11 ms·

It is a bit overkill, but the closest you can get to owning your online identity is to "own" your own domain. sarcastiquotes used because you don't really own a

• kingds 4y ago
  but if you stop renting from the registrar then whoever rents the domain next gets access to your email. seems like a horrible solution to this problem. at least i can be reasonably confident that google will never recycle my email address and send all incoming mail to a rando.
  • colordrops 4y ago
    Being in control of your own destiny entails more risk.
  • account42 4y ago
    > at least i can be reasonably confident that google will never recycle my email address and send all incoming mail to a rando. What do you base that confidence on? Short, meaningful names are valuable and there is no reason to believe that somewhere down the line they won't be recycling ones that aren't used anyway as premium accounts.
• deepdriver 4y ago
  I think I have a good idea of what you mean, but for those who don't, could you elaborate on the benefits?
  • TeeMassive 4y ago
    You can give unique throwaway addresses to people you don't fully trust (e.g. newsletters, recruiters) and apply the rules you want. It would be very naive to think that Big Tech won't abuse their market positions.
    • Shared404 4y ago
      I do this, and it's very nice to tell who lost/sold my email. Also it's funny to see people react to their business name being in my email :P .
      • yonrg 4y ago
        Yes, I got once a discount because the phone agent thought I am a colleague :)
        • dariusm5 4y ago
          I've had a few occasions that employees thought I worked for the company based on my email. On one occasion, I was checking into a Hilton hotel and the employee thought I worked for corporate due to my email, hilton@domain.tld. In the past, I used to explain to them how I control the domain and I have separate emails for every company due to spam reasons. However, this usually caused confusion so now I sometimes go along with what they think or hint that I'm some 'mystery shopper'.
      • godmode2019 4y ago
        I had a website break, because they were filtering emails that contain their domain name for some reason. And I had no way to apply for the government licence thing I needed, and the people on the phone suggested I use the website.
        • hamburglar 4y ago
          I’m very rigorous about including the full domain name in my email address (consistency helps me remember what I used. I made the mistake early on of using myname-paypal@mydomain.com instead of myname-paypal.com@… and it drove me insane until I changed it), but every once in a while there’s a site (or occasionally a customer service rep) that refuses to accept that, in which case I just make up some unique three letter suffix to use instead and make a note of it in my password manager. My email for my kids’ school whose name starts with a W, for example, just ended up being mynane-w@mydomain.com. Luckily these exceptions are rarely necessary and I’ve only had to do half a dozen of them in about 17 years of doing this.
• gwnywg 4y ago
  I run my own email server too, many will not because of fear of missconfiguring it- and in some respect they are correct, first thing I have done wrong 11-ish years ago was to make my server an open relay which was cought in 5 minutes from setting up and luckily I figured it out 5 minutes later. No big deal, I love postfix and dovecot :)
  • bongobingo1 4y ago
    This is my fear. It's not really the running or configuring that scares me, it's the unceremonious bouncing/filtering at the other end. I have run some mailers (postfix) for some clients who didn't want to spring for a MAAS provider, I would to my knowledge, set up everything correctly with SPF, DMARC, DKIM, stuff would still land in the spam folder half the time. Maybe still my mistake, maybe over eager receivers, maybe my hosts were just in a bad net block. And this was just for low volume transactional stuff, they would add manual "not spam" rules which is OK for them receiving sub-LOB notices but really put me off trying to run my life out of a self hosted machine. I saw someone post the Helm the other day, which is an interesting idea of having on-prem storage with an off-site dns/sig layer. Still kind of beholden to another service though - and I personally don't want to host my mail in my house but on a VPS. Did make me wonder about how viable a low cost "we just provide the DNS stuff" mailer service would be or if that exists. https://thehelm.com/products/helm-personal-server-v2 https://thehelm.com/products/helm-personal-server-v2
    • jjav 4y ago
      There is also a half-way solution which is to run your own mail server for inbound traffic and use a mail delivery company to relay the outbound mail. This gives you full control of receiving emails (for the online identity part) and gmail can't lock you out of your life with no recourse. But you don't need to deal with outbound email handling which is a bit more work.
