
Why Free Email May Not Be Such A Good Idea - terpua
http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2008/10/13534/
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unalone
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.

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

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baha_man
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.

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icey
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.

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shedd
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.

