If I don’t “own” the domain, I am tied to the domain owner and subject to its business practices.
It’s not personal email if I can’t choose where it’s hosted.
So is having your account shut down on any of the other big social media sites.
Oh wait… even the president of the United States of America got booted from Twitter, Facebook etc.
They don’t necessarily need to shut down.
What’s stopping Google from to introducing a 5$ monthly fee Gmail email addresses? Or 10$?
They have an estimated 1.5 billion active users. Many of them are so deeply invested, I have little doubts they’ll pay. Let’s say 95% will stop using the service after after the introduction of fees - the other 5% will pay 5$ a month. They’d be making billions of dollars a year - while reducing the costs of operating the service to a fraction.
I just picked up the .me from Namecheap (hopefully they’re an ok company with a good email product). I noticed the .com is coming due next month, but it’s owned by a major corp, so probably not. I just found out my brother owns the .us, but unfortunately we’re not on speaking terms. We have a 5 letter last name, and the last 2 letters are a TLD (so lastna.me) but again, that’s taken for now.
I think most here would backup the file, but not everyone might.
In terms of corruption, I ran in to issues when Postbox decided to convert to EML and then back to MBOX formats. It’s also not the first email client to do something silly on me. My comment was that MBOX is a large database file, rather than a single EML file.
My email archive, that I keep as a backup, consists of MBOX files in EagleFiler.
I managed an email server for around 15 years that stored all its messages in MBOX and/or a variation of MBOX files. It used no databases. The entire message store was text files in folders. The “carrier grade” server software was designed for ISPs and is used by companies like ATT, Verizon, Orange, PayPal, etc. It was the most efficient and reliable email system I ever used.
About 10-15 years back my wife was an email administrator working with Exchange and Outlook. Some of her users had OST/PST files over 500mb. Outlook would occasionally take a hike and mangle the file. Only recovery was to restore the file from the last backup which might be up to a week old. Seemed that the larger the store the greater chance of getting corrupted.
I can believe that. The company I worked for in the late 90’s used Exchange/Outlook and limited users to 200MB of storage on the server. And they did not back up users PCs. When Outlook “took a hike” the user lost everything.
Therefore, is there any risk that eventually they will charge whatever they want for renewals? What is stopping Verisign to charge $100 or $1000 a year for MacPowerUsers.com. From a business perspective, there are only so many good .com addresses so why wouldn’t they start charging more for renewals…
Financial consideration may be irrelevant now but that could change. Any thoughts on this?
I personally, after reading the comments comments, leaning towards keeping my domain and just go with it.
Ah, interesting. I know I had that in my “small” mailbox, and I just configured the rules to forward all the junk mail back into my inbox. But I can see that would be a potential problem if you can’t get in there to edit.
I always renew my domains a couple of years before they expire. If one domain registrar charges too much, I can move it to another.
I’ve been a satisfied customer of Hover for several years and would be surprised if they suddenly started charging exorbitant prices. But there are no guarantees.
I could be misremembering, but they get their monopoly roughly the same way power company typically gets it - by accepting regulation as to how much they can charge.
Verisign has the rights to be the exclusive registry for .com, but as part of their deal they have to offer .coms to other registrars at a “utility” rate. That’s how there can actually be price competition in a market with a monopoly provider.
I would expect Hover’s prices to rise pretty much rise proportionally with the underlying registry, but not to “whatever they can charge”.
Ah, that’s at least a little bit concerning. Based on previous regulatory action though, I feel like a hike from $15 or so to $50 or so might happen - but not a hike from $15 or so to $1000. If it goes up too much there’ll be a call for re-regulation of the market, and the government (at least currently) seems to be looking for ways to slap Big Tech with some regulation.
I’d think price hikes would be somewhat measured in light of that, as a huge price hike would both create public uproar and give the government an “easy win” as far as “doing something”.
Probably no public uproar. The overwhelming majority of the population doesn’t have a domain names. It’s mostly corporations and nobody boohoos over corporations paying more. Seems even most small businesses just have a presence on Facebook these days, no website or personal domain for email.
Fair enough. It’ll be interesting to see what the landscape looks like in a few years when it really becomes an issue. I’m wondering in platforms like Facebook will continue to be as dominant as they are now, what with all the craziness currently going on.
Interesting point @tomalmy
It does seem to me that there is a good chance custom domains will be like real estate where a good web address costs more etc. Right now, domain renewals are pretty cheap and I am considering renewing MereCivilian.com for 10 years when it expires later today.
I have 4 domains at the moment so $40 a year for all for of them right now is fine. But if its $160 a year or more, I to have to think about it because MereCivilian.com is not a business.
Using custom domains for email is inexpensive at the moment. However, based on ICANN’s recent actions, things may be changing.
I am happy for ICANN to charge $1b a year for Apple.com, Amazon.com etc but still keep my MereCivilian.com at $10 a year. Selfish approach for sure…
I have my personal domain. It really doesn’t take any effort to administer it. I have a paid G Suite account so I’m still using Gmail. Maybe if you had gone with G Suite your family would have used it but they resisted because they didn’t want to use Fastmail?
I would have to disagree. I was speaking to a business and they provided me with their email address. Fair point it wasn’t with Gmail but they spent longer spelling the @domain part of the address than telling me their company name at the beginning. It was a really bad look. Given a Hover domain is $20 a year and G Suite is roughly $50 a year and if you speak with Hover support they will do the configuration (CNAME, A record etc) for you then it’s a no brainer.
It’s all about branding. You should be promoting your business not someone else’s.
I have my own domain names for both my business and personal uses. I was on gsuite which was fine, the domains were simply set up with the appropriate MX records (5 minutes work, 24 hours of waiting) and it worked perfectly.
However I have moved now to Fastmail it took a simple change of the MX records and another few hours wait. I moved because yes I was worried about Google cancelling me out when they felt like it, apart from the privacy issues and my dislike of the dominance and power Silicon Valley wields and its seemingly increasing willingness to use it as they wish no matter what the results.
I maintain a Gmail account only because I need analytics for some of my clients other than that I manage perfectly well without Google (and Facebook).
For backup I archive all my mail to DevonThink once a year, after pruning the inevitable stuff that accumulates by using Mailmates ability to create sub mailboxes per sender and purging what I do not need.
That aside are you being precious? Who knows, its a relative term, what works for you works for you, we are all different with different needs and perceptions, there really is no “correct” course here.
Funny. In my case, it was the TLD. I previously use *.dev, but my language put little difference between F and V. Some dialects even spell V as P or F as eP. So I changed to my nationality *.id TLD.
I have considered registering wagn.er but ER is the Eritrean TLD and I don’t speak the language and I am not sufficiently motivated to figure out how to do it.
But I can see that would be a potential problem if you can’t get in there to edit.