://sneak.datavibe.net/20100227/the-future-of-the-interne... I think that most people's FQDNs will be third-level or deeper, granted by some identity provider, though once the whole user@host format is abandoned I'm guessing that there will be lots of identity/email providers that allow one to one-stop register a domain and integrate it with the service (something that's beyond most casual users of email today).

jaylevitt 15y ago
I thought one of the big lessons of OpenID is that the non-technical world thinks FQDNs are for web sites (or something you type into Google!) and user@host is for identity? I still have trouble explaining that jay@jay.fm is my entire e-mail address, and that there is no .com at the end of it. I think there was a point where everybody wanted to blog, and thus might have an URL that they considered "me", but that's gone away with Twitter and Facebook. Come to think of it, many people have a Facebook claimed URL, but I've never typed or clicked one, and I don't even know my own.

dools 15y ago

I have my own domain for email which is iain@workingsoftware.com.au but I also have iaindooley.com (although I haven't used that for email for some time). I run a DTC server (like open source CPanel) on which I manage email addresses for my workingsoftware.com.au domains, but I just forward all mail from there (for multiple accounts) to a single gmail account, iaindooley@gmail.com. I have setup that account to allow me to send email as multiple different accounts, and send using my own, external SMTP server so that it looks "real". I then have fetchmail running on one of my servers which downloads everything from gmail (except the spam) and I mostly read my email with alpine although using gmail as a waypoint has the advantage of lots and lots of free storage, excellent search and very easy accessibility from the web and multiple devices. I periodically archive this when it gets too big onto the same server that holds my nightly backups (a 5.3TB RAID-Z NAS in the same rack as my primary development machine). If my gmail account got hacked and all my messages were deleted, I'd still have them (because I POP them off) and the email address that I use publicly is not associated with my gmail address, so I would just be able to open a different gmail account and forward my mail there. I'd lose the ability to search a crapload of messages, though, without un-archiving all my old tarballs that I'd popped off of gmail but that's more of an inconvenience than a catastrophe.

guelo 15y ago

I think it's dangerous to rely on some corporate owned address as your long term identity. Even a company as big as Google or Microsoft could disappear in 20 years. It is much better to own your domain and be able to switch out the underlying service provider as needed. Though DNS wasn't really designed for that and it is probably beyond the capability of the average user, I do recommend it for the technically inclined.

eli 15y ago
Namecheap will let you set up forwarding email addresses for free if you register the domain there. No need to screw with DNS. I'm sure others do too.