Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for? | Dark Hacker News

391 points by magusd 4 years ago | 299 comments

Last week I received a spam email from ~generic dumb scammer #199209842982~ here it is for your amusement: https://imgur.com/YYqOgYE

I've blurred the sender because it might have been a hijacked account, and it's not like it's hard to get a new gmail account anyways. You can also see that I've blurred all the other people too. Yeah, the scammer cc all his targets.

I was in a good mood, so I replied and made fun of him and warned all the other recipients that, "hey, just in case you're distracted, yes this is a spam email". I didn't use any curse words, or strong language, but I was a bit edgy.

Two days later, my google account was suspended. Apparently, my account was being used to send unwanted e-mails. Ha! I just became a spammer.

And let me tell you, it was very frustrating to be blacklisted like this. A little context for you, I'm a DevOps engineer and I've been using gmail for the past 15 years. I'll skip the classic 'my files, my contacts, my email' because I had backups.

But I lost access to paid services that I had set up with social login, besides all Google's services ( GCP, firebase, youtube premium, google one, subscriptions paid through play store, google ads, etc, etc). And here's the kicker: my gmail used to be the contact I shared with potential clients, current clients, and job applications which, by the way, I was actively job seeking. Not because I don't like my job, but because I had pushback on my raise on a recent promotion, so I was trying to get offers to make a point.

But what if I was out of a job? What if I was expecting a contract to sign? What if I had an SLA with a client? What if my bank or the government, health plan, car insurance, or any of the hundreds of notifications that I've set up throughout the years was triggered and needed my attention?

I know about terms of services, that they're a company and they can do whatever they want. But what if your car maker could take away your car if you turned right without signing first? Or if you went over the speed limit? What if you were a salesman and samsung could take away your phone because you're using it to call people to do your job and they've reported you for unwanted calls? Or AT&T could take away your phone number because you said a curse word on the phone?

You could argue that gmail is not a product that I own, but I paid for it, so technically, don't I own it? Don't I get the right to use it while they figure out if I'm really a spammer or not?

That got me thinking, what is an identity? How can I prove that I am who I am? I thought I could just share my profile, or gmail, or phone number, or identity and prove that I was who I was. But all those things can be taken away because of some rule that can be judged and enforced by someone else.

The google stack is very convenient, and it's 2022, I'm not going to start hosting my email server, but I'm in need of a foolproof and long lasting solution to online identity. And I've started by purchasing a domain name for 10 years and having a 'catch all and forward to gmail' rule setup. So I can just forward it all to somewhere else in case I lose my gmail again. But what if I get reported on my domain name? What if that gets suspended or blacklisted too?

Should we own the free services that we've paid for with money and data? Do we own our identities? Do we own our phone numbers, emails, handles, PO boxes, addresses?

What do you use for identity? And what are your thoughts on this? Am I overreacting?

moreira 4 years ago |

> lost access to paid services that I had set up with social login

I signed up to Quora with my Facebook account, back in the day. Deleted Facebook in 2013 and lost access to my Quora account, with no possible way to recover it.

I haven't used a social login since. In my case, it was fairly harmless, but it made me realise how dangerous social login is. Every time there's a signup, I look for "signup with email". It's the safer option. And if you can, use your own domain for email (Google's paid email offering supports this, as does Fastmail and countless other email providers). That way if your email provider decides to flip you off, you switch DNS records and you're up and running somewhere else, and everything keeps on running.

But: If you don't have a copy of emails then you lose all saved emails, so make sure you have a backup strategy in place.

bayindirh 4 years ago | |

Social logins only carry your information and a token, and you can enter to your profile and add a password too (99% of the time).

So, you can use social login (OpenID Connect in reailty), as an automated form filler and add your password, so your account will be effectively won't depend on that provider anymore.

I use a lot of services like that.

jtbayly 4 years ago | | |

Finding the place to enter and save and confirm a password sounds a lot harder than just putting in my first name, last name, email and a password in the first place.

phkahler 4 years ago | | |

>> Social logins only carry your information and a token, and you can enter to your profile and add a password too (99% of the time).

I think the whole point is not having to create yet another password.

One solution to all of this is to have some kind of durable identity verification that the user controls and can use everywhere. There are serious challenges with that of course, which is why we don't have it yet.

barbazoo 4 years ago | | |

How do people remember which social login they used for any given site? There are usually multiple and they overlap between sites and none work with every site.

spaetzleesser 4 years ago | |

I am not that smart but I always thought that using one company's authentication system to log into another site can be a source of massive trouble.

I connect all my logins with my (custom-domain) E-mail and also do regular IMAP backups of my E-mails. I run Thunderbird once a week and sync all mails.

marcosdumay 4 years ago | | |

Yes, do not force failures to be correlated.

Ideally one goes in life forcing failures to be uncorrelated, but that's extra work. Anyway forcing them to be correlated is also extra work, so just don't.

CyanDeparture 4 years ago | |

This is naive question, but I think a valid one, and I'd love to know what you think, is using a domain name to sign in, just moving the issue of losing an account to the domain provider? So instead of Google, your host controls your sign-in instead?

moreira 4 years ago | | |

It is, but you're much less likely to find your account suspended by your domain name provider. People lose Google accounts and Amazon accounts and all kinds of other accounts because there's so much going on with them and something somewhere triggers an automated ban (for Google, we've seen issues with people and their YouTube, or their Play Store apps, or in this case, their Gmail).

But you're far less likely to ever have any issues with your domain name provider, because you literally only have your domain with them, and don't interact with them outside of that.

I would say if you want to be extra safe, your domain provider would NOT be your hosting provider. Because you can lose your hosting, too, and we've seen stories like that here a few times.

londons_explore 4 years ago | |

There really needs to be a zero cost custom-domain email hosting solution.

I'd love to have webmail on my own domain, hosted by someone else, and with ads on the side. Those ads should generate ~$20 per user per year (after all, they can be targeted based on emails I'm sending and receiving, and I'll be looking at them many minutes every day - the perfect combination for high revenue ads).

With $20/user/year, there should be no difficulty paying the hosting costs of such a mail server and staff to look after it.

rglullis 4 years ago | | |

Why can't you just go around selling your data to the highest bidders and use the money to pay for the myriad of already-existing hosting providers?

I'll tell you why: because you are not worth that much to advertisers. If you are so cheap to the point of asking to get your data harvested, chances are you never going to be a high-value customer.

weird-eye-issue 4 years ago | | |

Just a heads up you could use Cloudflare Email Routing to forward *@foo.com to foo@gmail.com for free

It looks like Zoho might have a free plan too but I've never tried it https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html

ImprovMX also does email routing for free along with webhooks and such

dspillett 4 years ago | | |

> There really needs to be a zero cost custom-domain email hosting solution.

Unfortunately I doubt that would work. Any email solution hoping to get significant use will need to be able to send as well as receive and/or store & organise, because if someone is needing to run their own send route elsewhere they'll run their own receive route there too, and any free email solution that allows sending will be abused in any way possible by junk mailers and other scammy types.

It would be a constant fight to keep the service off black-lists and dealing with the backlash from:

* people blocked rightly because of service abuse

* people blocked because of a false positive in what-ever automated checks you do (the admin involved in doing all the checks manually will be excessive enough that it can't all be done manually)

* those who are inconvenienced by the service, even temporarily, being on a blacklist

And that mass of spammers such a service will attract will be worthless: they'll have everything quickly automated and won't even glance at a single one of the adverts.

> With $20/user/year, there should be no difficulty paying the hosting costs

I doubt $20/user/year would cover it unless you get a decent number of subscribers. And I doubt there would be enough people who would sign up for this, who are not already using gmail or similar big providers that already exist or mail provision included with their web hosting or domain registration service.

Of course my gut reaction could be quite wrong here: why don't you give it a go? If you are right then there is a market to corner that no one else is looking at yet so you could make it big.

xuki 4 years ago | | |

Some domain registrars provide a catch all email for your domains. Just forward that to your own gmail (or whatever service you are using). That way you are in control of the email addresses and can take advantage of free email services.

maratc 4 years ago | | |

I use mail forwarders on my custom domain so anything sent to me@mydomain.co is simply forwarded to myregular@gmail.com.

Except the domain renewal fees, it's free.

If Gmail blocks me, I can readdress the forwarding to hotmail or usa.net or whatever.

manigandham 4 years ago | | |

The largest email providers already show ads to the free tier. They don't earn that much per user and it's just not worth supporting custom domains at that scale.

If they cant make it work, why would anyone else have more success by offering even more features for free?

And if you're already buying a domain name then why not just pay for the email account too?

malka 4 years ago | | |

It is a basic utility, and it should be provided by (nation) states. Every citizen should have a domain, or a subdomain.

pydry 4 years ago | | |

Something like improvmx but, like $3-4 a month instead of $9 with just bare bones POP3 and SMTP for personal use only would suit me.

I'd like to self host data and webmail and pay somebody else manage the headache of delivering and receiving.

theothertom 4 years ago | | |

My domain registrar provides free, simple mail hosting with a domain - maybe yours does too?

Calamitous 4 years ago | | |

Sounds like a startup opportunity you should jump on. ;)

jventura 4 years ago | |

> Deleted Facebook in 2013 and lost access to my Quora account, with no possible way to recover it.

Did the same but lost my Spotify account. Needless to say, but I haven’t used Spotify since then..

riggsdk 4 years ago | | |

I created my Spotify account back when they only had the option to create it with a Facebook account (or at least they hid the email option very well). Eventually I disabled my facebook account and realized that disabled my spotify too. I spent an hour or so with Spotify support to transfer all my playlists to a new account since they couldn't (at least back then) convert my account to be a non-FB account. So much time wasted. Never again.

kojeovo 4 years ago | | |

They may have fixed this. Either that or I did something explicitly that resulted in my Spotify account being accessible by the email I used on FB.

rubenbe 4 years ago | |

A friend of mine had a similar problem with her Spotify account after she canceled her facebook account. Self-made Spotify playlists usually can have quite a bit of a sentimental value. I can only image what services the OP would have lost access to in case he/she used social login for all signups.

EnKopVand 4 years ago |

Google is simply not a very reliable business partner for tech. I have a decade worth of experience in the Danish public sector, where I’ve had plenty of great experiences with both Amazon and Microsoft. I know that a lot of people would prefer things to be open source, but part of what you pay for in an Enterprise Organisation is availability of support. When AWS first entered the European market, most of what they sold in the support side was rather automated. Which just couldn’t compete with what Microsoft sells, where Seattle will call you with updates every hour on the hour if you’re a big enough customer. This is a big part of why Azure managed to capture the market share it did under the nose of AWS, the other part being that once you buy Office365 well… Anyway, I’ve never seen a huge tech company change their ways as quick as Amazon did, and today they’re actually ahead of Microsoft in terms of compliance with EU legislation and Enterprise support.

Google mean while has the same business-to-business support that it does for private customers like the author here. For some services it’s because Google doesn’t care, but they do care about Education and they still can’t figure out how to readjust to be a valuable business partner even when they actually want to sell you something.

So my best advice to anyone using Google services would be to find a better vendor as quick as possible. It’s completely ridiculous that you can lose your business account over someone replying to a spam mail.

