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.

How do you counter this threat? How do you plan keep your communication going even if you are locked out from the ecosystem.

[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 → jcr]

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.

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[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.

[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.

[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).

[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.

[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!

[ixacto]

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.

[resoponso]

If you live in America, just sue them.

[rgovind → resoponso]

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

[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 :-)