    • kazinator 4y ago
      Bouncing on the other end has nothing to do with running your own mail domain. In e-mail, sending and receiving are decoupled. Some people use the same local mail server to do both: to relay outgoing mail and to receive. But these are independent functions, and you don't have to send mail through your server. You can configure your mail client(s) with the SMTP credentials from you mail provider (such as your ISP). That's used for sending. For receiving, you connect to your own server via IMAP4. Basically your sending side (if you choose to) can be essentially unrelated to your self-hosted mail receiving infrastructure except in the small fact of using your sending identity in the From: headers of your e-mails: you@yourdomain.com.
• tommica 4y ago
  What if you move to another place?
  • imgabe 4y ago
    It will be like phone numbers where your area code for the rest of your life is wherever you lived when you first got a phone.
    • lisper 4y ago
      You mean like it actually is today with mobile phones?
      • afandian 4y ago
        This may be how it is in the States, but in the UK all mobiles phones start with 07 (other area residential codes start 01, 02 etc). I always found it weird that the US numbering system assumes that mobile phones are static. Must be some weird technical debt buried somewhere.
        • kube-system 4y ago
          The first mobile phone I used only had coverage in a particular area. It didn’t work outside of town.
  • somat 4y ago
    just like mail you would have to get a new address. under my imaginary scheme if you wanted better you would pay for a domain. but everyone would always have a local address to use if you wanted to participate(not just consume) online.
    • subroutine 4y ago
      As the article says... "This is considerably more difficult with email because of the huge number of companies and services we want to have our updated email address. It takes a lot of time and effort to change your email address and it involves the risk of losing access to some critical service. There are so many of these services in our lives that we don’t even remember who they all are anymore!" Including a city in the domain seems like it unnecessarily complicates things. If the goal is to provide free access to a more permanent online "identity", people shouldn't be forced to change it when they move.
• ezoe 4y ago
  How do you own a domain? If you rely on a registrar, it just move the identity owner from an email provider to a registrar. Real overkill method is own a TLD. It's unrealistic for an individual though.
  • jjav 4y ago
    > If you rely on a registrar, it just move the identity owner from an email provider to a registrar. OP put own in quotes because of this. Still, while horror stories with registrars certainly exist, they are vastly outnumbered by horror stories of gmail/et.al. locking people out for no reason and no recourse.
  • makeitdouble 4y ago
    Registrars are not infallible, but are a big step above in term of stability. There is the ideal view that you should be able to have your own virtual island where absolutely nothing can deprive you of ownership (including existing govs. depending on your beliefs), and I kinda root for the people who try to push it as far as possible. But pragmatically, registering your domain goes a very long way and is IMO the best trade-off you can get without going crazy.
    • fauigerzigerk 4y ago
      I agree and it's what I do. But I think there is one valid counter argument. If you have to pay for something, then there is always additional potential for loss of access that doesn't exist with free services. That potential is perhaps even greater with domain registrars and all the other service providers involved in email services (registrar, domain host, email provider). Any issue with any of these services could mean you're not getting notified of problems and you may no longer be able to get into the admin account. And if you try to avoid that by storing a different notification/recovery email with them (if at all possible), it opens another can of worms. My main domain almost expired on one occasion because I didn't get the renewal reminders at the alternative address I had stored there years ago. I had simply forgotten about it. And after I had canceled my legacy G Suite account recently, I received a message from Google at one of my old recovery addresses telling me that this G Suite (Workspace) account was going to be automatically upgraded unless I log in to check some box. Only I could no longer log in as the account didn't exist any more, nor could I contact support as that requires logging in as well. Every single account I pay for requires some sort of constant monitoring and maintainance. Otherwise, things just degrade and access is eventually lost. That's why I'm not sure whether I would really recommend everyone rent their own domain.
