Hello HN! After a recent story about how someone lost access to their email address after using it for 10 years, I began thinking how I could prevent this kind of nightmare in my life. Some alternatives often suggested:
A. Pay for your email. Use Fastmail. But how do you guarantee that Fastmail won't screw you over someday? Get a lawyer! But how would the law work across countries? Not everybody lives in the US!
B. Buy a domain name and host your own email address. But you don't own domain names either. You rent them from someone else. There are so many failure modes that can make you lose your domain. Missed payment. Error in admining it. Fake abuse reports triggering takedowns. How can you avoid all of these failure modes? Get a laywer! But again, laws don't work very well when there are geographical boundaries.
So must we always buy a paid email service from our own country where if things go south, we can hire a laywer and rectify the matter? Must we always buy a ccTLD of our own country if we want to host our own email?
