Since a lot of people on the libertarian right would be more accurately called monarcho-capitalists it seems understandable.
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And forget home internet service-- you might run afoul of the “no servers” clause.
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It’s a popular idea, but will require a full and final rout of Republicans and corporatist Democrats to have any chance of happening.
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I actually was going that route at one point, had my own domain etc, on a business internet connection. Problem was, the ISP was constantly blocking inbound traffic, and there was a problem of my domain not being accepted by a lot of email providers (because it was not a “big enough” site), and when I moved hosting to a hosting provider, still had the “small company domain” problem and it was just a pain to maintain. So, never was as reliable as just using one of the big providers like yahoo.
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Purchase web hosting that includes full email. Register a domain, pre-paid for approximately ever if that puts you at greater ease, but definitely do not register the name through your hosting provider.
You then have two basic choices: either forward all mail coming to Gmail, Ymail, etc. to an @dreamofthedarkstar.com email address and send/receive email from your own mailserver, or have mail sent to your domain forwarded to Gmail or whomever, and continue using their interface for mail.
The second choice still defends you against this issue, but if it happened you would lose all mail sent to you until you had changed either your mail forwarding or your DNS to route around that damage.
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Why not?
By your own mailserver, do you mean one that you maintain on your own colocated iron? Or the ISP’s mailserver that’s doing the mailserving for your domain?
That seems entirely doable; gmail will allow you to send mail as another email address, though it might put that ‘sent on behalf of’ thing on the From header… would it?
Yes, it does seem it might work, and you’d probably quickly notice is the hammer fell, so the amount of mail you lose would be minimized. However, couldn’t you keep a copy of all incoming mail at your ISP, as well as outgoing messages (maybe bcc’ing yourself)? Maybe once in a while archiving it there rather than let gmail do that?
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Algorithms.
I had a comparable experience. I ran a blog and added banner ads courtesy of Google Adsense. I put a line of text under the banner that said “support our sponsors!”. An automated bot later saw this and decided it violated google’s rules about “incentivizing clicks on ads”. My entire domain and all my email addresses on that domain were immediately banned for life from all Google and YouTube ad services. There is no appeal process, no way to reach a human to correct the situation, nor even so much as a customer service chat bot in Ad Sense. They intentionally wall it off from all possible contact by users.
I later rebranded my business anyway and was able to get back in with a new domain and new accounts, but the old stuff is burned forever because I put “support our sponsors” under an ad.
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Gosh, it’s as if google started out saying, “Don’t be evil,” but planning the whole time to become evil in ways no one yet expected.
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Think of this is a pre-digital context. “Honest Larry’s Mail Stop” opens down the street. You have all the people who send you mail send them to a box at Larry’s rather than your home. Larry says he has a convenient vault where he can store all that paper filling your file cabinets. No charge. You give Larry all your checks, your bankbook, the documents for your mortgage and auto loan. Larry suggests he can also store all your business and financial records for you, no charge. You agree. While you’re at it, Larry says, why not let me store all your family photos, day-timers, recipes, and your kid’s homework in my super-secure vaults? You do. Larry installs a switchboard and points out how convenient it would be to route all your phone calls through his answering service. No extra charge! Everything works like a charm. You gain a lot of space in your home. You don’t have to worry about storing and digging out your stuff. If you need anything you just pop down to Larry’s and he’ll get it from his vault. One night Larry shuts down his shop, loads a van with a vault full of the stuff people gave him, and absconds to a distant country with no extradition treaty. On Monday morning you pop down to Larry’s and find a “For Lease” sign on the door. You’re stuck. Meanwhile Larry lives by selling off all the stuff people gave him while he opens another Mail Stop.
Somehow after all this time people still haven’t got it through their heads that Google is not a “service.” Google is a commercial entity with the sole purpose of making profit. It has no interest in fairness, respect, transparency, ethics, doing no evil, or any other high-minded concept. You trust Google with huge chunks of your life and they owe you nothing in return. “You knew I was a snake when you took me in.”
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So that it is even easier for the NSA to eavesdrop on all communication? Doesn’t sound like such a great idea.
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! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
(Discourse doesn’t think that’s a cogent response; beg to differ, do I.)
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I “print” those as PDFs and store them on redundant media.
Plus printouts of the really important/costly/PITA-to-recover stuff at two different locations.
Two is one, and one is none.
(And like everybody else, I learned that the hard way. Thankfully at a time before cloud services etc, when this sort of thing was a nuisance, not something potentially disrupting your whole life.)
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That was always just a catchphrase.
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Google’s business model (one of them) is cloud backup.
Could there be a business model along the lines of cloud backup backup?
After all, there is insurance insurance.
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Runbox out of Norway is who I use, and they’re WONDERFUL.
Excellent point and post. In my state, there was a period of time where the DMV decided to stop mailing reminders that your registration was due (thanks to a shitty governor’s budget cuts). Your only option was to get an email reminder.
We have large swaths of the country without broadband and we have many people without any internet access at all, while at the same time we’re requiring people to have access to these things to be able to fully function in society. It’s so messed up, and frankly the “i told yas” here regarding eggs in baskets are extremely privileged and tone deaf in that regard. We have a long way to go to digital equality for everyone, and most people are entirely unconcerned.
If my hosting provider pisses me off, I can change the DNS settings of my domain name to point to a new hosting provider. If they were also the registrar of the domains they are hosting, they have all the leverage. By registering my domains with a company that does only domain names, they still have leverage to screw me, but far less incentive. So the registrar becomes a (highly regulated) single point of failure. But that’s just plain unavoidable.
My hosting provider runs that as part of the deal. I can access it via webmail, and/or I can tie any mail client to it just like any other mail provider. I have zero to run or maintain that is any different from ISP-provided mail.
No idea.
My primary mail client is Mail.app on OSX. It talks to my mailserver via IMAP, and pulls down local copies of everything that isn’t crap (and, let’s be honest, much that is crap). So all my mail is instantly searchable via Spotlight, and those local copies are backed up by TimeMachine.
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Fastmail is also good. I’ve been using them for years.
I believe I read that part of the data that was fed into GPT-3 was the contents of everybody’s Gmail. I’m not sure I like that.
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Even easier? You say that as if they aren’t already tapped in everywhere on the backbone. There’s no way to make it easier.
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