Just imagine if Microsoft kicked the Danish government out of Office365 every time one of our employees did something silly in their emails. I know there is a difference between us as individuals and the Danish governed, but the point in trying to make is that there isn’t, not to Google at least. So maybe they are just a terrible vendor?

This is all anecdotal by the way. I haven’t seen anyone complain about getting locked out of their azure essential subscription, so in my eyes that is simply a safer way to pay for g-suite type services than g-suite. That being said, I do personally host my domain and DNS stuff on their own separate accounts at their own separate vendors, both privately and professionally, exactly because you want that stuff to remain unaffected by everything else.

Grustaf 4 years ago |

When you put it this way, it's really quite remarkable how tenuous our hold is on even paid for digital services.

There is really nothing you could do with a car to prompt the car maker to take it from you. And the state will only take it if you break the law in particularly dangerous ways.

When it comes to other possessions it's even harder for anyone to take them away from you. If I take a kitchen knife and stab someone with it I will go to prison for sure, but I don't think they will take the knife away. They definitely won't ban me from buying knives.

But when it's a digital service, even something as crucial as a banking service, it's seen as normal that you can lose them for posting offensive things on twitter. Perhaps it's because we haven't had these digital services for long enough to consider them as really belonging to us, so we accept that they can be taken away at the slightest provocation.

YPPH 4 years ago |

In sensible jurisdictions, a tenant cannot be kicked out for non-payment of rent without a court order. That's right, a debtor who owes money to another cannot be booted without an independent government body approving it.

So it's not inherently wrong to say a user of a free service should have some rights. In some situations, it's not fair to pull the rug out under people.

I think that there will come a point where we need to have independent tribunals governing the behaviour of large web services. That point will probably be reached 5 years ago.

TadasPaplauskas 4 years ago |

No, you're not overreacting :) it sucks.

In theory, you agreed to all the ways they can screw you over when signing up. In reality of course no one can be reasonably expected to understand the full ramifications of multi-page terms of service.

I'm happy that EU is pushing this ownership argument forward. GDPR seemed unreasonable just a few years ago, now it's the new standard. I also don't think it's the final destination. We're moving towards more regulation, but that's expected in any mature industry.

However, this specific topic to me isn't as much about ownership as it's about redundancy and diversification.

Of course it's not a good idea to build your whole identity on some corporate identifier (@gmail.com, @icloud.com...). Of course your business income shouldn't be based on a single platform (e.g. youtube demonetization, facebook news). These problems could've been forseen even without the benefit of hindsight.

There's no such thing as absolute ownership anyway. Even your money or real estate belongs to you within the framework of modern banks and governments. Doesn't mean this ownership isn't meaningful, just that there are always limits and gotchas.

The most meaningful thing you can do is own as much of your digital surface area as you can. Having everything under your own domains will get the most bang for your buck. I don't bother with self-hosting, but for someone else that would be a must. Your mileage may vary.

em-bee 4 years ago | |

it may not be a good idea, but we can't possibly expect a layperson to have more than one email address.

randunel 4 years ago |

Phone number porting is a thing due to regulation. I'm looking forward to having email address porting legislation, one day.

For full porting, there's a long road ahead, starting with regulating domain names, which email addresses depend on. However, as long as the domain name _de facto_ remains in the possession of the original provider, this is technically possible, already.

Email address porting might even be possible without a persistent domain/DNS entry. After phone numbers get ported, the _sender_ (of sms, or a call) caches the new routing, and the original carrier doesn't know the ported phone number is getting a call in the new carrier's network. I'd be interested in discussing this sort of thing for well established internet services (such a central authority already exists, ICANN, but perhaps legislators can come up with a non-US authority for emails)

andyjohnson0 4 years ago |

Apologies for going meta here:

Could I urge that posters follow the site convention of prefixing the title with with Ask HN, Tell HN, etc. for posts that don't link to an external source? There are currently two such posts in the top 30.

HN is primarily for discussing external articles, and I'd suggest that this post should have been submitted as such.

jmyeet 4 years ago |

This was an issue 10+ years ago and I'm shocked it still exists. In the early days of Google+, some people lost their accounts for not having "real names". Whether or not you agree with a real names policy (I don't), you should never lose access to your Gmail or Google Photos or Youtube channel because of it.

Even though this didn't happen to me I learned that my Gmail is too important to lose so I can't use that account for anything else and that's dumb and shortsighted of Google.

It says a lot that this hasn't been fixed in 10+ years to safeguard your Gmail account in particular. Uploading an offending image (which could be an ccident) to Google Photos shouldn't terminate your AdWords account.

dlowe-net 4 years ago |

An important tip if you intend to send everything to gmail.

Do NOT send everything to gmail via forward. Every bit of spam you forward is going to count against your domain name. I had someone who did this on a community server and it wrecked our rating for a while.

Instead, have gmail pick up your email via pop3. This will avoid the "spam origin/relay" problem of forwarding.

p0d 4 years ago |

A lot of us have also been caught out by Google announcing they are forcing free G-Suite Legacy users to upgrade.

Here is where I am heading (having given the matter much thought and some testing, trial and error)

Free Gmail/Cal account as I enjoy the software

My own custom domains with any registrar

Paid Fastmail account storing all my emails to all my domains/aliases at Fastmail

All Fastmail messages forwarded to Gmail

Mail from Gmail sent through Fastmail's smtp servers

This gives me the mail/cal app I like and the freedom to move. I don't have a problem with paid. Google are forcing Workspace on me when all I want is email with custom domains.

magusd 4 years ago | |

Damn, I've been through this too and I have even forgotten about it. 5 users, no cost, gone. I've even used zoho for a while after that, but that's gone too. My current solution is to use custom domain with icloud and forwarding emails around.

inanutshellus 4 years ago | |

Also caught in the Legacy drama. :-( still haven't decided what to do about it. blurg.

iamjkt 4 years ago | | |

I moved to Zoho for business and have 2 accounts there for £10 each/year.

The configuration of the service is much easier than Google makes it. Filtering took some getting used to, but I have it working much better than I ever could on Google, so happy bunny there. And the Android client is OK too.

The only meh part (for me) is the web interface for email/calendar isn't as streamlined as Google, but being out of that eco-system more than makes up for it.

criddell 4 years ago | | |

Me too. Currently leaning towards iCloud. It’s very inexpensive for email with a custom domain and I trust Apple a bit more than other tech companies.

xunn0026 4 years ago | | |

Migrating to Zoho is super easy. Did it for 2 domains.

akkartik 4 years ago | |

What do you enjoy about Gmail/cal? I don't see the point of that level of indirection in your setup. Fastmail seems indistinguishable from Gmail UI except I don't have crap on the left nav. And gcal is unreliable garbage, in my experience.

These days I pick a provider for each service that lives and dies by the quality of that service. Fastmail has 'mail' right on the tin.

rcMgD2BwE72F 4 years ago |

Buy a domain (I bought lastname.contact) and subscribe to Fastmail or a similar paid-for service. You can then use anything@lastname.contact and if your email service provider drops you, you can switch to another and not care about your contacts trying to reach you or updating the email address of all your online accounts. I couldn't be happier with the switch (I was using Protonmail before, and Gmail a long time ago). I still use my work g-apps account (only) for the Play Store on my Android phone.

hvdijk 4 years ago |

Are you overreacting? In my opinion, depending on how long the suspension lasts, you may be, though not necessarily. You sent unsolicited bulk e-mail. That is spam. It is possible that your mail helped some people, but anyone who had set up their own filtering to prevent the original mail from coming through would then only see it because of your followup, and additionally the "To" list may well have been spoofed as well and not reflect who the original mail was actually sent to. Google have a responsibility to prevent spam from being sent through their systems, and if this suspension is the minimal they can do to stop your spam, it was the right thing for Google to do, and you would see the same with a lot of other e-mail providers as well. However, if this suspension lasts beyond the point where you are clearly aware of it and can make sure you do not repeat that, then no, as far as I am concerned you will no longer be overreacting and should look to avoid Google in the future.

thfuran 4 years ago | |

If their obligation is to stop the sending of spam, then why is it right that they also block all other uses of the account and all access to all linked accounts? How could it possibly be the case that that is the minimal restriction they could place to prevent sending emails? Surely they could just...not allow the sending of emails from an account.

foxfluff 4 years ago | | |

Indeed, there are a million things they could do other than suspend the entire account.

It's just lazy admins on a power trip retaliating, doing the easiest & cheapest thing they can think of. Hardly different from blocking an entire /24 because a hacked wordpress install on some VPS started sending spam. Big overreach, but nobody holds them accountable. It reminds me of mafia & gangster movies where the revenge is extended to an entire family/business/building because one bad actor offended one of the mobs.

hvdijk 4 years ago | | |

Yeah, that's a good point. There is a chance it is simply not a possibility in the way their systems are currently set up, but if so, that's on Google and they should change their systems to make it possible.

grishka 4 years ago |

A couple of years ago I set up a mail server with my domain to forward everything to gmail. I now give everyone these addresses instead of my underlying gmail one. Yes, Google can still suspend my account for any number of reasons with little to no recourse. But this way I retain the ownership of the front door. If Google does do that, I can reconfigure my server to store incoming mail or to forward it somewhere else.

Social login is more complicated. I usually set up multiple different social logins for every account to make it more redundant against this sort of thing.

estaseuropano 4 years ago | |

Why use social login at all when you can use email instead?

grishka 4 years ago | | |

On services where sessions have a lifetime for some stupid reason, entering your email and password gets really boring really fast. Even more if they use a username instead of an email. Even more if they require you to change passwords periodically.

Much easier to just click a button.

lbriner 4 years ago |

There is a general problem with poor customer service. In the past, I think most people had the belief that you had to have good service to keep customers and if you didn't, you lost work and possibly eventually the business.

Nowadays, so many services are so sticky that it is not the case that a business has to give good service and also unrealistic to expect people just to go somewhere else if they don't like it.

In a different but related example, I am remortgaging. The new lender has their own conveyancer who should be handling things. The conveyancer is really slow, doesn't respond to emails or phone calls for an update and if they don't sort things by the end of this month, I will need to pay another $500 on my mortgage payment. What can I do? Go elsewhere? Not at this rate, I cannot afford to wait another 2 months to apply for another mortgage and I could even end up with the same conveyancer. The Lender isn't interested because it is waiting for the conveyancer and the only person who will be out of pocket will be me. Others have had entire sales fall through because the same conveyancer took so long.

So what I was thinking was a new law that you are not allowed to advertise or take on any new customers unless your TrustPilot score is above 4. A bit Black Mirror but it might just work ;-)

Fnoord 4 years ago |

Free services are fantastic, until they break. Or until you get banned. There's people who get their Microsoft banned for no reason, without notice. The reason is some kind of ML algorithm found (rightfully or not) CP in their data, which could have been some public Discord or WhatsApp group or could have been a troll beating the checksum mechanism (it exists for both the Microsoft and Apple one). Good luck getting to talk to a human, and good luck getting your account back. Which includes your Windows Store acquisitions, your Windows/Office licenses, your Xbox games. Everything. I see Black Friday sales for family OneDrive. You'd have 5x 1 TB for 60 EUR a year, a good deal, right? Except I don't trust my data there, even encrypted. I don't vouch for my backups containing no bogus data, given it also includes something like browser cache or Discord/Telegram/WhatsApp backups. The solution is quite simple for techies: don't rely on cloud; DIY. For the rest of the world, competition would hopefully lead to better product. And this is all about Microsoft. Not Google, they're abysmal when it comes to support (for their free tiers).

foxfluff 4 years ago | |

> Free services are fantastic, until they break. Or until you get banned. There's people who get their Microsoft banned for no reason, without notice.

