Personal Email Service - Am I being too precious?

@webwalrus when you reply from a forwarded email address, does the from address show your gmail or the domain email?

It shows Gmail. You can set Gmail up for SMTP sending, but that (practically speaking) requires an email checked via POP3 rather than a forward. You can send/receive (I believe) up to 5 accounts via POP3 with Gmail, which is actually a viable solution to your “4 different devices” problem. :slight_smile:

Although I did know one relatively average non-technical lady who insisted that she absolutely needed all 8 of her email addresses…Gmail wouldn’t work for her.

Regarding sending though, I’ve found that at reply time, it doesn’t seem to matter as much to people what the original email address was they sent to - lots of businesses have Gmail forwards. The only time I give a side-eye is if it’s from an @aol.com address. :slight_smile:

As others have said it seems like you’ve already decided but FWIW here’s my take on the issue.

I do have 2 gmail accounts, and I occasionally use them but my preference is always for custom domains. I have a lot of them registered and many are just parked. Th biggest advantage of custom domains for me is that I can easily set up as many different email addresses as I want in the domain and use that to filter mail appropriately. So I have addresses for financial dealings, personal e-mail, business email and more. I have mail rules to handle those effectively but I can always see everything I get. I can and have moved my email hosting from place to place easily.

Irrelevant. I’ve had my emails from my .gmail account bounced back as spam from even OTHER .gmail addresses! it’s not necessarily the domain name that causes that but often overzealous filtering by the recipient’s server or mail rules.

I’ve had hundreds of good messages from unknown domains sent to my .gmail accounts that are identified as spam by the gmail spam blockers and hidden from me. So many that I don’t trust it at all to actually get all my mail to me. And this is AFTER I’ve tried to remove spam filtering at all on my .gmail accounts.

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The risk with Gmail is not about Gmail shutting down, it’s also Google shutting you out.

Several years ago I went to login to my gmail account and couldn’t. I knew I had my correct password in 1Password, but it wasn’t working for some reason.

I finally got to some page (I don’t remember what specifically) that said “Your account has been suspended.”

Looking up what I could do under those circumstances, the answer was “If your account has been suspended, the decision is final. There is no appeal process. We are not obligated to tell you why your account has been suspended.”

I knew that I had not done anything that warranted having my account suspended (I was barely using it except for some mailing lists, etc).

It took a week, but I finally got my account re-enabled by jumping through 4,732 different hoops and responding to emails from nameless/faceless Google employees who seemed loathe to help.

No clue was ever given as to why my account was suspended. It was suggested that the process was somehow automated, so it wasn’t even a person who decided to suspend my account, it was some kind of Google bot.

If you aren’t a paying customer, if there is no customer relationship and no one to contact if something goes wrong, you are risking losing access to your email account. Not just with Gmail, but with any of these free providers.

Now, think about what goes to your email. Think about trying to access your accounts and services without being able to access your old email accounts. Think about how many of them won’t let you recover a password if you don’t have access to the email account on file. Can you change your email address on all of your services if you don’t access to the old email address?

Now, imagine this…

Pick a domain. Pick an email address “you@somewhatever.whatever”. Use that email address for everything. You don’t even need to manage anything, you can even just forward it to a Gmail account if you want.

Then one day you realized that Google has shut off your Gmail account.

That same day, you can either setup a new Gmail account or use a different provider and start forwarding “you@somewhatever.whatever” to the new provider. If you don’t have backups of your old email, you might lose access to those messages, but you’re never locked out of any of your accounts because those accounts are connected to “you@somewhatever.whatever” not “someone@gmail”

“Well, I’ve never heard of that happening to anyone else…”

Sure, I’m guessing 99% of Gmail users will never have to deal with that scenario I described, but when you find yourself in that 1%, it’s little comfort to know few other people end up there.

I still have an use a Gmail account,I have daily backups of it, and I don’t use it for anything crucial. It’s my generic choice for “This site requires an email address” especially if I don’t care about that site. But for accounts that I care about, especially things like PayPal, banks, etc., I would never use an email address where I did not own the domain.

FWIW.

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Yup. Gmail’s servers semi-regularly get blacklisted, and Google uses those blacklists, so… :slight_smile:

It’s a problem for every provider. The only way around that is to get, quite literally, your own IP address for sending email - and that has its own whole set of problems that aren’t worth going into here.

Kind of like having a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. You’ll (hopefully!) never need it. But if you do need it, it doesn’t help to be staring at a blazing stove and self-reflectively note, “well this is highly improbable.”

:slight_smile:

Out of curiosity, what do you use for those backups?

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This is not all at once – accounts come and go over a long period of time.

Yes, typing “myaddress@myaccount.com” as the user name, then “mail.dreamhost.com” as the SMTP and IMAP servers, and finally the password is, I agree very very tiring and stressful. I usually require a week or two recovery in quiet rooms without electronic intrusion after setting up each device. :laughing:

Or, use Airmail’s “sync settings” feature.

I bounced around between several email addresses about 20 years ago, and dutifully asked my friends and business associates to change their email for me each time. Like @zkarj, I was looking for the perfect email address.