• greazy 4y ago
  > I wish municipality offered domains, for example: you move to St Louis you would get name.stlouis.mo.us this would give you the same agency online that a mail address gets you offline. Australia kinda does this with their `.id.au` second level domains for 'Individuals (by real name or common alias)' Not many folks use it or know about it.
  • gitgud 4y ago
    > Australia kinda does this with their `.id.au` Interesting, is there any links/documentation on this? Is it for every citizen or something?
    • Grimburger 4y ago
      https://www.auda.org.au/au-domain-names/domain-name-help/idau-rules-eligibility-and-allocation https://www.auda.org.au/au-domain-names/domain-name-help/ida... It costs more wholesale than a regular .com, requires handing over PII to a small company and isn't subject to the same price increase limits. Obviously won't work for everyone but I bought <firstname><lastname>.com instead and its 50% cheaper per year than the equivalent .id.au which should have maybe a few dozen other people in Australia vying for it with first/last name and I assume no one else with my middle names included.
  • Ayesh 4y ago
    eu.org does this too, and at no cost too.
  • gog 4y ago
    Croatia as well, you can get a firstName-lastName.from.hr domain for free.
• WaitWaitWha 4y ago
  this is not a good idea for multiple reasons. john@smith.stlouis.mo.us? Who gets that first? arkhramud@maprikhoychich.stlouis.mo.us? How hard is to trace a person from one location to another? To fix this email problem abandon the email as an account identifier. Use a 'username', or as I do a random set of characters and digits. There is no reason my account (login) has to be indexed as "john.smith@example.com". It can be "SDf23wfwef". And, at an other site, it can be "hdf3gf0s", and so on. I believe this would also reduce spam. An alternative is to use what freenet used with your idea. Just issue sequentially lettered & numbered emails with aaaaaaaa.stlouis.mo.us. a through z and 0 through 9 would give 2.8 billion addresses just for stlouis.mo.us. Moved away? forward the email for a period, bounce (?) for a period with new address, then re-issue.
  • kumarvvr 4y ago
    For most services, the email address is also mandatory for verification, marketing materials and other stuff. So, from user experience point of view, it makes sense to use the email as the unique identifier for the account, as it avoids remembering another id for login.
  • zuhsetaqi 4y ago
    > It can be "SDf23wfwef". And, at an other site, it can be "hdf3gf0s", and so on. I just use the name of the service. So for example it would be github@example.com for my Github Account.
  • barrysteve 4y ago
    Could just extend the logic and tie it all the way down to your house address. john.124mainst@stlouis.mo.us and finally commit to a real-world identity to match the cyber one. Why not have a mail server in every house and then it's private and everybody can understand your email address. When you move house, the mail server spits out a thumb drive with your emails and deletes the local storage. You move email address to the new house. You could eventually replace the abc@xyz.com format and just autofill the email for John at 124 Main St in St Louis. For some reason (probably a good reason) the internet can never be grounded, we always are going to stick to obscure formats that don't necessarily line up with real life and then get surprised when gov agencies collect that data and corps make money selling that exact data, out from under us.
• kumarvvr 4y ago
  I am a developer but have limited knowledge about setting up my own email server. Do you know of any resources that I can read to help me do it on my own?
  • xiconfjs 4y ago
    https://mailcow.email/ https://mailcow.email/ is a good package with a good interface and enough documentation
  • eulenteufel 4y ago
    If you're not afraid of running nixos, nixos-mailserver is a pretty good all in one package.
