[HN Gopher] Become unbannable from your email
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Become unbannable from your email
Author : bfoks
Score : 82 points
Date : 2025-10-07 21:39 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (karboosx.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (karboosx.net)
| Tepix wrote:
| Forwarding mail is problematic. If you forward spam, your spam
| score can increase and suddenly you're on a blacklist.
|
| Also when you pick an email provider, pick one with a good
| privacy policy.
| jsbisviewtiful wrote:
| Yeah the idea is good but spam scores would definitely crater
| your deliverability - and quickly. It's hard enough keeping
| spam scores within a reasonable threshold while sending
| _subscriber approved_ marketing emails.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| TL;DR: Step 1: Get Your Own Domain Step 2: Make Backups
|
| This is not sufficient. Even your domain can be seized. There is
| no way for any service dependent on the DNS System to be
| irrevocably owned.
| iamnothere wrote:
| I don't think TFA is talking about hosting email for well-known
| piracy sites or terrorists. My guess is they are more concerned
| about arbitrary and capricious account bans for supposed TOS
| violations, which is more relevant to ordinary people. Your
| domain won't be seized by someone because Google doesn't like
| your YouTube upload or whatever.
| toast0 wrote:
| > There is no way for any service dependent on the DNS System
| to be irrevocably owned.
|
| All you need to do is get an ISO-3166-1 alpha-2 code issued for
| you, and then never change your name, and you're golden.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| Nope, again, not enough.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-
| level_domain#Historical_do...
| pzmarzly wrote:
| Counterpoint: I lost a domain when a registrar went out of
| business, and another when a registrar bumped the price 10x and
| refused to give me authenticode unless I physically show up to
| their office. Sure, I cheapened out and used shady cheap
| registrars, and this all happened a while ago so things are
| probably more regulated now, but for comparison I never
| permanently lost access to hosted email. (Losing access
| temporarily is another thing, Google likes blocking me from my
| own account when travelling.)
| mobilemidget wrote:
| I'm surprised to read they had an actual physical office you
| _could_ show up :)
|
| was it a very distant location to head out to?
| iamnothere wrote:
| This is why you (1) keep a local backup and (2) never ever use
| shady registrars for anything important. Hopefully you have
| learned from this and you regularly backup your email from
| Google in case your account becomes inaccessible for whatever
| reason.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| I think the main worry about losing access to email is not
| losing access to your historical archive of email messages,
| but rather your sudden inability to reset passwords and
| recover access to other accounts.
|
| Not to mention the risk that someone else takes possession of
| said email accounts and domains, in which case they
| essentially own every account you have that's bound to that
| email.
| iamnothere wrote:
| [delayed]
| nodja wrote:
| For people reading this that are worried, .com and .net domains
| are price capped and while the price may rise, it's regulated
| directly by the ICANN. If you're paying more than that then
| either your registrar is not following ICANN regulations or
| you're buying a domain that is being resold by a third party.
| rwky wrote:
| Same thing happened to me over 20 years ago back then it was
| common to get domain hosting email all from one provider. They
| hiked up the price to something extortionate and changed the
| owner details on the domain to themselves cost me a fair penny
| to get that back from then on I kept my domain email and
| hosting all separate and stuck with what are hopefully more
| reputable providers. And of course these days if it happened
| I'd go straight to legal action something that young me didn't
| think of.
| hu3 wrote:
| That's good but make sure you don't lose the domain. Ever.
| brulard wrote:
| And that's the real hard part
| iamnothere wrote:
| Have you ever lost a domain? I haven't despite having many
| domains across a number of registrars over the years. Are
| people just using bad registrars or what?
| brulard wrote:
| Yes, I have. Due to a human mistake we lost a family
| domain, where I hosted one of my important e-mails.
| manytimesaway wrote:
| "How to become unbannable"
|
| Step 1 : go with the one company that's known worldwide for
| abusive & permanent bans with no recourse.
|
| This post is a bit too generic, but it's true that using your own
| domain for mailing is the best solution to avoid getting locked
| out. Although you need to pick a good registrar, too...
| morshu9001 wrote:
| well your recourse is repointing the domain
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I learned this lesson when switching away from the first ISP I
| had email through. Rather than switching to another transient ISP
| email, I registered a domain. I've been through a couple of email
| providers but my email address never needs to change again.
| simojo wrote:
| There are online services where a bad actor can enter your email
| to automatically sign you up for hundreds, thousands of marketing
| emails. In the event that that happens, given that you have full
| control over the domain, you could just divert whatever
| <x>@yourdomain.com to a black hole. What will happen when email
| attacks become more advanced--to the point of signing up
| thousands of different <x'>@yourdomain.com? What strategy would
| one have then? You would most certainly have to part ways with
| that domain.
|
| The author makes a good point, your email address is (arguably)
| more important than your home address. Perhaps there already are,
| but I hope for better safeguards against these kinds of attacks.
| kibwen wrote:
| For every crucial service (banking, etc), generate a unique,
| cryptographically-strong email address, save it to your
| password manager, and have its mail forwarded to your common
| inbox. If only phone numbers were so easy to mask.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| 1) what does it mean for an email *address* to be
| cryptographically strong?
|
| 2) in case of hard to remember address, what do you do if
| asked to write it down with no access to your records? (It
| happened to me once before)
| dotancohen wrote:
| I already am in that situation. Like onions and Ogres, my email
| defense is in layers.
|
| 1. Specific known compromised TO addresses are sent to devnull.
|
| 2. Specific FROM senders are whitelisted.
|
| 3. Three or sometimes four heuristics engines evaluate. If any
| of them pass the mail, it goes to a separate new-senders inbox.