In 2007, I started a Google Apps account, and created the wagmail.com domain. It was a terrible domain. When I gave people my email address, I had to spell it out and they STILL sometimes got it wrong, because “M” sounds like “N.”

In 2010, during one of my several periods freelancing, I connected that Google Apps account with mitch@mitchwagner.com, which is nice and professional.

And that’s the email address I’m still using today. And I’m still using Google Apps, though it’s now called G Suite. It has been very little hassle over the past 10 years.

These days, I don’t think it’s unprofessional to have a gmail.com account, or an account with some other consumer provider. At least not in my line of work.

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Horcrux IMAP email backup for Mac OS X.

Saves messages to individual .eml files.

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It occurs to me one could simply install Thunderbird and set it up with the Gmail credentials. It would need opening periodically (or left open in the background all the time). Then you’d have standard mailbox files which could be backed up through whatever means.

I’ve long used Thunderbird as a go-between when migrating email from one place to another.

Another option is to Right Click on your Archive folder in mail.app and select Export Mailbox. This creates a standard Mbox file that can be imported back into mail.app, Thunderbird, and other email clients. Even EagleFiler will import it and automatically create a searchable email archive.

Apple Mail puts the Mbox file in a folder named, in this case, Archive.mbox along with a table_of_contents file. Only the actual mbox file is needed by other apps.

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A better solution is to quit using your email as a filing system. Better to save the emails as a pdf into whatever filing system you use. In many years of doing this I have never needed an email in the original form.

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Email is intended as a filing system. That’s why it has folders. It also (through IMAP and similar) has the ability to sync across multiple devices.

Converting to PDF just changes the presentation layer and de-formalises the information within it as all just “content” versus the native email header fields that infer structure in an email client.

Do whatever works for you, but giving up on the very nature of email seems like it creates as many problems as it solves.

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I’ve seen too many people lose valuable work when an email store got corrupted. In some cases they were able to get it back but it took some time. They were often dealing with large attachments and the databases got too big.

I use folders all the time but just for work in progress. I have rules to sort my incoming mail into subject oriented folders. Just bought a new house last fall and all the email in the process went into a folder for it. When all,the dust had settled and we were somewhat moved in, I filed all the “need to keep” emails into my filing system and deleted the mailbox. All this is synced via iCloud so it’s accessible from my Mac, iPad, or iPhone.

Ever tried to restore emails from a backup? I can restore my PDFs easily. Depending on the email system used it can be a monumental task.

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Fair points, and email attachments are a weakness. That’s why a lot of businesses try to push the likes of SharePoint — put the content somewhere central and put a link in the email. But that has its issues, too.

I own my domain (firstnamelastname.com) for ages. So, I am in control if I move from to another provider/service.

  • I have the same email address forever.
  • I can add aliases and accounts

Right now, I am running my own email server, but I can easily move to any service if I ever want to change it.

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Point with that is that you have to backup the MBOX files, as if that corrupts, you could lose the entire file. Obviously, Time Machine will help out there. I use Postbox and that saves the files - I archive to a folder on the server and then after three years, copy it to my local folder. Once it’s on my local folder, it also get copied to my NAS in a backup folder. So I’ll have a “live” copy in the Postbox folder, a backup via Time Machine and a backup on the NAS.

One thing I quickly learned about this is Hover has a secret junk mail folder that they don’t give you access too on the $5 forward option. I was signing up for another discourse forum, but hover wouldn’t forward the confirmation email as it was detected to be spam, and I only learned of this by contacting them. I’ve been using Hover’s small mailbox for my business and it’s ok. I wish it had a few more simple features (like aliases).

For me, I don’t like Gmail’s special IMAP handling. I don’t like using webmail, and it never feels quite native using other clients. It’s not so much privacy that I want to leave Gmail, more so for control of the transaction. The lesser apart of the big machine the better, I feel.

While I have a vanity domain (firstnamelastname.com) for my business, I also want one for my family, so my kids don’t get every free email address like I have. But unfortunately, most of the easy TLDs with just my last name are taken. I could do lastnamefamily.com but I’m undecided on that at the moment.

Yes, you have to have gotten in early for most names. When I decided to get one nearly 20 years ago “almy.com” was taken, and legitimately by a company. I settled on “almy.us” thinking “us” was good for family members’ emails. Makes a decent website name as well. Wasn’t long before another person grabbed “.org” and those were the only three available TLDs at the time. Helps to have a fairly rare last name. Some people try to get firstnameLastname.com for their newborn children, thinking of the future!

Anyway, with a four letter last name and a two letter TLD, it makes for having really short email addresses!

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True, but why would it corrupt? (And why wouldn’t you back it up as with any other content?)

It’s probably useful to bring up here the difference between backup and archive. If I was of the view that I needed to protect my email this way, I would create an mbox of one (completed) calendar month and store it locally and offline somewhere (probably Backblaze B2) and never write to that file again. I have backups of my photos on Time Machine and Backblaze. I have archives of my photos on B2. If I accidentally delete the last three months photos from 2010 (true story) then my Time Machine and Backblaze backups will soon enough expunge them, too. But my B2 archive will have them.