I’ve moved almost completely to Proton Mail. I expect I’ll end up keeping a Google or Outlook account, not for use as a primary account, but as a recovery account or to access other services.
I currently see a lot less value in the google account than outlook, but that’s because my family does need access to full blown office. Libre office does 98% of what I need, but on occasion I do need office. An install of 2010 would probably meet that requirement as well. Firefox is set to delete cookies on exit, and I do not ever stay signed into these services.
Does anyone else keep free service email accounts around, and if so, what do you use them for? What’s the pit-fall I’m not seeing if I try to restrict them and treat them with the Principle of Least Privileged model?
Honestly email is the last frontier in privacy I haven’t been able to reform in my life… can’t self host since it’s a lot of work and trouble. And you gotta trust that companies will do the right thing with your data
An important first step that you can do before any “real” selfhosting is to get your own domain that you control. That way you can more easily switch providers (or start selfhosting) later on without having to distribute the knowledge of your changed email address to all relevant contacts and services.
I’m still using Gmail (lazy and it works), but I’ve switched fully to using only email addresses on domains that I own.
It is only a lot of work to set it up. Once done, though - just keep renewing the domain and applying updates to the server. ~5 moneyunits/month for the server and ~10/year for the domain. Get in touch if you’re genuinely interested - I can give you a hand.
Out of curiosity, I’ve heard that emails being undelivered is a huge problem with self hosting as well since it gets flagged as spam. Is this something you’ve frequently encountered?
Also I appreciate the offer for help and will definitely consider it!
I’ve only really had issues with outlook rejecting email when I had DKIM config messed up, but it’s been fine the last few years. I’ve emailed friends, companies, their support endpoints - it’s worked well. There are penalties for new domains and new IPs used within the domain, but they go away in a week or so.
I’ve done the same as you, switched mostly to proton. I keep my 14+ yr old google account only in case there’s something I’ve forgotten to switch over, but I only access it through a separate browser I specifically use for that purpose.
I just use google as an account to collect spam emails if something asks for an email and I don’t want to give them something proper with a password that I actually plan on remembering.
I still have an outlook for Minecraft
That’s it, that’s all I use it for
Nope, deleted my google account a year and a half ago. I have my own domain that proton handles for me so i can do like “finance@mydomain.com”, or " catchall@mydomain.com" and those are automatically sorted into their own folders.
