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I don’t know why this is getting downvoted. If you self-host your email, you are still beholden to your ISP’s TOS. Maybe it’s an improvement because it’s less l

I don’t know why this is getting downvoted. If you self-host your email, you are still beholden to your ISP’s TOS. Maybe it’s an improvement because it’s less likely you’ll be found infringing, but it’s still quite real. Let’s not forget your domain registrar either…

ryandrake 3y ago
It seems every couple of weeks we have a new "I was banned by $COMPANY_X and lost access to everything! They won't tell me why." HN article. It's probably rare, but happens often enough and the consequences are severe enough that it's a risk worth considering. It's likely a lot more rare to get banned from your VPS or ISP than it is to get banned from something like Google, since who knows what the rules are there? Your kid could upload an inappropriate video to YouTube or something, and they'll associate IPs with your account and suddenly you lose access to Gmail.
- amatecha 3y ago
  Yeah, it just happened to me a while ago. Banned from an online game inexplicably, for something I am absolutely innocent of. Their support team refused to do anything, assured me "the ban is correct". Only got lifted because of knowing someone who knew someone and was able to have it actually looked into, rather than the usual non-investigation you'd typically get. I know numerous people who have lost their entire Microsoft or Google account (or other services), with zero explanation, zero recourse, just everything permanently nuked. This can happen to anyone at any time, as erroneous false positives happen seemingly arbitrarily.
layer8 3y ago
You generally don’t self-host your email via your ISP, you use a VPS, and you can switch that at will. I haven’t heard of any case where a domain registrar took away a domain other than as a consequence of criminal prosecution or court orders. In any case, it’s far more robust than e.g. Google shutting down your account for unknown reasons.

ryandrake 3y ago

It seems every couple of weeks we have a new "I was banned by $COMPANY_X and lost access to everything! They won't tell me why." HN article. It's probably rare, but happens often enough and the consequences are severe enough that it's a risk worth considering. It's likely a lot more rare to get banned from your VPS or ISP than it is to get banned from something like Google, since who knows what the rules are there? Your kid could upload an inappropriate video to YouTube or something, and they'll associate IPs with your account and suddenly you lose access to Gmail.

amatecha 3y ago
Yeah, it just happened to me a while ago. Banned from an online game inexplicably, for something I am absolutely innocent of. Their support team refused to do anything, assured me "the ban is correct". Only got lifted because of knowing someone who knew someone and was able to have it actually looked into, rather than the usual non-investigation you'd typically get. I know numerous people who have lost their entire Microsoft or Google account (or other services), with zero explanation, zero recourse, just everything permanently nuked. This can happen to anyone at any time, as erroneous false positives happen seemingly arbitrarily.

layer8 3y ago

You generally don’t self-host your email via your ISP, you use a VPS, and you can switch that at will. I haven’t heard of any case where a domain registrar took away a domain other than as a consequence of criminal prosecution or court orders. In any case, it’s far more robust than e.g. Google shutting down your account for unknown reasons.