It's not just free services. Big hosting providers are taking a similar approach. You might find one day that your VPS has been deleted or your entire account blocked if they have an issue with you.

raxxorrax 4 years ago | |

> There's people who get their Microsoft banned for no reason, without notice.

I got my private MS account suspended after asking a question on their support forums. I could only reactivate it by providing them with my number. I then tried to delete the account, but that would only possible if I could log into it. So now they have another ghost account floating around...

zivkovicp 4 years ago |

> what is an identity?

PGP is a good solution, and in general the crypto space has the right idea in my opinion. I like the idea of using cryptographic key pairs to sign messages and prove identity, but the learning curve makes it impractical for general use.

The best place to start is owning a domain you control, at least that way you can manage your own facade.

upofadown 4 years ago | |

In general, if you want people to be able to use cryptographic signatures to prove their identity, they are going to have to know what those things are and how they work. Since this is an entirely new thing in the world there is no existing culture to map it to. The problem is not specific to any particular technology.

This would be an excellent topic for new curriculum for the schools. Some ideas need to be generally known to be beneficial.

zivkovicp 4 years ago | | |

Exactly this. Good point.

raxxorrax 4 years ago | |

In some cases providing identity is a good idea. In a web full of advertising it is mostly not.

My domain is completely detached from my online identities, even for private and professional development to a large degree.

Many domains are pretty cheap though, not much more expensive than some mail services. Of course they don't come with respective keys for which you might have to pay extra.

mminer237 4 years ago |

You can't compel a company to provide you with a service. That's a little too close to slavery for society's taste. If a company doesn't provide you with a service you agreed to, you can get damages from a court, but you have to use such services as your contract agreed.

It stinks to end up on the wrong end, but that's part of the cost of getting such massive benefits for free. If you want something more reliable or with better customer service, you have to pay for it.

You don't own phone numbers, emails, names, PO boxes, or addresses. You have them within a legal framework, and you can lose them in that framework. Software products may treat them as unalterable identifiers, but none of them are. Things should always be able to be changed.

3pt14159 4 years ago | |

> You can't compel a company to provide you with a service.

Yes we can. We have for centuries. These entities exist as the result of the will of the people. We are the ones that allowed the concept of corporate personhood to come into being.

Rights are important, yes, but this isn't really about rights and everyone knows it. This is about Google optimizing their support staff to maximize their own ends over what would be jointly better for everyone. An email account is more important than a real address these days, and it is perfectly reasonable for us to expect that, at the very least, Google forward mail to a new account after closing it and quite frankly they should do much more than that, especially if someone is willing to pay for support time.

If Google locked me out of my accounts it would cost me around 200 or 300 hours of work. I would literally pay $25k to reverse their stupid decision over the alternative. What I'm trying to say here is that the costs of type 1 error here is completely born out on the public, and one of the roles for Government is to solve these tragedy of the commons situations.

PretzelPirate 4 years ago |

The Decentralized Identity Foundation is attempting to build a standard so you can own your own identity that’s independent of any centralized provider: https://identity.foundation/

That helps you ‘own’ who you are, but doesn’t stop someone like Google from refusing to work with you in case they think you’re a spammer (though your DID can provide enough evidence that you aren’t).

throwaway984393 4 years ago |

> I paid for it, so technically, don't I own it?

There's a lot of scenarios where you wouldn't want purchase of service to transfer ownership. People providing services have rights too. You don't get to do whatever you want with their brand, trademark, copyright. And you don't get to expect more service than is promised, or that you won't have your service taken away if the service owner doesn't want to deal with you anymore.

So you ask, well how can I be protected as a user of services? And the answer is: competition, being an informed consumer, and the occasional regulation.

> Do we own our identities? Do we own our phone numbers, emails, handles, PO boxes, addresses?

Those are all great examples of why there is no simple answer.

You do not own your phone number, but you do have the right to transfer it between carriers, thanks to regulation. You don't own your own email address, but you can rent a domain name and do what you want with your email address while you're renting the domain. You don't own your handle unless it is your real name and you go to court to protect it. You don't own a PO box, but you can rent it while you pay for it.

Ownership is often just a matter of possession. Who possesses your email address? Who possesses your PO box? Hell, who possesses your house? The land it's on? The access people have to it? The impact it has on neighbors?

Identity and ownership are complex ideas that are involved in many different levels of our society. As much as people want it to be simple, it just isn't. And the world is not going to get less complicated.

rglullis 4 years ago |

> But what if I get reported on my domain name? What if that gets suspended or blacklisted too?

Forget about all NFTs-as-scam-overpriced-jpegs, but this is exactly what web3/blockchain-based domains are for. Take a look at https://ens.domains or https://unstoppabledomains.com/

xmlninja 4 years ago |

Sorry for the harsh attitude here.

You work as devops engineer for 15y and you reply-all to spam emails?

ksec 4 years ago |

1. You are not overreacting. You have simply woken up to the truth in the online world. For others like Phone numbers and Address you do ( or should do ) have some protection under the rule of law.

2. Google has been like that since.... its inception? Which is why I have been Anti-Google ( one way or another ) since around 2004? Google just doesn't care. It is not in their DNA to care.

Seanambers 4 years ago |

Why doesn't Google just rate limit suspected gmail accounts to incoming only and demand that the user identifies for continued use with strikes as on youtube..?

I've commented negatively about Google before, and this seems like a very harsh punishment based on what I assume is a rule/ML based anti spammer policy with no humans in the loop.

jamil7 4 years ago |

I had my first experience with this recently in which my Netlify account I was using to host a small local community / volunteer project was automatically flagged and suspended after I logged in. DNS for the project was also hosted there and when an account is suspended all DNS records are wiped and sites are immediately taken offline, so even things not hosted there (backend and mail server) were also down. I don't use it for any professional work (and likely never will after that) and was on a free plan so maybe on a paid plan it's different. I'm just glad it happened with that project where it didn't matter and not something critical.

I would also recommend buying a domain for your email, that's what I did a few years ago and point it to Protonmail. It's not self-hosted but at least I can always point the domain somewhere else.

dudeinjapan 4 years ago |

In the early days, I was thepimp@hotmail.com. One day, my account was suddenly suspended because of the handle, no other reason, all data permanently gone, no backsies.

vero2 4 years ago |

> Two days later, my google account was suspended. Apparently, my account was being used to send unwanted e-mails. Ha! I just became a spammer.

The issue is... if you see a mob/protest, Usually the police ask you to leave the place - allow them to take care of the issue. Even if your 'attempts' to resolve/negotiate/help people are very kind, the LE always says that is not your job.

Spam filtering is Google's job. Not yours.

It is possible quite a few people, marked your email as SPAM and therefore you got flagged.

This may sound like victim blaming but please do not take up these tasks unless you know what you are venturing into.

Even https://www.419eater.com/ advice is to stay away from these people (for safety).

const_burner 4 years ago |

> Do we own our identities? Do we own our phone numbers, emails, handles, PO boxes, addresses?

I don’t think anything you listed a typical individual owns.

Even street addresses change.

jokethrowaway 4 years ago | |

Not if you buy a house

rocqua 4 years ago | | |

Sure it can. Street-names can change, the numbering of houses in the street can change. At least, it can be changed by the municipality here in the Netherlands.

lkxijlewlf 4 years ago |

IANAL, but it would be interesting to hear from one. My opinion is that your data is a currency. You spend it in exchange for goods. So, I believe that, yes, you should own the services you have paid for with data.

zuzun 4 years ago | |

That's how it's done in Germany since the beginning of the year. Paying a price or providing personal data gives the consumer the same rights now.

suhastech 4 years ago |

I got into the exact same problem a few years ago. So, I wrote email backup app: https://thehorcrux.com/why-i-built-horcrux-app/

I still use Google Apps at this point as it's pretty convenient compared to standing up my own server. However, I make sure my email address is on my own domain. https://thehorcrux.com/about/

Berniek 4 years ago |

How long has the debate been going about personal privacy? Do you think it didn't apply to business or corporate entities? Ensuring you are in full control of your passwords was already a thing, but logic suggests being in control of your identity (your login identity) is every bit as important. The reason websites want to use your email address as a logon is they can on sell it.They can aggregate all your data under the username and cross link it. You got it for free. Those services you paid for you actually still have, you just can't access them because you used a free service to handle the security. (google, Facebook, twitter handled the verifying it was you and they do it for free - it just cost you your privacy) Sadly, you actually got exactly what you paid for security wise. If you had used your phone number as a logon (don't laugh google is doing that too) then all your privacy is out the window because even transitory email accounts can be cross link and you are now fully identifiable. No? Well how often have you changed phone numbers? When you start again, get at least 4 email addresses. 1 private 2 banking/financial 3 all the other stuff 4 business (perhaps another one for business don't care) Manage them yourself so you can delete or add as the spam/junk overwhelms.

tgdnt 4 years ago |

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html

gefhfffh 4 years ago |

You could even argue that you should own your "free" services, since you pay for them indirectly (through buying products of companies that buy ads, and by watching ads).

w4rh4wk5 4 years ago |

> Do we own our phone numbers, emails, handles, PO boxes, addresses?

I'd argue no, and that it should stay that way, and that it needs to become more apparent that we don't own those things.

Just because I am using a certain phone number today does not mean that I'll be using it tomorrow, or still have access to it. It should therefore not be used for identification, even less authorization. Hell, it shouldn't even be a requirement to have a phone number.

silon42 4 years ago |

also, if you fail to renew your domain, it should not go to someone else tomorrow (or even in a year, ... decade, maybe)

bryans 4 years ago | |

It's incredible that companies are so eager to delete your data after a couple weeks. If someone gets sick at the end of the month -- let's say with a deadly virus that caused them to spend weeks in the hospital, maybe even being unconscious and intubated -- they shouldn't come home to a deleted domain name or web server, or need to reupload several terabytes to a backup provider, all over a ~$10 billing issue.

Grace periods for everything (online and off) used to be 3+ months. Now they're days. These billing policies are quite literally inhumane, as they entirely ignore the logistics of being human.

silon42 4 years ago | |

Probably the safest address is with your national telco monopoly or a similiar provider.

vertis 4 years ago |

Another day, another story about losing access to Google. At what point do we legislate that there has to be a path back for what has essentially become a utility that we can't live without.

I know a lot of the comments here are "Never again, I only use email". I fall into that camp personally, but it's hard to expect that kind of discipline from others.

dpcan 4 years ago |

Every service that lets you sign up with Google, Facebook, whatever should require a secondary authentication method, period.

They should be very aware that this could happen and their customers need a backup, that’s on them.