• dusted 4y ago
  I run my own mail server as well, on my own domain, own server, physically present in my home. It's increasingly becoming a hassle.. Especially sending mail from a "consumer" line is tricky, they block outgoing port 25 and no longer really provide a relay host for you to go through either.. I basically had to infiltrate my current ISP to get access to people in netops and gaslight them into configuring reverse-dns and leak enough info to me to get access to use their relay.. Back when I got my first ADSL, the ISP apologized for blocking port 25 and explained how to use their relay.. Things sure have turned sour in that regard. To this end, I've become convinced that the only fair thing to do is make email a human right. Nation states absolutely should provide and host, e-mail accounts for their citizens. (it can be up to the citizens how they want to use these accounts, if they want to use them only for receiving mail from the state, or if they want to use them for everything else too).
  • fuzzy2 4y ago
    You could always use a service like Mailgun to work around problems like that. It could help with IP/network reputation problems, too. I think that’s a reasonable option if it enables running a mail server at home.
    • powerhour 4y ago
      In my experience (from a few years ago) Mailgun had terrible deliverability to Microsoft and Yahoo. There would be long periods where those providers would return nothing but anti-spam errors, based on Mailgun's own logs.
  • actionfromafar 4y ago
    What can work really well, is to rent the cheapest, smallest VPS you can find. Then redirect the SMTP port with a VPN to your local server, which can be anywhere in the world. You can run IMAP the same way if you want to.
    • dusted 4y ago
      Personally, I'm fully capable of doing that, but even then, it's all entirely dependent on the graces of random VPS providers, it's another route I'd rather not go, I already find it repugnant that the Internet service itself is in the hands of private entities which are under no obligation to provide any specific quality of service (not an enforceable one anyway, as I cannot really chose whose running the actual network fabric, even if I can chose which "company" I pay the bill to). Geez, if water and power delivery was as unregulated as Internet delivery, we'd be like "well, it's mostly AC, maybe DC offset a few thousand volts, on sundays it's 10 hz slower, and it's somewhere in the range of 100 and 500 volts" "Yeah, this is what we call water.. No, we don't support Hydrogen molecules, they're dangerous you see." On top of that, most people don't care (don't know why they should) and don't have the ability to host this infrastructure themselves, and frankly, they shouldn't have to either..
• colordrops 4y ago
  what is the safest registrar? If for instance you own a domain with a TLD managed by a shady jurisdiction, it may not be so secure, right? What's the safest TLD? Other than .com
  • fuzzy2 4y ago
    If you’re living in a country with reasonably low levels of corruption and a somewhat functional judiciary, why not use your country’s TLD? It also helps when verbally relaying your mail address.
    • formerly_proven 4y ago
      Also, you're familiar with whatever laws govern that TLD already, and your local registrars will be by most familiar with them when any issues come up and likely have the quickest turnaround for solving issues. I'd probably avoid using one of the huge registrars (because big companies invariably have poor and slow support that's unable to account for exceptional cases), and of course avoid resellers.
      • colordrops 4y ago
        This all seems too vague. Is there no registrar making more specifc availability and stability guarantees backed by law or at least believable rationale? Or is there some technical solution that bypasses the entire registrar system altogether?
  • traceroute66 4y ago
    >what is the safest registrar? Nominet (.uk) Whilst not entirely without controversy[1], they do allow any man or his dog to become a member[2], you only need to have "an interest in the operation of the .UK domain". Nominet membership gives you the ability to maintain your names directly and bypass the middlemen. The alternative (as others have already pointed out) is to write out a (very big) cheque to ICANN and setup your own TLD where you are the registrar. [1]https://publicbenefit.uk/ [2]https://www.nominet.uk/corporate-governance/members/
• Timshel 4y ago
  While less private if you have a domain instead of hosting youself you can delegate the handling to a mail provider. This way you retain the ability to seamlessly change mail provider. And you gain other benefits like infinit number of alias while requiring a low level of technical knowledge and maintenance.
  • Iolaum 4y ago
    Agreed. And Migadu has quite cheap plans and very good service during the two years that I use them. Not affiliated, just a happy customer.
    • aembleton 4y ago
      Zoho has a free plan that I've been happy with although its only been a month since I moved to them from gmail.
