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Comment by mipmap04 | Hacker News Reader

On the topic of old email addresses, make sure your old email provider doesn't release your email address after so many years / months. This is a common way to get access to accounts by creating a new email account with the same address as an expired address and then using an email-based password reset to gain access to the account. Happened to my wife with an old email address from high school.

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My understanding is that as of now, Google never permits account name reuse. That being said, I keep all of my old accounts, even if I don't use them anymore. I do check Gmail occasionally for emails which trickle in from time to time.

I lost the password to the @hotmail.com address I used for Myspace, and wanted so desperately to delete the account. Last year, just on a whim, I tried to register it and they actually let me.

Turns out it wasn't the email I used on Myspace.

Also, is Myspace back? Somehow my profile and pictures are on there again, but I thought they removed personal profiles years ago?

This is really a big problem since one is forced to keep old addresses active and around. But your email provider, even if it’s a paid service, may have stupid policies to recycle addresses very soon and may not make exceptions for you.

Posteo.de recycles deleted email addresses/aliases in three months. Fastmail is also similar and recycles them within three months or so. Same goes for Mailbox.org. All these paid services are pathetic in this regard.

Runbox.com (which I don’t use) is the only paid email service that clearly states that it never ever recycles email addresses, just like Gmail and Yahoo Mail don’t do either.

I’d like to know about privacy focused paid email services that have a clear policy of not recycling addresses.

Ideally if you're paying for email as it is, you should probably be in the custom domain space. FastMail may be able to reuse my FastMail address, but my FastMail address is tied to very little, since I use a custom domain, that they can't keep.

Of course, as a reminder: This means you have to keep your custom domain, or else someone can register it after it expires and make any emails they want on it. But if you have a domain personal to you that you've used as part of your email address, you should probably keep it forever anyways.

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