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Comment by hallway_monitor | Hacker News Reader

The story drives home how dangerous it is putting your trust, maybe your business and maybe your life in the hands of these mega corporations. I've tried to distance myself from Google somewhat but Gmail is still my main email account. I don't want to know how many accounts I may be locked out of if I ever lose access to it.

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Absolutely buy your own domain name and use an email service where you can use your own domain as an email address, period. I can't tell you how many horror stories I have heard about people getting permanently locked out of their gmail accounts that served as email address for password recovery and what not. And I have some horror stories of my own.

How do you prevent the registration services from losing (not renewing) your domain and having someone else register it? This happened to me, and there was no recourse.

Confused, how did that happen to you? Doesn't every registrar support renewal? Did they pretend to renew but they actually didn't? Did you get a receipt for it?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8833/dark-fail-fake-court-...

It is rare, but it can happen. Another threat vector.

Registrar issue, if I remember correctly. It was set to auto renew, but they didn’t do it, and I only noticed when my site was suddenly a placeholder page.

I had that 20 years ago. Credit card expired, registrar didn’t tell me, and I lost a 4 letter .com.

After that I moved to hosted Mail (yahoo, then gmail) as I felt it was more reliable. Now I ensure I have more than one email on file if possible with any account. Same with phone numbers.

Select a highly reputable registrar with good business practices. Pick a couple, then buy a super cheap domain and try to screw with it, like doing a transfer with no authorization. A horrifying number of them will let you get away with it.

You can register domains for >1 year. You'll still need to renew it every year but you'll have a buffer in case something goes wrong.

If you really are concerned then you might want to consider migrating away now while you still have access for those situations.

At least getting a new email address, pointing it to Gmail, and working to migrate

GMail has the same problem, of course. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think the suggestion was to get your own domain. You can use gmail as a service and if they kick you off you still own your domain and your email address. If you're smart you might backup the email. That's fairly easy to do.

And if your domain registrar decides to ban you for whatever reason?

In the extremely unlikely event that happens (provided you pick a registrar whose only service you're using is DNS), then you transfer it to another one, as mandated by ICANN. You're down a week, but everything is fine after that. Quit being contrarian.

It's a bit like getting struck by lightning, you deal with this when it happens if it happens. This is sufficiently unlikely for most people that it's not worth being too concerned about it when other exceedingly more dangerous and pressing matters could be dealt with using that same energy.

Yep. Ideally you get some sort of actual paid email account, with someone that only provides email (so you don't have issues elsewhere that lead to loss of email account), and then you get your own domain (with no other services that you're using), and forward your gmail to that domain, and point your personal domain's MX records to the new email address, and start using an email address on your personal domain from here on out, but failing the separate email, at least getting a domain and pointing an email address to your current Gmail account, and starting to use that new address instead, gives you a migration path to reduce your reliance on Gmail.

The best part is that they could get locked out of anything they have "find my" enabled on.

Imagine that. "oh you broke the TOS, now all your apple devices are bricks"

There is a solution.

https://sneak.berlin/20201029/stop-emailing-like-a-rube/

It took me a couple years to transfer all important online accounts to a new email, one by one. I feel free now.

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