As for emails, contacts, photos, downloads, that’s on us. We need backups like you have but the vast majority of users wouldn’t even know where to begin with this.

vishnugupta 4 years ago |

> I'm not going to start hosting my email server,

You don’t have to. I use Fastmail on my own domain. Purchasing domain is a one time hassle.

WithinReason 4 years ago |

Daily reminder to set up automatic forwarding of all email from you Gmail address to a secondary address. I use ProtonMail.

stephc_int13 4 years ago |

Gmail itself is a scam.

It took me a while to realize how fucked up this "free service" was.

We've collectively ben pwned by Google, big time.

thfuran 4 years ago | |

It might be a bad deal, but it's not a scam. The say they'll give you webmail and they give you webmail.

stephc_int13 4 years ago | | |

It might be at the individual level, but the scale completely changes the nature of the deal, in my opinion.

rightbyte 4 years ago | | |

It was a scam though. They read our mails and sold PI to advertisers. Google say they stopped doing it but there is no way I trust them. Do you still get flights added to your Google calendar automatically?

6510 4 years ago |

You are not overreacting.

I've always thought we were excessively tailoring to ease of use rather than efficiency. Recently I started questioning that idea. We should have probably designed everything with security and stability as the nr 1 priority. If it doesn't need to be implemented in software it probably shouldn't be. Add a few extra chips to the mobo or have some pci card.

Government probably shouldn't be running things like a messaging services but it can offer infrastructure to facilitate it. An actual court for disputes, violations and crimes would be expensive but its probably worth it. No bans until you get your day in court.

Even in extreme cases where you [say] want to discontinue the email service you've provided. We could have laws that force you to auction the domain and force the new owner to continue the service for same price. OR compensate the (free) users for damages.

crate_barre 4 years ago |

This is kind of the big issue with technical people not being involved on some civic issues. We might not be able to join the mass of people with every little political opinion on abortion, healthcare, education, etc, but we could outline very specific technical platforms that Congress needs to pass.

Case in point, any “free” service that can be used as 2FA authentication, or receive communication from at least one important life service (banking, your school, your job, etc) should fall under consumer protection. They must offer phone support and address any account closures and offer a variety of methods of retrieving the account/data. We got FINRA laws like this in finance.

^ That won’t change the world, but it would change one thing, that we all understand and can get behind. We could do stuff like this, and mobilize everyone.

shadowgovt 4 years ago |

The significant risk of the way Google operates is there isn't much firewalling of the services. If one piece decides you're a scammer, that account can lose access to everything... And they'll tie other accounts to the offending one and lock those too.

Relying on Google is a single point of failure.

Hizonner 4 years ago |

> But I lost access to paid services that I had set up with social login, besides all Google's services ( GCP, firebase, youtube premium, google one, subscriptions paid through play store, google ads, etc, etc).

So you gave Google total control over your entire online presence, tying a bunch of things you depend on into a tight bundle that would all get banned at once. And, by including so many things, you created more opportunities for something you did with one of them to trigger a ban of all of them.

> The google stack is very convenient,

... except when you get totally shut down for no reason. Which is an absolutely predictable consequence.

You have a very strange idea of convenience.

> and it's 2022, I'm not going to start hosting my email server,

This reads to me as "I'm unwilling to take even the most trivial steps to solve the problem".

> But what if I get reported on my domain name? What if that gets suspended or blacklisted too?

That is a risk, but, at least as of today, it's much, much harder to get a domain name shut down than to get something like a Google account shut down.

Nonetheless, you should probably be isolating things that are really important to you under separate domain names unless they NEED to be tied together.

> Do we own our phone numbers, emails, handles, PO boxes, addresses?

The user agreements for most of those will say no. The standard on the Internet right now is "We can cut you off for any reason whatsoever and you have no recourse". It's right there in black and white. And it's been that way forever. Maybe it's wrong. Maybe there should be legal changes. Maybe there should at least be changes in common expectations. But at the moment, that is how it works.

So don't become overdependent on any of them, and don't set up a situation where losing one also loses others. This is pretty basic stuff.

timonovici 4 years ago |

I also lost access to a previous gmail account - I changed my password with a random generated one, and god (and a google engineer) knows why, I lost access. No amount of appealing would return my access, even if I was wiling to show my national ID card and stuff.

Anyway. About your plan with the email server. We ran such a thing for an organisation in Romania. You'll be surprised how many times our emails ended up in Gmail's spam folders (other providers too, but gmail runs an especially harsh algorithm for spam filtering), even though we had DKIM, SPF and all that jazz setup. You will most likely be locked out of most people's reach, unless you use one of the largest providers. So maybe government regulation is the only realistic way out.

judge2020 4 years ago | |

Google doesn't get social engineered into handing over user accounts since maybe a few hundred people have any access to the Google Accounts system proper, less so for the gmail.com organization (Workspace Support can help with recovering an Admin account in an org). Introducing a way to retrieve an account via human intervention makes the chance of someone taking over a Google account via malicious social engineering, incl. faking national ID cards, non-zero. In fact, i'm sure tons of people have been able to take over accounts using account recovery[0] where it'll ask you things like "when did you create this account" and "what was the phone number you put on the account".

0: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/7299973

lobocinza 4 years ago |

Have a personal domain name and use it for email. That way you are not dependent on the provider. It's like owning land, if you don't have a domain name and do not own the infra or pay for the services you are just a 'peasant' with no rights.

fmajid 4 years ago |

You are not overreacting.

Google’s aversion to paying humans to provide customer service is actually a plus in most cases, as that means the nonexistent humans cannot be social-engineered into hijacking your account as is all too easy at cellular carriers. But having dependencies on as arrogant and high-handed a company as Google (or Apple for that matter) is asking for trouble.

Hosting your own email means getting a domain name from a DNS hosting provider, sadly that is also a weak point of vulnerability. I’ve been doing this for 20 years now, but I wouldn’t be confident that a determined attacker couldn’t take me out despite U2F 2FA with my DNS provider.

jokethrowaway 4 years ago |

I do the same with my own domains and I'm similarly a Google slave. (huge shout-out to niftylettuce's https://forwardemail.net/)

That said, I'm planning to migrate to either self hosted or a paid service which is not run by algorithms and where customer supports exist (in that regards big tech is terrible: facebook, google, paypal = worthless customer support).

I completely agree with your premise though: Ideally everyone should have their own server providing a personal site and mail and maybe even hosting a decentralised social network.

doctoboggan 4 years ago | |

Do you have any delivery issues with forwardemail.net?

Is there any significant delay in receiving or sending?

I am currently a google apps user grandfathered in the free plan which is disappearing so I am looking for something new.

sdevonoes 4 years ago |

> The google stack is very convenient, and it's 2022, I'm not going to start hosting my email server, but I'm in need of a foolproof and long lasting solution to online identity. And I've started by purchasing a domain name for 10 years and having a 'catch all and forward to gmail' rule setup. So I can just forward it all to somewhere else in case I lose my gmail again. But what if I get reported on my domain name? What if that gets suspended or blacklisted too?

I imagine that's less likely to happen? Otherwise I'm on the same boat :D

prima-facie 4 years ago |

> And I've started by purchasing a domain name for 10 years and having a 'catch all and forward to gmail' rule setup.

This is the easiest way to do this since most domain registrars have a forwarding option. Cloudflare recently introduced Email Routing, which has been working well for me.

> But what if I get reported on my domain name? What if that gets suspended or blacklisted too?

Usually IPs or blocks of IPs get reported for spam, not domains. So in case the SMTP server you use starts to see a drop in reputation you can always change to another one without affecting your deliverability.

anotherhue 4 years ago |

Social sign in means all your eggs were in one basket. Google tries very hard to encourage you to do so.

You weren't wrong to do so, but the convenience/risk bet hasn't worked out for you. For most people it works out fine -- i.e. car driving risks.

I use a different email host, and only use user/pass logins, no social. It's fiddly, and you'll need a good password manager (not chrome) but that's the cost of not being exposed to this risk. Only you can decide if its worth it, very few people have the skills for it to even be an option.

dfxm12 4 years ago |

You could argue that gmail is not a product that I own, but I paid for it, so technically, don't I own it? ... Should we own the free services that we've paid for with money and data?

I really don't see how, so this reads as hand wavey to me. Also, keep in mind, even if we're taking claim of payment at face value, you paid something for it, but that doesn't mean you've paid in full & paying for something doesn't imply ownership (like leasing a car, renting an apartment, etc).

sirwitti 4 years ago |

That's the reason why paying for a domain and custom e-mail adresses is the best option in my opinion.

Changing infrastructure / hosting can be done quickly for myself if necessary.

Apart from that, knowing that every e-mail I get or send is being processed by google and potentially read by US authorities simply makes me cringe - even though there's nothing special in my e-mails.

I'd love to self host e-mail and love to read HN posts about it, but I think self-hosting e-mail can become a time sink quite easily.

jpambrun 4 years ago |

I am also worried by this. I have paid one subscription, nest aware/protect/camera/doorbell, youtube premium, pixel phones, assistants, have taken advantage of their photo backup that came with phones.. The prejudice of them closing my account would be in the 3,000$+ range just in now useless hardware. That is not counting the logistical nightmare. I firmly believe we need governmental protection.

joshOiknine 4 years ago |

You make a good point. Your address is yours because you own/rent said property and the address is associated to that. Your phone number also can be yours because you have the ability to transfer it from one service provides to the next. Email should be the same but the problem with email is that it is tied to a domain. Has anyone thought of a way to decouple emails from the TLD?

renewiltord 4 years ago |

Huh. I would have never thought that was a risk. It’s the sort of thing I would do. Thanks for the warning.

My highest likelihood interpretation is that a bunch of fools marked your email as spam rather than the initial spammer.

I think it’s hard to help most people drawn from the total population in an async context because of the 50% being less than median intelligence problem.

layer8 4 years ago |

In particular for “free, paid by data” services, things won’t change unless there is regulation enforcing ownership. Because email is the central hub for managing identities, I’d therefore always opt for paid services with a proven track record, and also not use social logins.

Personally I use my own registered domain for email and would encourage anyone to do so.

bena 4 years ago |

Maybe don't send spam?

Here's what you should do when you spam: Ignore it. A reply only lets the spammer know there's a live account at the other end.

Next time, do a whois on the domain the email came from, see if there's an abuse contact and forward them the email, letting them know there's malicious actors on their system.

JimWestergren 4 years ago |

Suspended for how long?

pedro2 4 years ago |

No, you're not overreacting since it happened to you. On the other side, you are also overreacting. Take a walk.

This being said, since you got a scare, maybe it's a good time you buy a 2nd domain from another registar and handle accordingly.

PS: how does one find a good domain name?

david04 4 years ago | |

Not overreacting. It can happen to anyone of us and we just ignore it, keep going, and think "it will probably never be me, only happens to others". Until it it us.

daneel_w 4 years ago | |

How is he overreacting? He lost access to so much on a completely absurd basis. It's (once again) Google and their systems responsible for overreacting and causing damage.

