Why Free Email May Not Be Such A Good Idea

uneasysilence.com

3 points·terpua··5 comments

I agree with the gist of the email, but... most people don't control a domain, and most people are incapable of setting up email for themselves. I also would think that most people don't care enough about the possible risk to abandon free email entirely.

How is this any different than any other email provider being unavailable suddenly?

I think they're suggesting that if you're paying for email,

(a) you have a number to call if it suddenly stops working, and

(b) you can threaten to stop paying them if they don't sort the problem out.

Personally, I use GMail as my main account, and it doesn't worry me that there's some (probably miniscule) risk of being locked out of my account. If anyone wanted to get hold of me, they could still reach me via my work email address, telephone, or Facebook.

I'm slightly more worried that they could lose all my past emails - in which case there would be very little I could do to get any sort of redress from them - but I'm pretty confident that I'm more likely to lose my own data than Google. It is possible to back up your GMail messages to your local machine, and I have taken this precaution, although I don't do this very frequently.

Ostensibly, yes; but with catastrophic failures, you're just going to get your monthly fee back. Which isn't really solving the e-mail availability problem.

Not having someone to call and Google's poor reputation for responding to Gmail issues (plus data loss) is why I try and stick with domains under my control for (at least important) email. Even if my email provider goes under, I can repoint the domain to another email server and at least recover easier than having to start from scratch, as would be the case if my email address was under Gmail and suddenly was locked.

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