Forwarding mail is problematic. If you forward spam, your spam score can increase and suddenly you‘re on a blacklist.

Also when you pick an email provider, pick one with a good privacy policy.

TL;DR: Step 1: Get Your Own Domain Step 2: Make Backups

This is not sufficient. Even your domain can be seized. There is no way for any service dependent on the DNS System to be irrevocably owned.

Counterpoint: I lost a domain when a registrar went out of business, and another when a registrar bumped the price 10x and refused to give me authenticode unless I physically show up to their office. Sure, I cheapened out and used shady cheap registrars, and this all happened a while ago so things are probably more regulated now, but for comparison I never permanently lost access to hosted email. (Losing access temporarily is another thing, Google likes blocking me from my own account when travelling.)

That's good but make sure you don't lose the domain. Ever.

"How to become unbannable"

Step 1 : go with the one company that's known worldwide for abusive & permanent bans with no recourse.

This post is a bit too generic, but it's true that using your own domain for mailing is the best solution to avoid getting locked out. Although you need to pick a good registrar, too...

I learned this lesson when switching away from the first ISP I had email through. Rather than switching to another transient ISP email, I registered a domain. I've been through a couple of email providers but my email address never needs to change again.

There are online services where a bad actor can enter your email to automatically sign you up for hundreds, thousands of marketing emails. In the event that that happens, given that you have full control over the domain, you could just divert whatever <x>@yourdomain.com to a black hole. What will happen when email attacks become more advanced--to the point of signing up thousands of different <x'>@yourdomain.com? What strategy would one have then? You would most certainly have to part ways with that domain.

The author makes a good point, your email address is (arguably) more important than your home address. Perhaps there already are, but I hope for better safeguards against these kinds of attacks.

Over the past few weeks I've been systematically migrating every one of my accounts to a domain under my control.

During the process I've been marking them in a spreadsheet with their 2FA status (no 2FA, TOTP, security key, etc.) and adding their passwords to a password manager.

This is all in case I ever need to go through the migration process again for whatever reason, or if I lose/break a Yubikey, I will know what I'm signed up for, and will know where to enrol my new Yubikey(s).

It really is a massive hinge for many people that isn't even really considered, most people's entire digital lives would be uprooted if they lost access to their email for whatever reason.

Thankfully that doesn't really ever happen to most "normal" people to my knowledge, since most just use Gmail, but I know it can and has happened through account bans or such.

Looks like a good intro for people who want partial self-hosting, which is better than leaving it with a megacorp (especially for non-professional email).

In before:

* running your own mail is too much of a burden

* I used to host my own mail but I couldn’t figure out DNS or used a bad IP or something and Microsoft/Gmail won’t accept my mail

* if “they” want to ban you they will just seize your domain or kick down your door and shoot your dog

* it’s good that they can ban you from your email because I don’t like spam

Edit: lol, I was not in fact “in before” the comment about domain seizures. Unbelievable.

Creating aliases for the addresses you are actually using, e.g. a netflix@ signup is preferred over a general catch all, .. and all that spam senders can generate approach.

I like email forwarding services like mailgw [1]. If my email provider gives me problems, I can just forward to a different one.

[1] https://www.mailgw.com

Services should allow secondary email addresses.

I've been doing this for years, though I don't really think of it as "having a backup" so much as "using an IMAP client". Works fine. It's really useful to be able to make up a new email address for every company who wants one; they each get their own folder. If I get any unexpected mail, it's obvious where it came from and easy to deal with, though in practice this rarely happens.

You don’t have to have a single email address. I have plenty and various providers.

Then use mail client instead of webmail. I use thunderbird and have multiple boxes I just backup Thunderbird profiles folder to my NAS.

That's fine for your own domain, but I usually download my emails via IMAP and don't leave anything on the remote server. Finally, do you really keep your emails? Emails are ephemeral, often just informative, and if there's anything important, I process it and delete the email. I may archive 'sentimental' emails, but I rarely search the archive as I mainly delete emails.

I never really understood why "owning" a domain is any more owning than you own your Gmail address: a company is letting you use it and that works until they don't. What an I missing?

> With this solution, there's a high chance that if they ban you by mistake (AI bots are to blame), they will not disable the forwarding mechanism.

Why bet on that instead of doing it the other way around (i.e. making the self-operated mail server the primary that forwards to the service provider inbox), or at least practicing doing so by pointing the MX records accordingly?

Been doing this for years, and surprised he didn't seem to mention the other benefit: "infinity" email addresses. Oh, rando burger spot wants an email for some free fries? Great, hit me up at randoburgerspot@"mydomain".com .

Forwarding emails is problematic especially if your provider for the primary mx does not have great spam filtering and then you end up sending spam to your backup account.

It certainly does not get around the ...if your account gets banned maybe the forwards will still work... concept but in general something like https://github.com/joeyates/imap-backup to backup your email and then add them to a typical backup process with your other files works well.

Anyone wanna share their email strategy? I'm thinking of going for the following but I'm still undecided:

1. 1 custom domain (<simple-word-or-two>.com): this will be used for friends, family and any online accounts that know me IRL.

Use Fastmail masked addresses with my custom domain where it makes sense like an online account for amazon.

2. 1 custom domain (<online-nickname>.xyz): this will be used for a blog, professional IRL interviews, correspondence, github.

Use Fastmail masked addresses with my custom domain where it makes sense.

3. Masked emails using fastmail.com: for online accounts that are ephemeral, random newsletter signups etc. Don't want to associate any of my custom domains or IRL identity. Don't care if these are portable.

My main goals are:

- Separate my online identity/alias used for my blog (2) from gov entities, banks etc (1).

- for more anonymity/privacy use the fastmail.com domain with masked addresses to blend in with others on this domain.

I'd love feedback and to read what you do if you want to share :)

Another huge thing is that if you get banned from Google you (might) also lose "Sign in with <bigcorp>" - so you lose access to a lot more thing than just your email.

Anyone else have a .io domain and worried about the future?

I am actually working on doing the opposite and getting rid of my custom domains. I’m not really doing anything with them except spending money to have them. Working on getting all my socials to basically match with a similar username and just go from there.

If I host my blog, assuming I actually start making posts, on GitHub with a custom domain, when I die then the domain will likely expire and the blog is no longer accessible. If I keep it with my GitHub .io url, it’ll be there for as long as the account is there.