The main advice would be to avoid Google as if it were the plague. There are other free and paid providers that don't have a persisting and renewing rumour of suddenly, without warning, pulling the plug on you and then making it impossible to get in touch with proper support to try clear things up.

cybarDOTlive 4 years ago | |

> PS: how does one find a good domain name?

brute force checking thousands of examples till you find one that isn't squatted.

captn3m0 4 years ago | | |

Also, if you're planning to use it as your primary email domain - pick a "normal" TLD. Using something like .email/.xyz/.live etc can end up in spam (especially for newer domains).

Kelteseth 4 years ago | |

> how does one find a good domain name?

domainr [1] is fast and has a cool autocomplete feature that mixes domain endings with your name

[1] https://domainr.com/?q=

chrismorgan 4 years ago | |

> PS: how does one find a good domain name?

A time machine might come in handy.

(I can just see the cartoon now: guy invents time machine, friend asks if he’s going to stop Hitler, he says no, but to register a good domain name. (Never mind the practicalities of the ten-years-at-a-time limit.))

hogrider 4 years ago |

This is why I want to pay for an email provider but I'm in argentina with very little access to dollars so they all seem too damn expensive to me. I wouldn't trust a local company or something like that we are too scummy in bussiness.

ricktdotorg 4 years ago |

happy to be corrected on this anecdata, but it seems to me that the common thread among nearly all (i can't say with certainty, all) of these locked-out-of-Google disaster reports is that the victim was using a free Gmail/Google account as one of the central cog in their digital life/social/single sign-on to personally-vitally-important sites/services.

pay google the 12 bucks or whatever per month to get a paid account, with actual service people you can call on the phone so if something bad happens, yes you can raise a merry stink about it.

become an actual customer! it really works

foxfluff 4 years ago |

> Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

We should own our own stuff. Your email is your own data. No company should have the right to arbitrarily destroy or block your access to your data. Whether that service is free or paid for is irrelevant; offering a service for free isn't a license to rob and destroy.

I've argued this point multiple times (e.g [0]). Business who host your data should treat your data as your property and take responsibility for it. They don't have right to destroy it or put it through a virtual shredder any more than your landlord or car service should take your property to the junkyard.

I also consider it a security issue [1]; if you can't access your data (or worse: it's gone all of a sudden), security has failed. No, destroying data isn't the same as securing it. Google has poor security. Security should protect your data and your access to it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30242824

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30055397

Unfortunately law seemingly hasn't quite caught up with the idea of digital property.

Notice that Google's automatic suspensions may very well be illegal under GDPR. This was discussed here recently [2]. Having been rejected a credit card application (an example of a decision that should't be made automatically, under GDPR [3]) and lost access to a gmail account, I can say the latter was much worse.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30138669

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30140312

I host my own email these days, and I am my own domain registrar. If someone wants to take away my domain, they have to take it up with my government.

bradknowles 4 years ago |

Lesson 1: don’t build your mansion on someone else’s property.

Lesson 2: don’t use gmail. At least, don’t use it for anything you actually care about.

muzani 4 years ago | |

What is a good email provider, paid or not?

bradknowles 4 years ago | | |

One that you pay for your services, and where you’ve done your due diligence and confirmed that they are actually a good actor and responsible provider.

Speaking only for myself, I have personally hosted my vanity domains that I have owned since 1995 with the folks at Heller Information Systems, who own the his.com and hers.com domains.

During that time, I was also the Sr. Internet Mail Administrator at AOL, and the co-author of the SAGE booklet on “Internet Postmaster: Duties and Responsibilities”. I know how hard it is to run an e-mail system properly, and how large of a team it takes to do the job right. And I have steadfastly refused to try to do that job on my own for myself. The folks at HIS do a better job than I could do on my own for myself.

Since 2003, I have also helped run the mail systems for python.org and NTP.org. That work has just solidified my views that running a mail server is a highly complex and burdensome task, which is why I drafted in the authors of “The Book of Postfix” to help run the mail systems for python.org. They have done a fantastic job, far better than I could have done on my own, and reinforced once again in my mind how much effort is required.

So, do your homework. Check out the long-term reputation of the company, and see how much of that might be due to a single person who is heroically trying to balance the entire world on their shoulders, versus those who are part of a large team.

jka 4 years ago |

As an example, I think it'd be nice if eventually Spotify decided to offer wood-engraved machine-readable BitTorrent QR-code links to each of the albums you have in your profile; effectively available in perpetuity and on-demand by placing them into an appropriate reader with cached storage and Internet connection -- no need for huge capacity in either of those. The engravings could be available on a large delayed timescale to provide for healthy forestation and materials gathering.

CyanLite4 4 years ago |

How did you get your Gmail account back?

someotherperson 4 years ago |

OP - create a new email address and add it to your profile. A Googler might see this and reach out to help.

zokier 4 years ago |

I do see this overall situation being at least partially consequence of the early internet community thinking that internet could live outside any traditional structures and especially laws. There was this strong sense that we could forge a new ultra-liberal virtual world, free of the shackles of the physical world. In retrospect that way of thinking now feels pretty naive. That led to outright hostility towards any ideas of government-rooted electronic identity programs, or anything resembling that.

The reason I think government identities are significant here is two-fold. Firstly it left an vacuum for identities that email, despite its obvious shortcomings, then filled. Secondly, weak unconnected identities provide poor means of dealing with abuse.

Sibling threads discuss how kicking people out of e.g. banking or rental involves some legal processes or something comparable. But in those cases both the barrier of abuse is higher because usually there are real consequences, and doing whatever legal process is more practical because the other party is not just some John Doe. In contrast the scale of abuse something like Gmail faces is pretty staggering, and the ability for the operator (Google) to do anything about it is somewhat limited, so it is somewhat understandable how they ended up so trigger happy with bans.

I posit that if we were able to implement real consequences to the actual abusers, then we well-behaved users could have stronger standing to demand better treatment for ourselves and we would be less likely to face the current level of opaque algorithmic bans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technolibertarianism

benkkey 4 years ago |

That is a very big loss as one should not use social logins in all sign-ups.

KronisLV 4 years ago |

One thing to consider is the possibility of using multiple separate e-mail accounts from different providers.

Currently i have about 10 different e-mail accounts:

  - one for development related things and communities
  - one for newsletters, various online platforms and so on
  - one for throwaway purposes, lower importance things like video game accounts
  - one for university related things (it stayed after graduation)
  - a few separate accounts (and corresponding Google account) for various phones or other devices, as necessary
  - some standby accounts if i ever need them, some from different providers to check mail denylisting
  - a personal address that's mostly for contacts through my website or my self-hosted automation messages

There are some others, as well as each platform for automation has a separate account as well (e.g. GitLab, Zabbix, Nextcloud, ...), though most of those are on the same self-hosted mail server. Of course, deciding how to structure everything is one's own choice, in my case it's just historical cruft and loosely defined boundaries of how much i care about any particular item.

That said, mail servers that are easy to set up are a godsend (for example: https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver), as long as you also have one of the larger walled garden alternatives for public communications, should there ever be delivery problems.

It's not like Google deciding to ban all of my accounts at once (though fingerprinting, or based on IP because i don't care to set up some sort of an advanced proxy to access all of them from different VPNs) wouldn't be problematic, but this way at least the impact would be minimized.

Plus, with software like Thunderbird and something like KeePass for strong randomly generated passwords, managing everything is really low effort. Of course, this also lends itself nicely to avoiding social logins and creating a separate e-mail based account wherever applicable, for a bit more control, rather than keeping all of your eggs in the same basket.

As for those who will inevitably say that this is too hard or complicated to be practical: i invite you to try setting up your own mail server with the help of the provided link on a 5$/month VPS, things have really improved in the last few years! Of course, creating new Google accounts (or for other platforms) might be a bit more cumbersome with modern verification steps etc., but it's not like it's impossible either.

Sometimes i wish we could do the same for personal identities, e.g. a list of aliases that could be issued through some government org. for particular purposes and revoked as necessary. For example, i wouldn't want a leak of some shopping site result in my personal data being compromised in regards to my online banking or my physical address, in any capacity whatsoever.

sprkwd 4 years ago |

Don't wake the gods.

montroser 4 years ago |

> free stuff we pay for

Did you actually pay for it? With money? Or was it free?

DocTomoe 4 years ago | |

Either you think "paying with your data" is a valid argument, or you don't (but then the service needs to be free even without agreeing to the data stuff). Google can't have it both ways.

montroser 4 years ago | | |

Can't they? Seems like they do have it both ways.

You can pay for Google Workspace with money, in which case you are the customer, and so you get customer service.

Or you can use the free version, in which case the advertiser is the customer and you are not.

zulln 4 years ago | |

The post mentions a few subscription services, Google One being one of them. That gives extra storage in Gmail and access to Google support. By then I would definitely say that you are a paying customer.

nathias 4 years ago |

social logins are a dark pattern, don't use it

gw67 4 years ago |

yeah, we really need a decentralized identity service.

carapace 4 years ago |

The way I see it is that folks are becoming peasants or serfs. They are doing it voluntarily, and are almost solely motivated by convenience. Google (and the rest) talk and act like obsequious servants (one outfit even called themselves "Ask Jeeves" after the greatest fictional valet in English literature!) but they are more like drug pushers: they do not actually care about you, they just want your money/data. The free stuff they give you is not altruistic, it's to hook you.

I know that a lot of good and earnest people work at Google (and the rest) but that doesn't change the nature of the beast. If anything it makes it more pathetic that these good people are powering the corporations that are subjugating the masses. They are the ones that hear the sad stories on the back channels (official support is nearly useless, by design!) and intervene with the "Powers that Be" to fix problems here and there. But by easing the pain of some people they reinforce the dependency of all users. (I could go on about the psychological impact of intermittent rewards and capricious authority on conditioning people to obey, but I'm not an expert and anyway it's really depressing.)

So, we have been hoodwinked by pushers, we have voluntarily given up our let's call them "rights and responsibilities" to these unelected quasi-anonymous semi-authoritarian organizations that are not beholden to us directly in pretty much any way, and we are "fine, just fine" with it right up until they flush our digital lives down the toilet.

> Should we own the free services that we've paid for with money and data?

No. What are you a commie? Seriously though, you own what you own, you didn't pay for anything, and what do you want to actually do anyway? Pass laws that claw back some of your autonomy? Why give it up in the first place? Convenience. Bottom line: you're looking for ways to make other people pay for your laziness.

> Do we own our identities?

Both ownership and identity are abstract mental concepts. In contrast, rights, laws, contracts, Terms of Service, etc. are all part of the vast and ancient mechanisms we employ to manage real world assets and relationships. You can talk back and forth all day but in the end "get it in writing".

> Do we own our phone numbers, emails, handles, PO boxes, addresses?

Again, these are mostly philosophical concepts. If you want to discuss them in concrete terms we have to talk about laws, etc. For example people found it desirable and convenient to be able to be reached by the same phone number even if they switch carriers, so we got enough clout together to make some laws about it, and compelled carriers to support it.

So we can pass laws to, in effect, create new kinds of "owning".