      • planede 4y ago
        I concur, I am using Zoho for years now.
      • bogwog 4y ago
        Yeah I found them a few months ago when looking for providers, and it's insane how cheap they are. $1/mo gets you a custom domain email, and a bunch of online office/productivity apps. Only issue I see is that their mobile apps seem to be a joke when it comes to privacy. I wouldn't trust them not to read/scan my emails either, but that's not always a deal breaker.
  • octobus2021 4y ago
    That's what I do as well. In addition, all my emails are backed up in my local email client (which I back up locally to another location once in a few days) so if things go south I have a way to restore my accounts.
• klabb3 4y ago
  > "what if you had a mailing address that didn't change when you moved?" 1972 > you move to St Louis you would get name.stlouis.mo.us 2022
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• t_mann 4y ago
  I wish more people did this. Self-hosting email is quite advanced, but most domain registrars offer a very reasonable mail package that is very. Since so few people do this, it's becoming increasingly harder to use such email adresses with important services - eg I set up something like this for a relative, and I remember it wasn't straightforward to set up an Apple ID with this custom email for them (I think I might even have had to call their support).
• npteljes 4y ago
  You have to trust a third party company either way, so I don't think you're closer by having the domain, from a trust / vulnerability standpoint. In fact I think that email is best hosted by specialists with experience - and I'm saying this after hosting email for quite some time.
  • account42 4y ago
    Domains are much less of a wild west than accounts at a mail provider. Whil you do need to go through a private registrar, that registrar has to follow certain rules including letting you transfer the domain to another registrar. This is a good reason for not using any of the new vanity gTLDs though as they can make their own rules unlike old gTLD (which are regulated much more closely by ICANN) and ccTLDs (which are regulated by the corresponding country).
    • npteljes 4y ago
      The domain situation is something that I don't have a good understanding on, and part of the reason why I outsource the responsibility to a third party email provider - namely that they will do a better job protecting their own domain, than I'd do protecting mine. I understand that some domains carry some legal attachment. That the new vanity domains are not as trustworthy as others, some are even filtered, as email validators reject it for not being a "valid" address even. Some TLDs need to have a business registered on a location, etc. And I understand that the oldest ones (com, org, net) are among the most universally accepted. But I don't know what carries greater risk: 1. me losing control over my domain, or 2. me losing access to my email account (Posteo in particular - I wouldn't just trust any email provider).
• kkfx 4y ago
  A domain is an address. If you have a home address you are a citizen, if not you are homeless. That's is. However there are few issues we have anyway even being Netizens: - some DNS hierarchies are NOT domestic to our country so in case of political issues between countries or in case of legal issues we do not have much domestic legal protection, witch in Democracy is the protection of our people between us; - there are too many intermediaries who only resell, they are a danger. Registars MUST BE national and international public bodies ONLY, not private companies and domains must be NOT allowed for sale, people can register them, de-register them but no commerce on them; - a minor, but no so minor, email issue, is that with modern anti-spam or to be more precise modern bully-sheriff companies hosting their own mailserver is hard. It works of course, but some giants often simply drop your mails. Personally while I'm a fierce against PRIVATELY controlled digital IDs I favor public ones, not mandatory of course, BUT if you are a Citizen than choose a domain name, it will be on your ID card who happen to be a smart-card PCSC/Java/something OPEN in both middlewire and hw design itself. That's yours and you can use from your homeserver as you wish. Then you are perfectly free to use anything else not much tied to your identity.
• zachrip 4y ago
  I own my domain name, however I opted to go through google apps for hosting my email. Most of the time it's fine, however the part that breaks down (and many have already commented about this) is that I can't make use of any of the google services via that email (nest, voice, etc). So I ended up creating another gmail account that is only used for those services. All that said: can someone point me in the direction of a hosted email service that is reliable (this is a must, I don't want emails to bounce and I don't want spam), has native mobile apps w/push notifications, has a good web ui, and generally just works? And can anyone confirm that once I pull my email from google apps that I could then use it for those google services?