| I thus get maybe a dozen spam messages per week in that box -
| and five figures of messages rejected.
|
| I used to tweak it a lot, now I just occasionally add another
| FROM address to the whitelist.
| jwkerr wrote:
| Over the past few weeks I've been systematically migrating every
| one of my accounts to a domain under my control.
|
| During the process I've been marking them in a spreadsheet with
| their 2FA status (no 2FA, TOTP, security key, etc.) and adding
| their passwords to a password manager.
|
| This is all in case I ever need to go through the migration
| process again for whatever reason, or if I lose/break a Yubikey,
| I will know what I'm signed up for, and will know where to enrol
| my new Yubikey(s).
|
| It really is a massive hinge for many people that isn't even
| really considered, most people's entire digital lives would be
| uprooted if they lost access to their email for whatever reason.
|
| Thankfully that doesn't really ever happen to most "normal"
| people to my knowledge, since most just use Gmail, but I know it
| can and has happened through account bans or such.
| iamnothere wrote:
| Looks like a good intro for people who want partial self-hosting,
| which is better than leaving it with a megacorp (especially for
| non-professional email).
|
| In before:
|
| * running your own mail is too much of a burden
|
| * I used to host my own mail but I couldn't figure out DNS or
| used a bad IP or something and Microsoft/Gmail won't accept my
| mail
|
| * if "they" want to ban you they will just seize your domain or
| kick down your door and shoot your dog
|
| * it's good that they can ban you from your email because I don't
| like spam
|
| Edit: lol, I was not in fact "in before" the comment about domain
| seizures. Unbelievable.
| mobilemidget wrote:
| Creating aliases for the addresses you are actually using, e.g. a
| netflix@ signup is preferred over a general catch all, .. and all
| that spam senders can generate approach.
| ROBLOX_MOMENTS wrote:
| Some services will also ban you for this. Samsung, Amazon, ...
| so you have to use generic or random words on left side.
| gblargg wrote:
| I like email forwarding services like mailgw [1]. If my email
| provider gives me problems, I can just forward to a different
| one.
|
| [1] https://www.mailgw.com
| fnord77 wrote:
| Services should allow secondary email addresses.
| marssaxman wrote:
| I've been doing this for years, though I don't really think of it
| as "having a backup" so much as "using an IMAP client". Works
| fine. It's really useful to be able to make up a new email
| address for every company who wants one; they each get their own
| folder. If I get any unexpected mail, it's obvious where it came
| from and easy to deal with, though in practice this rarely
| happens.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I've been doing this for years
|
| Downloading email via POP or IMAP? Ever since I started using
| email in the 90's. I never deviated from it. In the old days,
| even the free mail hosts gave you POP access.
|
| My own domain? Doing it for over 20 years.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Yep, pretty much the same story here. The only (relatively)
| recent innovation is the bit where mail sent to
| foo@domain.com lands in a folder called "foo", so I neither
| have to sort out a messy inbox nor check many accounts
| individually.
| bigwheels wrote:
| As of last week, Google is on-track to discontinue POP-
| polling functionality. I've been using this for about 20
| years, not sure what to do. What a pain.
|
| _Gmail will no longer support checking emails from third-
| party accounts via POP (support.google.com)_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45439670 - 6 days ago,
| 372 comments
| pessimizer wrote:
| This is alarming if you just skim the headline (which I
| did, and was slightly alarmed), but it is about having
| gmail download from third-party accounts, not downloading
| emails from gmail. I don't think many people do this
| anyway, but I'm sure it was very convenient for some.
| ozim wrote:
| You don't have to have a single email address. I have plenty and
| various providers.
|
| Then use mail client instead of webmail. I use thunderbird and
| have multiple boxes I just backup Thunderbird profiles folder to
| my NAS.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Local mail clients are excellent for taking full control of
| your mail without contortions.
| wtf77 wrote:
| That's fine for your own domain, but I usually download my emails
| via IMAP and don't leave anything on the remote server. Finally,
| do you really keep your emails? Emails are ephemeral, often just
| informative, and if there's anything important, I process it and
| delete the email. I may archive 'sentimental' emails, but I
| rarely search the archive as I mainly delete emails.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Do you mean "on the server?" I don't -- and just the opposite
| here; the cost of keeping literally all of them is close enough
| to zero, I _never_ delete any emails and use "read/unread." I
| just archive yearly.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I keep mail because there's been things that only became
| important or useful long after the fact. You just never know.
|
| They can also serve as a sort of snapshot of a certain point in
| time that's very effective at jogging your memory. I've had
| occasions where old emails reminded me of things that happened
| that I'd nearly forgotten or conflated details about.
| bxsioshc wrote:
| I never really understood why "owning" a domain is any more
| owning than you own your Gmail address: a company is letting you
| use it and that works until they don't. What an I missing?
| lxgr wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Why bet on that instead of doing it the other way around (i.e.
| making the self-operated mail server the primary that forwards to
| the service provider inbox), or at least practicing doing so by
| pointing the MX records accordingly?
| pseidemann wrote:
| Afaik sending emails is much harder than receiving, because of
| several layers of anti-spam measurements, which don't apply for
| receiving (besides local spam filters).
| jrm4 wrote:
| Been doing this for years, and surprised he didn't seem to
| mention the other benefit: "infinity" email addresses. Oh, rando
| burger spot wants an email for some free fries? Great, hit me up
| at randoburgerspot@"mydomain".com .
| deadbabe wrote:
| This is the most useful thing about having your own domain for
| email.
| imiric wrote:
| I like that as well, but it's exhausting having to explain
| every time that, no, I don't in fact work at randoburgerspot...
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