But again, the way I see it is that you're using these FAANG systems out of convenience or because they give you something you want and you don't care that they have you by the "short hairs" right up until they jerk the rug out from under you. Yet, rather than abandoning these systems and using something else, you want to pass laws to make them do what you want them to do. In other words, rather than rewarding the folks who are trying to do right by you by using their systems, you want to keep using and even improve the system that is exploiting you, even if you have to do it against the "will" of the corporation supplying the systems/services.

Is that right?

> What do you use for identity?

Cryptography. (I originally wrote "Fucking cryptography, duh!" but then I thought that might be a little over the top and changed it.)

I use ssh keys mostly.

> And what are your thoughts on this?

To recap: to me you seem like a lazy fool who should have known better. You seem to want a legal solution ("ownership" is a legal concept) rather than just using some other service(s) that won't screw you over.

> Am I overreacting?

Yes. People are hard at work building "identity" services that work under your own control. You should avail yourself of their efforts, stop using exploitative "services", and get on with your life.

magicjosh 4 years ago |

I'm curious about blockchain solutions for this.

Public blockchains have potential to be part of the solution. Imagine the following:

- Decentralized file hosting using IPFS

- Decentralized login using ENS / Ethereum Name Service

- Email service gives you a UI on top of your data, plus an outbound server for relaying to/from non-blockchain email accounts

Overall, you end up with portable data thanks to IPFS, and a login through ENS to whatever UI you want to use/pay for.

This seems like a win to me. Haven't seen anything yet that pulls this together but the pieces are there. Maybe someone here wants to prototype it.

magicjosh 4 years ago | |

Here's the start of what that might look like: https://ethmail.cc/

As far as I can tell this is just like regular email that you login using your Ethereum Wallet. Data is still stored the web2 way.

DharmaPolice 4 years ago | |

I do wonder if the whole data ownership thing has become somewhat confused by the regular usage of "your data" to mean data about you. My email is my data. Facebook's record of how many times I've logged in isn't my data, it's data about me. There should be regulations on what corporations can do with data about me but it's fundamentally different from "my data".

ekanes 4 years ago | |

I’ve never heard of someone being their own registrar. Was this hard to set up?

foxfluff 4 years ago | | |

It was about five minutes of filling a form with the national authority.

There are some responsibilities that you get along with it (e.g. you're supposed to do risk assessment and document your approach to risks and security, etc.) but you don't actually have to deliver those documents unless they ask for it. They may also require you to respond to some questionnaires and such (I've received only one questionnaire over the years; they were conducting a study about how registrars verify the identity of their customers). Obviously these are primarily intended for commercial operators who have responsibility for customers' domains, and my risk assessment offering domains for myself is going to look pretty simple so I haven't actually written anything down. Will do if/when requested.

Excerpt from my whois records:

    Holder
    
    holder.............: Private person
    
    Registrar
    
    registrar..........: Private person

(It used to have my name along with other info in the registrar field, but this thankfully changed following GDPR)

megous 4 years ago | | |

Here, I'd have to do it on a company, and it would cost $9000 upfront and $2800/year. Not worth it. :)

Free domain lock against NS changes and domain transfers with national TLD authority seems good enough.

profmonocle 4 years ago | |

> Google mean while has the same business-to-business support that it does for private customers like the author here. For some services it’s because Google doesn’t care, but they do care about Education and they still can’t figure out how to readjust to be a valuable business partner even when they actually want to sell you something.

My experience with Google's business support is that instead of talking to a brick wall, there's now someone between you and the brick wall. Support is very responsive, and the response is always "I've filed an internal support ticket". When you ask for an update after weeks/months, the response is basically "there has been no update on the support ticket". As a bonus, your support ticket with them will sometimes auto-close because there hasn't been any activity - I had to ask Google Cloud support to re-open an unresolved issue three times once.

spaetzleesser 4 years ago | | |

"My experience with Google's business support is that instead of talking to a brick wall, there's now someone between you and the brick wall. "

That feels like a lot like the support my company (multi bullion dollar company) gets from MS and other vendors. We have super friendly people to interface with but if you have a real problem nothing happens besides a lot of friendly phone calls with "action items" and "follow ups". But when an issue hasn't been addressed for months it's a taboo to call that out. Even the managers at my own company don't like when you say "issue X hasn't been resolved". Instead it seems an unspoken rule to just keep scheduling conference calls that never lead to anything but are very friendly and upbeat.

lukeschlather 4 years ago | | |

That's generally my experience with Microsoft support. Microsoft support won't even acknowledge that there's a bug most of the time. (I've heard tell they have some really bad KPIs for their tier-1 support people.) Google support usually figures out my issues within a week. Of course I use GCP more heavily than Azure so part of this is probably me writing significantly better bug reports. (On the other hand, while there are aspects of GCP I dislike none of Azure's stuff makes any sense to me. It seems like Azure managed to build something in a few years that has more accumulated incompatible interfaces hidden behind nested dialogs than all of the MS Windows OS.)

polynomial 4 years ago | | |

The robot hasn't gotten any better, but it's learned how to fake smile.

theshrike79 4 years ago | |

I can confirm the AWS support responsiveness.

I've worked both with small clients (under $1k AWS spend) and big ones (monthly billing on the order of my yearly salary) and both got pretty much equal response times from their (paid) support.

The BigCo of course had a dedicated direct contact on company Slack for any issues and zoom calls with AWS staff before big launches - but anyone can get it if they spend money.

Google on the other hand seems to be completely opaque. The front page of HN seems to be the best way to get stuff resolved.

fmajid 4 years ago | |

Google is an online advertising monopoly at heart and that breeds the complacency all monopolies instill in their salespeople. That’s why they are an irrelevance in the cloud services market despite arguably superior technology, just like telco monopolies that have the same sense of entitlement.

pjc50 4 years ago | |

> even something as crucial as a banking service

Interestingly the problem of people excluded from the banking system has been addressed by statutory regulation in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/basic-bank-account... ; see also discussion at https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201617/ldselect/ldfi... which covers the question of people with inadequate ID.

Getting your email account wrongly banned is an injustice, whether trivial or costly, and whether or not you have alternative arrangements. That's why people are (generally) rightly cross that it's happening. That feeds into wider questions of "why is justice so expensive" and "how does a local justice system address the bad behavior of a multinational". These questions tend to get resolved incredibly slowly.

Grustaf 4 years ago | | |

Good to hear that you have protections around this in the UK. I know that in Sweden several political, and even ideological organisations have had their accounts frozen because of things they said or held true. Entirely legal things I should add.

foxfluff 4 years ago | | |

Notice the difference between organizations and private individuals (which the quoted UK regulations seems to protect). I don't know if it's EU wide but Finland also requires banks to provide service to private individuals.

pjc50 4 years ago | | |

The rules only apply to bank accounts, and there are still circumstances under which they can be frozen, but "bank just decides you can't have your money" is a lot rarer.

Edit: see Which? who are always good on consumer issues: https://www.which.co.uk/news/2021/09/why-banks-are-freezing-... : alleged suspicious activity; https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/22/exclusive-h... inactivity

Traditional British solution: a QUANGO and an Ombudsman.

danielscrubs 4 years ago | | |

Could you provide links? We have similar rules so I'm a bit surprised...

Grustaf 4 years ago | | |

Not really, this is people I know personally. I know some of them have mentioned it publicly but can't find any links. Would be in Swedish anyway. I know two people off the top of my head that had their personal accounts suspended for legal political activity, for organizations it's pretty much any organisation on the right side of the spectrum.

adolph 4 years ago | | |

> people excluded from the banking system has been addressed by statutory regulation

I wonder if the effort behind this is a Baptist and Bootleggers moment. Surely some maybe most want to solve something that they see as a societal problem, others see opportunity a la payday lenders, and others see an opportunity for social control. Maybe the people who see not-banking as a social problem also want to use the end result to "nudge" participants in the right direction.

elif 4 years ago | |

Cars are also digital service platforms which can and do take away things. I am currently playing a safety score minigame to unlock enhanced driving features. If I pay $2000 my software will enable my minivan to have a 0-60 of a Ferrari. This is all premised upon a connectivity package I'm obligated to pay for but have been gifted for a year by the manufacturer.

To put it more bluntly, my eyeballs are watched by AI to make sure I pay attention enough to deserve the full use of my vehicle.. it's beyond punitive, it requires my positive behavior.

ALSO bonus, if I did something with my vehicle that resulted in losing my account, I would also lose access to my home electricity system.

tsatsawayy 4 years ago | | |

Most cars do not do this. Teslas are famous for their DRM, restrictive connectivity, and shady upsells. Those will show up in the "cons" column of any honest review.

A normal car in 2022 will not constantly surveil you. No critical functionality is tied to an online account in any non-Tesla mass-produced car that I am aware of.

thr0wawayf00 4 years ago | | |

Neither of these points are true. Other manufacturers like Toyota are getting into the "features as a service" game with things like keyless entry.

On the surveillance point, I worked for an auto software company that partnered with a big auto manufacturer on a feature. We were granted access to an API that could geolocate any vehicle made by this company in real-time given its VIN. I volunteered my car's VIN to test with (I drove the same make as the company we partnered with) and confirmed that the API returned real-time location data on my 2019 vehicle. If you own a car that was built in the last 10 years, you are more than likely emitting your location to an internal service maintained by the manufacturer.

noelherrick 4 years ago | | |

That is amazing since VIN's are often visible from the outside. This is just so open to abuse, especially if it was a casual to lookup as you make it seem (no verification that you were the owner and for just a lark). We as engineers need to establish a code of ethics. Seriously, every profession needs to have a "do no harm" clause because clearly companies have zero ethics.

thr0wawayf00 4 years ago | | |

To be clear, we signed a contract that explicitly prevented this API to be used for anything other than our particular commercial use case and access to production creds to this service was heavily restricted. I never once saw the service being abused, but you're absolutely right. The question I kept asking myself was: who is out there using this service against the vendor's TOS for whatever reason? This industry was largely built and shaped by people that didn't care at all about the rules, and the longer I work in this field, the more cynical I become about the effectiveness of just adding more rules. It feels like a pinky promise at this point.

Kon-Peki 4 years ago | | |

This is true, for example:

https://www.toyota.com/privacyvts/

You do have the ability to opt-out, but it's not usually a simple process.

hackerfromthefu 4 years ago | | |

The supposed ability to opt out. How do you know Toyota truly removes that capability?

nudpiedo 4 years ago | | |

What car is it? In what country did you purchase it? To me that sounds beyond reality…

coliveira 4 years ago | | |

It starts with a T.

jstanley 4 years ago | | |

Why not just say what it is?

coliveira 4 years ago | | |

Use your imagination.

jstanley 4 years ago | | |

What car is this?

htrp 4 years ago | | |

You got a model X?

mns 4 years ago | |

But you can't really download a car, can you? :) Joke aside, I think we are actually going in the opposite direction. Looking at the way Tesla wants/already does keep a score of your driving, maybe self driving cars in the distant future, I would predict that we are going in the wrong direction when certain people and groups will want cars to drive away from you back to their home base or your car to refuse to start or unlock if you misbehave.

Somehow I am not sure why, we as technical people, and I would even think that most of the people in these fields are also into fiction and sci-fi, we are taking only the worst things from novels and stories, instead of the good ones, VERY slowly transforming our society in an dystopian nightmare.

c-linkage 4 years ago | | |

This is because we work for businesses that are fixated on generating revenue and profits rather than on improving the human condition.

