

Ask HN:I am worried that Gmail is increasingly becoming unreplaceable in life. - rgovind

I regularly use Gmail for communication (both personal and business). Also, I use for logins on a number of websites. I am afraid that, if for some reason, google decides to block account access, I may be screwed big time..that I will loose inbound mail from all my friends and all my docs/online services will be blocked.<p>How do you counter this threat? How do you plan keep your communication going even if you are locked out from the ecosystem.
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jcr
The answer is simple; use your own domain. You can even have google host the
email for your domain, so in essence, you still have gmail. If anything bad
happens, such as the highly unlikely event of Google shutting down gmail, then
you just move your domain email handling to someplace else.

~~~
pasbesoin
Caveat: While you might use Google Apps to host your email [1], I would be
leery of using Google to register the domain name that you use for this.

A major point of this exercise is being able to use control of the domain name
registration to change its email support settings (change your email host),
if/when needed.

You might find exercising control of a registration initiated through Google,
and/or moving such a registration to a different registrar, difficult. And if
so, you face Google's [cough] "legendary" customer support.

\----

[1] I believe that you can still host a single address for free; multiple
addresses / users under an Apps account is now a paid-only feature.

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anigbrowl
Set up another email address, move communication o that, use Gmail to access
it via IMAP for as long as you want to use the gmail interface.

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michaelpinto
If it's important never to trust Google with anything mission critical: For a
mere $10 a month I'm using a rent-an-Exchange server per email address, and
it's $2 a month if you want vanilla email (I still love Outlook all these
years later).

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mark_l_watson
Interesting timing for your Ask HN. I just went through the process of moving
off of two Google services that I consider to be "critical infrastructure" for
me: GMail and Blogger.

I used to use GMail as my primary email, and forward all email from my own
domain email account to GMail. I notified all of my important contacts to
change their address books to reflect my own domain email address. I still use
GMail as a backup, and for sending large pictures to family members, and other
non-critical stuff.

Moving away (slowly) from GMail has been easy.

Moving away from Blogger has been a painful experience. I first exported my
data, set up Wordpress on an unused EC2 micro instance I paid a three year
pre-pay on. This was easy to do but the micro instance fell down occasionally
because of CPU throttling. I moved to a "professional" hosting Wordpress
hosting company, prepaid for 3 years, and am not so happy with them, but I
will probably use up the 3 year buy in (or not). I have learned some tricks
for making Wordpress sites more efficient, but this is knowledge I bever
wanted :-(

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and LinkedIn all have fun and useful
services, but I would not want to depend on any of them for things I rely on
to earn a living.

BTW, I would like to give a shout out of thanks to Google for always making it
so easy to get data off of their services - a good one on them for that.

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jameswyse
If email is important to you then you should have your own domain, then you're
free to move it wherever you like! You can even set up GMail to forward your
mail to your new address.

I moved to Google Apps (all the benefits of GMail without the lockdown) while
it was still free, but I'd definitely pay for it if I had to.

When I changed addresses I created a filter and label to mark any messages
that were sent to my old address, I went through the list every so often and
updated my email address on the websites I still cared about. It takes a while
when you've been using an email address for a long time so I'd start on that
as soon as you move over!

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rayj
I am using me at myname dot com, hosted on google apps (free) and registered
with godaddy. If google tries to integrate my hosted mail with G+ or some such
nonsense I will immediately delete my google account and switch to another
email provider.

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resoponso
If you live in America, just sue them.

~~~
rgovind
I don't see a basis for Suing them. They are no SLAs in the EULA

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fakeer
At least Google still lets you download your mail(imap it) so keep it updated
(your local mail dump). When you need to leave Gmail(or even Google Apps with
your own domain) you'll have everything other Gmail chat.

There are certain things you might loose

\- access to those sites which used only Gmail sign-ins

\- Gmail chat (Calendar and contacts are not a worry but keep it dumped ,
maybe in Dropbox or Outlook, anyway)

\- IF you are comfortable with handling a server (sth like Webfaction or a
VPS) you can do a lot of these things yourself: mail, calendar, blog, contacts

 _Bonus tip_ : Seems you are new to these things I would advise you to backup
your entire computer along with all these data :-)

