I lost one, sent the emails I might need to another account. So that was ok but I forgot to change the email on every freaking service I use so it was very difficult to recover some accounts.

I recently lost my oldest email and I didn’t plan accordingly. Roadrunner email. It’s still a pain in the butt. I’ve managed to change almost everything (that I can REMEMBER) to my newer email, but there are two that haven’t been changed because they require an email to the old email first… It’s gone.

That email was probably 20 years old and I have no idea what services I had signed up through it.

The moral of my story is to read emails from your email provider. Apparently they sent out warnings 6 months in advance, but I always ignored their emails.

If Gmail goes belly up, you won’t have a problem. Every service will have a problem. You can just ride along with all the other customers.

Get a domain and register an MX record.

If your email provider shuts down, forward the mail somewhere else.

I’d be fine. If my email provider goes away, my troubles are over, because my email provider is me!

All my shit is in the Google ecosystem. I am fairly confident that Gmail is not going away anytime soon. However, I am more afraid that some obscure ToS violation will forcibly disconnect me from their ecosystem, and I will have to scramble to make sure all my contacts have my alternate info. I am doubly screwed, as a Google Fi customer. If we all get suddenly degoogled, I lose a phone number that I have had for over 20 years.

As good a deal that Fi is for me (I normally don’t use bandwidth unless I travel internationally), I may switch soon just to reduce my exposure to Google.

I own my own domain and back up my emails. It would be a pain and cost a few $ but I’d migrate to something else or self host.

Cox just shut down their email services. They did so by transitioning everyone to yahoo and gave yahoo the cox.net email domain. As long as the provider plans accordingly, they can shut down and not screw over their customers. It was hell getting grandparents to understand their email changed but not really, and just to reconfigure outlook for them so they can keep getting those prayer requests. “No grandma, that’s your windows password, what’s your email password? because that doesn’t work. You know what, I’ll just look it up in the registry.” It was a pretty seamless transition all things considered.

The only way to protect yourself from something like this is to own your own domain name.
You can still use something like Google as a provider but you can switch providers and recreate the same email addresses.

You’d be fucked like a choirboy at a Viagra-sponsored catholic-con.

Especially if they let the domain expire and you didn’t have time to migrate all those accounts that can be reset with just an email and a bad actor then registers the domain - or even just a slightly dumb actor that allows someone else to use what was your old email address.

I have all of my email sent to my own domain, so while I would lose previous emails, if my provider just up and shut down, I could just switch to another provider, change a few records on my DNS, and all of my emails would go to my new provider from then on with no problem. I control the domain after the “@” sign.

very, since most online services and government agencies depend on you having an email address to contact/let you use their service.

Wouldn’t be too bad. I use Keepass for my bookmarks and most of my accounts with the database synced by Syncthing. If Syncthing and all of my devices also went down it’d be a pain but I’d have a fairly recent copy of the database which I backup to a pen drive I always keep with me. I’d have to spend a day logging into my accounts and updating the email but then I’d probably go back to just using Keepass from my pen drive and backing up to a second one like I used to until I found another solution for syncing it.

I use a free email service with my custom domain. If it went down I’d just switch to another. Down time would likely just be while DNS records proliferated.

Not so bad. I use gmail as a backup for some accounts in case something happens to my VPS or domain, and my Amazon account is still linked to it out of laziness, but otherwise I never use it.

Oh. Except that I have an Android phone, and that’s linked to my gmail, although I don’t use any Google apps or services beyond Play. So I suppose my phone would stop working. Everything’s backed up, though, so maybe it’d be a good thing; maybe it’d motivate me to pull the trigger on a Light Phone. I kinda want a Minimal Phone because my F&F uses Jami, but that’d still be an Android phone, so it wouldn’t work either.