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Comment by sekh60 | Hacker News Reader

This story broke the camels back for us when it first appeared here and got us to migrate our email to protonmail and a domain we bought.

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I wish we had a portable email address format, like phone numbers are, instead of being inherently tied to a provider.

Owning a domain is close enough.

Buy a domain name, now you have a portable email address.

Though I often have questions about how that works in terms of managing your domain. I feel like I shouldn't have the account I manage my domains with tied to an email address at the domain that's under management. If my email provider disappears, I'm potentially locked out of the account I need to log into in order to change the MX records, right?

Usually it’s just username/account number and password plus TOTP 2FA. Depending on country (?) they also have your postal address on file and can send you a reset password by letter. And you can specify an alternative email address like your work address, or a free email account that you only use for that purpose. Or you acquire two domains at different registrars where you can mutually use an email address at the other domain.

It's hard to avoi nd this chicken and egg situation.

I use fastmail and they allow you "alias" addresses. So even though my primary email is on my custom dimain e.g. myname@mydomain.com, Fastmail also gives me an alsia of myname@fastmail.com. That's the email I used to log in (to AWS) and manage my MX records.

If either Fastmail or AWS were to go rogue/broke, I like to think I would eventually be able to restore access to my domain even without email? Hope never to find out.

You should just make an account with another provider for that purpose.

until your domain registrar starts playing stupid reindeer games too

So just work with a decent domain registrar. Or if you have extra money, just pay the fee to become a registrar yourself.

>So just work with a decent domain registrar.

People would have said that about Googs at the beginning (being a decent company)

>Or if you have extra money, just pay the fee to become a registrar yourself.

yeah, cause just registering a domain and admining your own mail service isn't enough fun already, let's just make spinning up a new registrar part of the deal too? <eyeroll>

>yeah, cause just registering a domain and admining your own mail service isn't enough fun already, let's just make spinning up a new registrar part of the deal too? <eyeroll>

A little paperwork and you get a nice cli tool to admin your domains, customer support directly from the registry. It's not a terrible option.

This. There should be anti-monopoly regulation that would state that e-mail addresses belong to users, just like the phone numbers or domain names.

I own my domain and therefore my email address will belong to me as long as I can pay the property tax (ICANN) and management company (Fastmail).

They can ban you for no reason, just like google.

If you have your own domain, Fastmail banning you is a minor speed bump at worst. You can just point your domain at a different email provider.

You can similarly transfer domains between registrars if one of them doesn't like you. And in practice, your domain registrar not liking you is pretty rare; I've only heard of it happening with famously evil alt-right websites and they generally manage to find a registrar that will take their business.

> You can similarly transfer domains between registrars if one of them doesn't like you.

That's sadly not true. There are various examples of individuals loosing their domains as registrar's refuse to release them. The transfer only works if both registers play ball, so it's essentially a very similar situation.

Yep. I’ve seen this happen.

A registrar revoked the domain, we tried to transfer.

The registrar required email verification of who we are, but for obvious reasons email wasn’t working.

Fun times.

You don’t own a phone number either. Ever tried to move between countries?

This is so messed up, esp once 2fa or gov forms get involved.

Literally every form nowadays requires a phone number

> migrate our email to protonmail

Any tips? It’s been on my lowest priority todo list to migrate off of gmail for several years, and I think the biggest reason I haven’t yet is that I know nothing about alternatives. I haven’t had to think at all about email for 15-20 years or so, and I’d like to keep it that way as much as possible after any switch. How close does protonmail get to that ideal?

I use Fastmail and love it.

The key is not to forward your email from gmail and just start fresh. Slowly migrate all comms and eventually you’ll never look at that email again.

Get your own dns record first.

Me too, and I have been a sysadmin and developer for almaot 30 years and know exactly what to do and even I still haven't gotten around to it. But every ordinary not-even-in-IT person is supposed to navigate all that? It's preposterous.

Protonmail has an import from gmail feature that worked well. Not that I practice inbox zero, so the amount of mail I had to transfer was very little. My wife's inbox is a disaster, sometimes I go in there to trim things down, but I have little advice there. Try to practice good email hygiene.

Yeah, this and someone I know getting burned for the same thing (we assume -- there was no concrete confirmation one way or the other) on another cloud provider. Putting "all your eggs in one basket" is just asking for disaster, as has been demonstrated over and over, unfortunately.

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