Since this is Hacker News I'm sure there will be some who can say the two are compatible, but it will only appear that way to the wealthy and the elites -- the rest of us will gain none of the benefits and will be seen solely as "customers" or "partners" from which revenue must be extracted.

One only need look at the transformation of business from selling products to selling services, changing a sales relationship into a rental relationship. For businesses operating key or critical technical infrastructures this is equivalent to a corporate "universal basic income", such as will never occur for the common man.

Grustaf 4 years ago | | |

> This is because we work for businesses that are fixated on generating revenue and profits rather than on improving the human condition.

Not quite. Few businesses have ever been focused on improving the human condition. The new thing is their ability to control our lives, and our acceptance of that, both in terms of laws and our quiet consent.

Grustaf 4 years ago | | |

Yes that is true, as software keeps eating the world, software mores will eventually rule everything. If it has a microchip in it, it might ban you.

For cars I don't think this future is distant at all, ten years max.

CRConrad 4 years ago | | |

> taking only the worst things from novels and stories, instead of the good ones, VERY slowly transforming our society in an dystopian nightmare.

I have only one objection here: Doesn't feel all that slow to me.

coliveira 4 years ago | | |

I wouldn't say slowly... It seems this thing is becoming a dystopia quite quickly.

mhh__ 4 years ago | |

There's no way for them to take your car away... Yet.

Maybe one day your Tesla will simply drive off if you don't pay the bills, or worse work for the SEC

ballenf 4 years ago | | |

Tesla's (and increasingly all cars) are software with attached motors and they don't need to seize them physically to take them. Or disable supercharging, etc.

Just like your fridge may not dispense water if you buy the wrong filter. Or your random IOT enabled device will refuse to work if you don't let it phone home with surveillance data.

mhh__ 4 years ago | | |

It'll probably need new legislation to protect consumers.

Although I was joking about the SEC thing, what happens if Elon get's a grudge? Some would say it's your fault for buying the car, but some guarantees for consumers are useful.

kingcharles 4 years ago | |

> If I take a kitchen knife and stab someone with it I will go to prison for sure, but I don't think they will take the knife away. They definitely won't ban me from buying knives.

This is true. Generally if you stab someone the police would seize the knife as evidence, but after your trial if the prosecution didn't file a forfeiture case against the knife, then it is still yours and you can get an order from the judge to return it :)

p.s. civil forfeiture cases give the best names, e.g. United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls, 413 F. Supp. 1281 (D. Wisc. 1976)

bjarneh 4 years ago | |

> There is really nothing you could do with a car to prompt the car maker to take it from you.

Maybe not take it from you, but with new cars that are always connected (Tesla et. al). They can certainly make them quite terrible if they want to... access to superchargers has been removed when "owners" use unauthorized work shops for instance.

htrp 4 years ago | |

This is going to be one of those situations where we will have legislation passed, especially if our digital identities are tied to 3rd party providers.

Alternatively, the government will just take over basic id services (think first.last@yourcountry).

Grustaf 4 years ago | | |

We already have state run (more or less) digital ids in both Sweden and Denmark. I don't know if anyone has been denied for ideological reasons though.

marcosdumay 4 years ago | |

That's the difference between products and services and between owning and renting.

Anything that you get from the internet is a service. Even connecting to the internet is a service. And providing a service is ongoing work.

What we need is recognizing services as essential and guaranteeing people has access to them. This is something for the government to do, and the guaranteeing access part is quite complicated when the service can be exploited like email.

gbasin 4 years ago | |

Not to be That Guy, since I'm not a shill, but "Bitcoin solves this" — not really today, except for pure cryptocurrency, but I can imagine a future where ownership of our access to these services is controlled by public blockchains ...

Grustaf 4 years ago | | |

Why would that solve anything? Google could still cancel my gmail if I say something politically incorrect, regardless of their database technology. It's not like making my email public would change anything, they are not reluctant to cancel people just because others can see it. If anything, that makes the cancellation all the more effective.

magicjosh 4 years ago | | |

If your email were hosted on a public blockchain, Google could not kick you off.

- Decentralized file hosting for all the emails using IPFS instead of Google's servers

- Decentralized login using ENS / Ethereum Name Service instead of Google's login

- a UI on top of your data, plus an outbound server for relaying to/from non-blockchain email accounts

Overall, you end up with portable data thanks to IPFS, and a login through ENS to whatever UI you want to use/pay for.

This seems like a win to me. Haven't seen anything yet that pulls this together but the pieces are there. Maybe someone here wants to prototype it.

Grustaf 4 years ago | | |

By hosted, do you mean that the blockchain would act as the mail server? Wouldn't that be incredibly slow and inefficient?

magicjosh 4 years ago | | |

By hosted I mean stored on IPFS. It's a bit like downloading a file from Bittorrent in that it can be fast and distributed, but with some added crypto layers.

The only part stored on the blockchain is the address itself. The files are not stored on the blockchain.

More here: https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/what-is-ipfs/

Appreciate your question! That should get you started.

magicjosh 4 years ago | |

I like how you put this. Yes, it does seem like our ownership of digital services is tenuous, unlike owning a knife or a car. I could wake up tomorrow and conceivably be locked out of my Twitter, Gmail, Facebook accounts forever.

Perhaps in the new era of tech we'll have better data portability and ownership. Sure, maybe Google can kick me off but they should still let me export all my data.

See my reply below about public blockchains.

throw3838 4 years ago | |

And as always it will backfire on users!

Now it is impossible to find unlimited rentals, every contract has yearly extensions! In some countries landlords even rotate tenants every two years, else they would get extra rights from long stay.

grishka 4 years ago | | |

In Russia literally everyone does 11-month rental contracts that are extended every 11 months because a year or more means the tenant would get more rights and they would also need to pay taxes.

sascha_sl 4 years ago | | |

Limited rentals are actually banned unless you have a very specific reason (you plan to occupy the flat yourself, you plan to renovate extensively or the flat is meant for temp workers - so no extensions and much shorter intervals) in Germany as well.

dbspin 4 years ago | | |

This is misleading. I moved to Germany last year and there's a whole secondary market - much bigger than I've seen in any other country, in sublets. While you officially need anmeldung (city registration) to live anywhere in Germany, there are at least as many sublet apartments without anmeldung available as official rental apartments on the open market. They're usually a good deal cheaper too. Lots of people (immigrants especially) have their 'official' anmeldung with a friend or relative, and move between short term sublets (1 - 6 months, but usually 3 or less) for years at a time. There doesn't seem to be any regulation of this sublet market at all - except by the management of individual apartments (where the subletter is in violation of their own rental agreement).

sascha_sl 4 years ago | | |

I don't think it is misleading, it is simply a different class of problem. And as you said yourself, in most cases these subleases are not actually legal.

fxtentacle 4 years ago | | |

Seems to work well in Germany, though.

sascha_sl 4 years ago | | |

Because limited rentals are mostly banned, and being caught on a violation is quite bad.

sdoering 4 years ago | | |

But isn't that the exact point? That strong consumer protection enables business to earn money in a way that at least prohibits the worst behavior towards the consumers?

So essentially what OP stated?

marcosdumay 4 years ago | | |

The trick is to keep the rules reasonable.

If the owner could go to a small cases court and get a bad tenant kicked out with minimal cost, he wouldn't try so hard to defend against the rule.

nudpiedo 4 years ago | | |

I don’t know from which countries you got such pessimistic view, but for me that’s unheard

otagekki 4 years ago | |

In France, it is the case but strangely what we hear and read on the news is often the case of homeowners being unable to access their homes[1] or having tenants not pay their rent and not being kicked out[2].

Either way people will use the system to their advantage.

[1]: https://www.bfmtv.com/immobilier/un-proprietaire-dont-le-log....

[2]: https://www.ladepeche.fr/2021/11/12/temoignages-loyers-impay...

em-bee 4 years ago | |

decades ago in germany a court decided that people had a right to phone service and it could not be cut even without payment because that would cause an undue restriction to be able to function. (this was pre-internet, so i can't find a reference). there is a more recent court decision that states that service may only be cut if the lapse in payment is sufficiently high,

i believe similarly in the US you can't just take away someones car because without it they might not be able to get to work and probably would never be able to pay for their debt.

likewise having an email address is becoming a necessity in life and therefore closing an email account would make it difficult to function in todays society.

the same goes for having a bank account.

all these things should have legal protection.

stickfigure 4 years ago | |

We have email porting already. With a custom domain, you can point it at any mail host you like. It costs a few bucks a year.

There's no reason for a complicated legal structure to ensure mail forwarding (which just begs for abuse). Users already have the power. Use it.

oauea 4 years ago | | |

Are you volunteering to call my grandma and walk her through setting that up? Are you also going to pay the yearly domain fees? No? The legal framework needs some work.

layer8 4 years ago | | |

Seriously, the domain fees shouldn’t be an issue. And while registering a domain and connecting it to a suitable email provider is a bit more involved than setting up a new phone number, it’s not that complicated either. People without any technical affinity will need help with both.

I agree though that there should be legal resort to not losing your email address.

stickfigure 4 years ago | | |

Are you suggesting that everyone has a legal right to a free email address? Phone numbers aren't free either, a phone line is way more expensive than a domain.

If you think there's real demand for email portability, go into business! A service that lets you buy a domain and route to different email providers is well within the abilities of a single programmer. Make the UI idiot proof and charge a few bucks more than the registration fee.

londons_explore 4 years ago | |

I would imagine it takes the form of a government "porting server", where anyone can query an email address and receive back a different target email address.

All people sending email will be required by law to first consult the porting server to determine where to send email. It could be as simple as an http endpoint. Total development costs and running costs could be pretty low - low enough that the government can argue it is more than paid for from increased tax revenue from mail providers.

g_p 4 years ago | | |

Rather than creating a central "government porting server", you could make this a "cost of doing business" of someone wishing to provide an email service to the public.

In the event that an ISP or digital services provider wishes to cease providing email service, they could be required to provide minimal access to enable updated provision of either a forwarding email address (which the provider would forward mail to), or an MX to redirect the sender to use. This would avoid the need for a big central "porting server", and retain the simplicity of doing a DNS lookup for one or more current MX records.

Given spam challenges, the former is likely unattractive (who wants to use their own IP ranges to relay potential spam to former users?), but the latter could likely work, or be made to work.

I realise the MX approach doesn't quite work, and you'd likely need to relay the email, but this is more akin to how the phone number porting system works - you ask the number block owner on each call, and they can either accept the call, or point you towards the correct destination network.

This topic is of indirect relevance and interest to the UK telecoms regulator [1], since many households rely on an email address from their ISP, which could become a barrier to switching, or result in long-term extractive pricing from users who have no real choice other than to pay a former ISP over the odds for email service to retain an old address.

