Clickbait-y title, I know :D but I stand by it!
I noticed that many people still treat email like some sort of second-class citizen when it comes to personal information, and the urgency here is real. I think, in today's world where everything is in apps and requires an account, email has become even more important than your home address.
Why Your Email Is Your Digital Home
Think about it for a moment. What would happen to you if you lost access to your email and needed to change it? Now, compare that to changing your home address.
For the second one, maybe you'd need to change some delivery addresses, and update government documents and bills. But that's common practice, and most places probably have procedures to handle that, and it's still not that many places. It's a solvable chore.
Now think if you lost access to your email address. What would you have to do to fix it? Create a new one, fine. But how will you log into all of your apps where the identifier is the email address itself? You need to contact each of the companies through their customer service, which is often painful.
And think how many conversations you would have to have? Uber? Customer service. Netflix? Customer service. YouTube/Google? Customer service. It's just a nightmare.
Look at how many important things you are getting today in your emails. Invoices → email. Password resets → email. Security notices → email.
My point here is that email has become our second home address on the internet. And we use that one piece of personal information way more than our normal address these days.
The "How": Taking Control of Your Email
Okay, so the boring "why" we covered. Now it's the part where I'm showing you how to deal with it.
I will show you how I have it set up.
Step 1: Get Your Own Domain
The biggest problem with free email addresses is that they are under someone else's domain, so they have full control over your email address.
To fix that, you first need to have your email address under your own domain.
For that, you need to find a provider that is well-respected in the "email community." Why? Because the email protocol is quite an interesting case of "we don't ditch old stuff." To properly use email without constant rejection from various email providers, your domain needs to be "known" by them. So, setting up your own email server is, in practice, out of the question.
But you can go, for example, with Google (G Suite/Google Workspace), or with Proton Email, or anything else that is somewhat well known.
I went with G Suite from Google because it comes with a slightly different privacy policy than normal Gmail, and only G Suite offers custom domains in the Google ecosystem. So, to ease myself from having a second, secondary Gmail, I went with this one. But others are also viable options.
Next, you need to follow the instructions of your chosen provider to set up your own email address on your domain. In practice, it will involve setting DNS MX records for your domain and some verification.
Oh, and I highly recommend providers that offer a "catch-all" feature. This way, you can have one main email address and unlimited @yourdomain.com email addresses. It's useful to have it separated, like [email protected] , but still receive the emails inside the same inbox.
Step 2: The Unbannable Backup
Now, you have your domain, and your email is under that domain. We don't stop here. Your emails are still inside your email provider. If they block you, you will probably lose access to previous emails, but at least now you have the option to just switch MX records to a different provider to start receiving emails again.
But we don't want that! We want full control over our emails!!!
So how do we handle it? Simple: making a backup!
The easiest would be to set up your local email software like Outlook or Thunderbird to download all emails to your local computer. It's something, and it will work, but if you happen to have some local server, I have a better proposition.
Set up some simple email server on your local server. I'm using my NAS. Just pick a subdomain for your email so it will look like [email protected] .
With your simple local email server, you can set up your email provider to always forward any email to your local server.
With that, you will always have a copy of every email on your server. So even if you are on vacation and your service provider blocks you from accessing your inbox, you will still have your copy.
graph LR A[Author/Sender] --> B(Your Email Provider); B --> C(Online Inbox/Access); B -- Forward Email --> D(Local Backup Server); D --> E[Your Local Email Copy];
And would you like to hear the bonus tip? With this solution, there's a high chance that if they ban you by mistake (AI bots are to blame), they will not disable the forwarding mechanism. They will just not allow you to authenticate to your account. That means you will still be able to read all your emails even when banned from your inbox!
So there you have it. That's my method for making your most important internet asset, your email, truly unbannable and resilient. It takes a little setup, but the peace of mind knowing that I'm in control of my digital life—not some huge corporation—is totally worth it. Now go take back control!