Comment on How screwed would one be if their email provider shuts down?

xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• howrar@lemmy.ca ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  This isn’t without its own problems. If you fail to renew your domain and someone else picks it up, they now have access to all your accounts. At least with a popular provider like Gmail, they don’t allow emails to be reused, and if they ever discontinue email services and drop the gmail.com domain, everyone will know about it and know that password reset requests should not be sent to these emails.

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• mike_wooskey@lemmy.thewooskeys.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Using your own domain definitely makes it easy to get back up by just switching providers. But what about all your historical emails? If your original provider goes poof, what’s the plan? I connect via IMAP, so all my emails are stored on the provider’s servers, right? Or do email apps keep local copies, too?

  Are there backup services for emails? I seem to recall Outlook having some kind of archive feature (I haven’t used outlook in decades), but I think I remember it was only recoverable in outlook and even then, it was a pain to search for a particular email.

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  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    The proper email programs have an option somewhere in the settings to either store a copy of the mailbox on the computer, or not do it. I'm pretty sure that's in Thunderbird, Evolution, etx. I'm not sure about Outlook.

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    • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      You can create an archive of your emails using Mail in MacOS also.

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  • sandalbucket@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    For historic emails, you could setup a forwarding rule from the primary to the backup. This would need to be done in advance of course

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  • scsi@lemm.ee ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    If you have access to some sort of basic Linux system (cloud server, local server whatever works for you) you can run a program on a timer such as isync.sourceforge.io (Debian package: isync) which reads email from one source and clones it to another. Be careful and run it in a security context that meets your needs (I use a local laptop w/encryption at home that runs headless 24/7, think raspberry Pi mode).

    This includes IMAP (1) -> IMAP (2) as well as IMAP -> Local and so on; as with any app you’ll need to spend a bit learning how to build the optimum config file for your needs, but once you get it going it’s truly a “set and forget” little widget. Use an on-fail service like healthchecks.io in your wrapper script to get notified on error, then go about your life.

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    • mike_wooskey@lemmy.thewooskeys.com ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Thanks, @scsi@lemm.ee!

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