[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/features-and-new...

oauea 4 years ago | | |

> who wants to use their own IP ranges to relay potential spam to former users

In your example, anyone who wants to legally run an email hosting business.

stickfigure 4 years ago | | |

This is literally how DNS works. Get your own domain and you can forward mail anywhere in the world.

scarface74 4 years ago | | |

Having the government having information about everyone’s email address…

What could possibly go wrong?

ollifi 4 years ago | | |

Probably nothing? They (or we I guess) have phone numbers and addresses as well.

scarface74 4 years ago | | |

You have a lot more faith in a government that has proven plenty of times that they can’t be trusted with information than you probably should.

vt100 4 years ago | | |

This could perhaps be integrated with PGP keyservers

fdewnijfwg 4 years ago | |

How would you even solve porting without breaking legacy systems? You can point the MX records to another provider's server (or your own), but porting single email addresses won't really work.

estaseuropano 4 years ago | | |

You could easily oblige forwarding. You cannot shut someone out and then not allow them a) a backup of all data noe unavailable and b) and auto forward to an email of their choice.

fdewnijfwg 4 years ago | | |

Alas, email forwarding is fairly broken since DKIM/DMARC/SPF/SRS came into the picture.

As for not allowing people to save their data before shutting down, I agreee. That's a consumer rights issue though, and not a technical one.

visarga 4 years ago | | |

Forwarding won't be enough if you need to reply from the same email address.

thfuran 4 years ago | | |

I assume a similar issue existed for telephone numbers. Was it wrong to require that they be portable?

g_p 4 years ago | | |

When you dial a number, you generally look up the owner of the number range in a list, then initiate signalling contact with them. They may take the incoming messages, or they may point you towards another network the user can be reached on (i.e. if they have ported their number)

In essence, in the regulated telecoms space, the number block owner retains responsibility for routing to the new network after a number port.

thfuran 4 years ago | | |

And did all Telecom providers have the ability to do that sort of forwarding before the statutory requirement to allow numbers to be ported?

criddell 4 years ago | | |

Legacy systems will be broken.

sundarurfriend 4 years ago | |

I honestly find the prefixes to be unnecessarily noisy these days, and prefer it like this - the (lack of) domain name next to the title tells me enough about the post, and I much prefer to quickly get to the actual title of the post rather than a couple of low information words at the beginning.

It was fine when it was one post in a hundred that was a "Verb HN", but these days these are much more common, and the prefixes make the front page more noisy and less signal-y than I prefer. If you aren't in the habit of taking a quick glance at the domain name before opening a link, I'd encourage you to start doing that, for more reasons than this.

dewey 4 years ago | |

I wish there was just a dropdown in the "Submit" view to pick well-known prefixes.

playpause 4 years ago | |

I'm curious, what problem does it create for you, clicking a link you momentarily thought was to an external site before realising it's actually a discussion on this site? Honest question, you might have a good answer, I'm not trying to be rhetorical.

dewey 4 years ago | | |

Maybe not necessarily a "problem" but giving them the right prefix makes them show up in the https://news.ycombinator.com/show and https://news.ycombinator.com/ask header links which are sometimes also implemented in HN apps as separate categories.

andyjohnson0 4 years ago | | |

> I'm curious, what problem does it create for you, clicking a link you momentarily thought was to an external site before realising it's actually a discussion on this site? Honest question, you might have a good answer, I'm not trying to be rhetorical.

Good question. And my answer is probably that, as things stand, I'm not greatly inconvenienced by it.

My original post was motivated mainly by "that's not how it's done here". By internet standards, I think that HN does pretty well as a self-organising community. And part of that is a general, loose adherence to norms. To maintain that community, I think that sometimes it is necessary for its members to point-out those norms in a friendly way - without trying to police anyone's behaviour. Thats really all I was trying to do.

To me, an important part of HN's value is to direct me to external things. If the norms change so that a significant number of submissions are hosted directly on the site itself, then HN becomes a very different beast. Probably more inward looking, and maybe more like that other site that the guidelines tell us not to compare it to. I think that would be regrettable.

More practically, "Tell HN" and "Ask HN" are hints that the post is addressing the HN community rather than the entire net. That could be useful in deciding whether to read it. And, as a sibling comment mentions, those prefixes result in posts being added to certain lists.

playpause 4 years ago | | |

Totally agree and to be honest I slightly misunderstood your original comment. You’re definitely being helpful to politely encourage use of the prefix conventions where they are a good fit.

nudpiedo 4 years ago | | |

I would prefer to know it AOT as I find it much more insightful, and even more likely to click on the link.

TameAntelope 4 years ago | |

Hm, I’m not sure where you got the idea that HN was primarily about discussing articles, because that is in no way true.

andyjohnson0 4 years ago | | |

Operative word is external not discussing.

TameAntelope 4 years ago | | |

Neither is true, though!

I know we’re getting super meta, but let dang police the site. Neither of us should be dealing with comments or submissions that “don’t fit HN”.

magusd 4 years ago | |

my bad :(

chrismorgan 4 years ago | |

Well, IMAP rather than POP3. I don’t think there’s a single legitimate reason to use POP3 any more (or has been for at least a decade).

The fetch approach has some significant caveats.

Firstly, it introduces something like 5–10 minutes of latency before you receive messages compared with forwarding, so it’s not suitable for every purpose. If you’re accessing via the webmail, forcing a refresh may trigger remote fetches too, if you know to expect something.

Secondly, if you leave messages on the server, there’s an undocumented limit at which point it will stop fetching mail, probably without notifying you. Back in early I think it was 2015, I went for a couple of weeks before I realised I wasn’t getting any email to what had been my primary address for six or so years (there were still just enough things going to my @gmail.com address that I didn’t notice), and on investigation, it told me that it refused to fetch from a mailbox containing more than 50,000 messages.

(Qualifier: I haven’t touched Gmail for five years (I now use Fastmail), so parts of this could be obsolete or altered.)

knorker 4 years ago | | |

> Well, IMAP rather than POP3.

I set this up a couple of weeks ago. I think Gmail only allows pop3 for email fetching, because I just couldn't get it to even try connecting to my IMAP. pop worked great though.

The settings even lists "POP Server", not "Server", even if you choose port 143 or 993

> I don’t think there’s a single legitimate reason to use POP3 any more

Well, pop was designed as a "download the messages" protocol, IMAP as a "keep messages on the server" protocol, right?

So while it doesn't prevent IMAP, pop is actually a better mapping in intent.

Pop is clear about what "the email" is. IMAP opens questions like "so… all email? Or just INBOX, or what?". And while it's not mandatory to delete the emails from the server with pop, it becomes even more of a complex question with IMAP.

The choice of pop3 very strongly implies answers to all of these questions, with no surprises.

Are there downsides to pop here that I'm not considering?

chrismorgan 4 years ago | | |

The main one I had in mind was POP3’s behaviour around deletion; my recollection is that if you don’t want it to work that way (and I think you might prefer not to in general, so you can be confident of having your own copy of everything), you run into practical performance, bandwidth and processing limits much sooner, because messages don’t have any external identity, so the receiver has to download everything every time to check if it’s seen it before. And you can’t just say “well only look at messages in this folder”—POP3 sees all, and that’s a problem.

But y’know what, I’m going to retract my comment for the case where you don’t want to keep a copy of anything. For most places, POP3 is generally unsuitable, but for this specific type of destructive server-to-server fetching, it’s reasonable.

KMnO4 4 years ago | | |

> and on investigation, it told me that it refused to fetch from a mailbox containing more than 50,000 messages.

Ironically, you would not have this problem with POP3.

chrismorgan 4 years ago | | |

… because POP3 isn’t able to leave messages on the server, it’s such a coarse instrument.

You can instruct IMAP fetches to delete too, and that’ll avoid this problem. Better would be to move emails into a new mailbox after fetching them, so that you don’t need to see them again but they’re still there, but I don’t know if anything supports that concept.

knorker 4 years ago | | |

> Better would be to move emails into a new mailbox after fetching them, so that you don’t need to see them again but they’re still there, but I don’t know if anything supports that concept.

The best way to do this, in my opinion, is to tee the emails to another mailbox as they come in, not as they get pulled from the inbox.

chrismorgan 4 years ago | | |

Yeah, that’ll have much better support.

yuubi 4 years ago | | |

POP3 defines separate retrieve and delete requests. Some servers lose messages when you retrieve them, but I've only seen that misbehavior on major ISPs.

akkartik 4 years ago | |

I have Gmail forwarding all spam to my domain/fastmail. Any issues that way?

RegBarclay 4 years ago | |

I've had that happen. I have my own domain, but some of my family just have it set to forward to gmail and they've had mail service disabled intermittently because of spam coming from the domain account.

norom 4 years ago | |

> I couldn't be happier with the switch (I was using Protonmail before, and Gmail a long time ago)

I am curious: What made you switch from Protonmail to Fastmail?

rcMgD2BwE72F 4 years ago | | |

You can't use any 3rd party mail app on Android and the official one is really bad (no thread view, fails to send emails to some valid addresses…). Also, you can't two-way sync your contacts. And the encryption thing is not really useful since too few people are on Protonmail (so all your messages will be stored in plain text somewhere) and Protonmail will share your data anyway (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28427259).

101008 4 years ago | |

I tried to do this long ago but I have two main fears:

1. Is it easy to set up the redirect from Gmail to the new account?

2. When I send email from new account (custom domain), how are you completely sure it is not going to be on spam? I send unsolicited emails to people in big corps (journalist asking for interviews/comments, not spammy :-)

nicoburns 4 years ago | | |

> 1. Is it easy to set up the redirect from Gmail to the new account?

Yes super easy. You can do this using Gmail's filter service. However, many services will also let you log in to gmail via POP/IMAP (OAuth for auth) and fetch the email from your gmail for you that way.

> 2. When I send email from new account (custom domain), how are you completely sure it is not going to be on spam? I send unsolicited emails to people in big corps (journalist asking for interviews/comments, not spammy :-)

I guess it's hard to know for sure, but I've not noticed any problems with this when the underlying provider is a well-known sender such as Gmail or Fastmail.

throwaway984393 4 years ago | | |

You don't need to set up anything in Gmail either, Fastmail has Gmail connectors that pull all your mail and calendars and even lets you send email through Gmail from Fastmail. It's ridiculously convenient.

orangepurple 4 years ago | | |

I have had Fastmail pull from Gmail for about 10 years just in case I need to log into a website I haven't logged into for ages. It just works. My gmail is abandoned save for the occasional password reset which flows through Gmail to Fastmail.

montroser 4 years ago | | |

You point your domain to Gmail. Then when they ban you, you point your domain instead to the new place, like Fastmail. So it's not really redirecting from Gmail, it's just changing a DNS record.

On sending from a custom domain, your mail provider walks you through setting up a few additional DNS records (for DKIM, SPF) that allow you to send from your domain through their servers. They maintain the reputation of their IPs and so you get their good deliverability.

rcMgD2BwE72F 4 years ago | | |

1. Yes, can't be easier 2. None of my emails have been flagged as spam.

bhy 4 years ago | |

By doing this you are trusting the .contact gTLD provider. Do you have idea how reliable are they? Would they reclaim your domain for some reason?

Tepix 4 years ago | | |

They have to follow the regulations of the gTLD. They can't just reclaim your domain at will.

For the .contact gTLD you will find them at https://donuts.domains/about/policies/ or over at ICANN.