3 ms·

> All your emails if you use iCloud for your email, and thus potentially locking you out of any other sites that use email as a 2-factor-auth. ...but you can u

• ozim 3y ago
  That is why I don't use webmail I rather use Thunderbird. Second reason I use Thunderbird (or whoever wants whatever else) is that I have 10 or 20 mail boxes like separate for shopping separate for more important stuff separate for stupid stuff. You don't have to have a single mailbox with a single provider.
  • brewdad 3y ago
    Another advantage of Thunderbird is that I already have a downloaded copy of my past emails. If I ever get locked out, I can change my MX records and start over elsewhere with minimal disruption or data loss.
• tolmasky 3y ago
  If they disable your account, you're not going to get any new email. So if a website uses your email address for 2-factor-auth, then you are straight out of luck, as I'm sure they also use that email for any sort of account changes. To be clear, "don't use email for 2-factor-auth" isn't a real answer here, there are plenty of services that don't give you an option. Additionally, you can't send email. That's also a pretty important part of the whole "email" thing. Any ongoing discussions will just be cut off. Seems pretty walled garden-y to me, considering the entire framing of this is that nothing bad was done with said email. It was because Apple has a unilateral switch that turns everything off if anything bad happens to an associated credit card. That is to say, if your credit card number is stolen, completely outside of your control, this could happen to your email. I'm not aware of any other email service where that is the case.
  • jrockway 3y ago
    Technically, you don't need an email account to send email. "telnet example.com 25; HELO there; MAIL FROM: you@example.com; RCPT TO example@example.com; DATA; ...; ." Viewing the reply is, of course, more challenging.
    • derefr 3y ago
      I don't think there exist any Mail Submission Agents well-connected to the graph of what you would think of as "email on the Internet", that allow you to send FROM an arbitrary address without SMTP AUTHing yourself as an account that maps to someone with privileges to send from that address.
      • jrockway 3y ago
        You connect to the recipient's server. It's nice that iCloud Mail automates this all for you (and is allowlisted), but you don't need an email provider to send email.
        • hiatus 3y ago
          Let me know when you can telnet into gmail to send mail as an unauthenticated user to another gmail user. Let alone DMARC, SPF and other modern protections. The last time I could do what you describe was more than a decade ago.
      • hiatus 3y ago
        This used to be a thing, with open mail servers making it trivial to send emails to your friends masquerading as whitehouse.gov for instance.
  • derefr 3y ago
    But that's true of... any email provider, though? You'd lose access to your ISP email account if you switch ISPs, etc. Federated email just generally sucks, insofar as email addresses are expected to stick around indefinitely, yet are almost-always associated with some service provider you might eventually no longer be a customer of (for whatever reason) and with "owning your own email providing" being nigh-impossible for deliverability reasons. Also, people's emails to you wouldn't go into a black hole; they'd start bouncing. Which would mean that those people would realize that they should be reaching out to you some other way. (In fact, properly-coded 2FA systems should recognize an SMTP bounce and use it as a signal to temporarily reduce the level of authentication required to reset 2FA. Things like this are why it's so hard to get 2FA right.)