  • fsw 4y ago
    > All that said: can someone point me in the direction of a hosted email service that is reliable (this is a must, I don't want emails to bounce and I don't want spam), has native mobile apps w/push notifications, has a good web ui, and generally just works? And can anyone confirm that once I pull my email from google apps that I could then use it for those google services? Fastmail does all that, I'm using it for years now: https://www.fastmail.com/?STKI=/u226717 https://www.fastmail.com/?STKI=/u226717
  • rollcat 4y ago
    I've set up my custom domain with iCloud mail and it's been 100% painless. The web client is pretty basic but also snappy and reliable. YMMV if you're not in the Apple ecosystem; but if you are, it's all super smooth. I have no idea how it works with the Google stuff, as I'm actively trying to avoid it; but last time I checked, you could create a Google account with any email you like, and things just work.
    • zachrip 4y ago
      My concern is that once I switch off of Google for hosting, their internal systems might not forget about the prior account status and still disallow me from using said services. But yes I agree, everything google has touched in terms of services I use has made them worse. I used to have a reliable set of cameras :/
• nulbyte 4y ago
  > I wish municipality offered domains, for example: you move to St Louis you would get name.stlouis.mo.us this would give you the same agency online that a mail address gets you offline. While a US municipality may or may not operate their locality-based domain (here, the university does), ordinary persons are able to get subdomains under them. The only reason I haven't is because the university here doesn't bother to respond when I follow the process. But you may have better luck where you are.
• kornhole 4y ago
  Gandi.net gives you two mailboxes with unlimited aliases in France for every domain you rent. This is a very easy alternative for most people who cannot run a mail server.
  • fauigerzigerk 4y ago
    I used Gandi for exactly this purpose years ago. Then emails from certain popular domains suddenly stopped getting through to me. When I complained, they told me in somewhat vague language to use a proper email service instead of a free add-on to a cheap domain plan.
    • kornhole 4y ago
      Did you have difficulty receiving or sending mail? I haven't noticed such problems with my Gandi inboxes, but I know the big email providers like Google and MS do a lot of gatekeeping. If the host in France is the problem, you can use your domain at another host such as Proton.me which I do for my main account.
      • fauigerzigerk 4y ago
        Yes, receiving. I just got the impression that email wasn't really something Gandi actually wanted to do rather than a box they needed to tick. And I think that may well be the case with a lot of domain registrars and their basic plans.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
    • account42 4y ago
      > a cheap domain plan. Gandi isn't even cheap really.
• koheripbal 4y ago
  Having the gov't control you email isn't a good solution for various reasons. We've all seen the privacy abuses as well as abusive enforcement/gov't seizures from police and prosecutors. This is better in some countries and dystopianly worse in others. What we need is a system where we can efficiently route messages to/from public keys like the tor url system. This way you always own your address and no one can ever take it away without the private key.
  • account42 4y ago
    Public keys as addresses would be great for the perfect user but for real people they can come with their own failure modes that are much more real concern than abusive governments for most users (especially since your government will always have ways to get to you): - How do you deal with a private key being lost? You can't treat this as a "almost never happens" scenario so you need a way to find people's (new) public keys which will be subject to all the same threat models as current domains or any other addressing scheme: there will be some kind of central authority. - How do you deal with private keys being leaked? Again, you will need a way to revoke keys without having access to the private key which again is only doable with an external source of trust.
• ubermonkey 4y ago
  Agreed. I've had my own domain for 20+ years now. I've run my own mail server for it, but eventually moved to Fastmail and couldn't be happier. My sister and mother also now have their own domains, administered by me. :)
• nytesky 4y ago
  Well even if you “own” your home, you are renting it from your municipality. See what happens if you don’t pay property taxes (or civil rents).
• 6510 4y ago
  Just like you rent a phone number.