Not to mention that account termination is only one way email providers can screw you over. They can bait and switch, take your emails hostage, and start charging premium. They can put ads that look like legitimate emails. They can cut costs, and open your emails up to hackers. They can peek, censor, or tamper with your private emails. They can even impersonate you.
Some people might laugh that away as ridiculous. But who can predict what'll happen in the next few decades? I find it highly unlikely that any single email provider will continue to keep the current level of service for the rest of my lifetime. Enshittification is real.
Your email address is inextricably tied to your online identity. If you don't own your email address, you're handing over control of your digital life to the whims of a company. Because what can you do when your email provider goes rogue? Shed your entire digital identity?
Sure, using your own domain can open you up to mistakes. But at least, you're the one in charge. By borrowing an email address from a company, you lose control. And for what exactly? It's not going to protect you against the loss of access to your emails, contrary to what the article implies. Worse yet, there are no preventative measures you can take unlike with domain expiration.
With all due respect, the article gives the worst advice ever. There's nothing worse than irrevocably handing over the keys to your digital life to an advertising company, whose business model is fundamentally at odds with your best interests.
> Sure, using your own domain can open you up to mistakes. But at least, you're the one in charge.
...Of the management of the domain and the email itself.
But if Google, Microsoft, or one of the other major email providers decides that you, someone else in your subnet, or even your ISP or VPS provider, is not following the rules they've decided are important, they can just...put you in a black hole. And you have no recourse. And your emails will simply never get to people using one of those providers, and you may not even know that it's happening without a user report.
(Note that this is not me saying "And thus you should just give up and use Gmail." I still run my own email server, and I've managed to get it set up in such a way that it's mostly accepted by the megacorps, but it took months to figure out why it was even being blocked, and then I had to switch to a completely different VPS provider to get around the block. If there's a message here, it's "...and therefore we should break up the big providers under antitrust law, because no one should be allowed to be that big.")
I'm not saying that you should host your own email though. Or that you shouldn't, for that matter. All I'm saying is that people should keep the option of switching email providers when things go wrong. Using your own domain is a requirement for that.
Some people might laugh that away as ridiculous. But who can predict what'll happen in the next few decades? I find it highly unlikely that any single email provider will continue to keep the current level of service for the rest of my lifetime. Enshittification is real.
Your email address is inextricably tied to your online identity. If you don't own your email address, you're handing over control of your digital life to the whims of a company. Because what can you do when your email provider goes rogue? Shed your entire digital identity?
Sure, using your own domain can open you up to mistakes. But at least, you're the one in charge. By borrowing an email address from a company, you lose control. And for what exactly? It's not going to protect you against the loss of access to your emails, contrary to what the article implies. Worse yet, there are no preventative measures you can take unlike with domain expiration.
With all due respect, the article gives the worst advice ever. There's nothing worse than irrevocably handing over the keys to your digital life to an advertising company, whose business model is fundamentally at odds with your best interests.