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Comment by Gareth321 | Hacker News Reader

This is why I have de-Googled my family - at least for the most part. The hardest part was Gmail. Hundreds of services and accounts relied on that email address for 2FA. If I were to be blocked from it, I would be screwed. So I bought a domain and spent the next couple of years migrating everything to it. Pain in the ass, but now no one can ever ban me from my own email address. Worst case scenario my provider blocks me and I switch to another one in minutes. Plus I can do cool things like catch-all, so when I sign up for services I use "verizon@[mydomain.com]". I have caught many cheeky fuckers selling my email address to spammers.

Outside of this there is very little harm in my Google account being banned now. I'd lose some YouTube watch history and a few locations on Google Maps.

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Just a suggestion but make the canary/alias less obvious. Companies caught onto this and are treating aliases with their name in it as "fraud" which is of course a load of crap. That is how tractor supply stole a gift card from me so I have turned many of their customers away from them and they have lost exponentially more than they stole from me. So now I use realistic looking aliases and just have my own lookup table that describes which one is for which company.

Thanks for the heads up. It hasn't caused me any issues yet but if it does, I will think long and hard about whether I want to use that service.

>> Just a suggestion but make the canary/alias less obvious. Companies caught onto this and are treating aliases with their name in it as "fraud" which is of course a load of crap.

> It hasn't caused me any issues yet [...]

Ugh, I ran into this earlier this year when creating an Airbnb account. I tried registering with "airbnb_[randomcode]@[mydomain.com]" and was confused when account creation would error out with an unhelpful error message (don't remember what exactly). After checking with multiple browsers to make sure it's not some browser or uBlock Origin problem, I suspected it might have something to do with the "airbnb" in the alias. Sure enough, I created some temporary alias without "airbnb" in it and ... it worked. I wasn't willing to tolerate their sh— "load of crap" though, so once the account was created I tried to change the email back to "airbnb_[randomcode]@[mydomain.com]" and ... it worked. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

takeout.google.com backs up watch history, google maps locations (probably)

The problem is not saving my data, it's losing access to the email account. I have hundreds of accounts like trading, social media, forums, GitHub, media, etc, which require access to my email account for 2FA. If I lose access to my email accounts, I lose access to those accounts. Some might be recoverable with a lot of effort, but many would be gone forever.

I understand, it is a horrible risk, the only answer is to get your own domain and then use an email service routed through that domain. Your ability to control your domain records should be modifiable even if your email provider is down.

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