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

If Gmail goes belly up, you won't have a problem. Every service will have a problem. You can just ride along with all the other customers.

It's not my problem if it's also everyone else's problem
- If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank 100 billion dollars, that's the banks problem.

All my shit is in the Google ecosystem. I am fairly confident that Gmail is not going away anytime soon. However, I am more afraid that some obscure ToS violation will forcibly disconnect me from their ecosystem, and I will have to scramble to make sure all my contacts have my alternate info. I am doubly screwed, as a Google Fi customer. If we all get suddenly degoogled, I lose a phone number that I have had for over 20 years.

As good a deal that Fi is for me (I normally don't use bandwidth unless I travel internationally), I may switch soon just to reduce my exposure to Google.

This is why I’m migrating off Google to a custom domain. I have no fear Gmail is going away, but I fear if they ever block my account for some inscrutable reason there will be no way to appeal or get actual customer service.
Fi isn't that great. We were on Fi for years; I switched to Mint, my wife stayed on Fi until I was sure it was going to work. So far, I pay less for more, no gotchas.

It was amazing when it first came out; now it has a lot of competition that beats it.
- How is Mint internationally?
Some years age when I was still using some more google stuff (like an account for calling out from my PBX) I had each service assigned to its own google account to limit the impact of google doing something crazy to an account.

Apart from playstore youtube red is now the only service left - and that's about to go as they now made it too expensive, especially taking into account that they enshittified it so much that we've blocked it on the TV, and "adfree on TV" was the main use case there...

The only way to protect yourself from something like this is to own your own domain name.
You can still use something like Google as a provider but you can switch providers and recreate the same email addresses.

It's not really "the only way". A similar problem to think about would be: what if your primary email account got compromised?

It makes sense to set up alternative means for recovering any account (or changing the associated email address), for example via second mail address, phone number, one-time-passwords, snail mail or similar. Many account providers use a recovery question system - here, I'd suggest using irregular answers, e.g. for "what is your favorite colour", I would't use a colour at all to make it harder to guess.

Compartmentalizing would be another approach: use different providers in a mix so that when one goes the way of the dodo, parts of your registered accounts remain useable. Ideally, for "critical" stuff like bank accounts, you'd split them up between different email addresses. But then again, for this kind of account, I'd really expect the bank to provide some other ways of backup access/restoration.

You'd be fucked like a choirboy at a Viagra-sponsored catholic-con.

Especially if they let the domain expire and you didn't have time to migrate all those accounts that can be reset with just an email and a bad actor then registers the domain - or even just a slightly dumb actor that allows someone else to use what was your old email address.

This might be the single most hilarious “you’d be fucked” statement I ever heard and I’m definitely stealing it for future use lmao

I’d be fine. If my email provider goes away, my troubles are over, because my email provider is me!

What's a good place to start to learn about self-hosted email?
- You can check out Mail-In-A-Box. Its a pretty good self-hosting email solution thats easy to install and maintain.
  
  https://mailinabox.email/

Register your own domain and use that. Then if your email provider dies then you can take your domain elsewhere.

How screwed would one be if the domain they bought was a ccTLD and that country ceased to exist?
- A little but not completely. There are defunct ccTLDs that still exist and can be registered, but .io currently doesn't have a clear future. I suspect that if a ccTLD is eliminated completely then there would be advance notice for you to start updating all your accounts to a new domain. So it would be annoying but not screwed

I recently lost my oldest email and I didn't plan accordingly. Roadrunner email. It's still a pain in the butt. I've managed to change almost everything (that I can REMEMBER) to my newer email, but there are two that haven't been changed because they require an email to the old email first... It's gone.

That email was probably 20 years old and I have no idea what services I had signed up through it.

The moral of my story is to read emails from your email provider. Apparently they sent out warnings 6 months in advance, but I always ignored their emails.

Get a domain and register an MX record.

If your email provider shuts down, forward the mail somewhere else.

Cox just shut down their email services. They did so by transitioning everyone to yahoo and gave yahoo the cox.net email domain. As long as the provider plans accordingly, they can shut down and not screw over their customers. It was hell getting grandparents to understand their email changed but not really, and just to reconfigure outlook for them so they can keep getting those prayer requests. “No grandma, that’s your windows password, what’s your email password? because that doesn’t work. You know what, I’ll just look it up in the registry.” It was a pretty seamless transition all things considered.

I own my own domain and back up my emails. It would be a pain and cost a few $ but I’d migrate to something else or self host.

What do you use to backup?
- Synology.

I lost one, sent the emails I might need to another account. So that was ok but I forgot to change the email on every freaking service I use so it was very difficult to recover some accounts.

Not at all, since I run my own. https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

I have all of my email sent to my own domain, so while I would lose previous emails, if my provider just up and shut down, I could just switch to another provider, change a few records on my DNS, and all of my emails would go to my new provider from then on with no problem. I control the domain after the "@" sign.

I use a free email service with my custom domain. If it went down I'd just switch to another. Down time would likely just be while DNS records proliferated.

I think you meant "propagated".

How do you monitor your email functionality? How long would it be before you noticed it was offline? What about paying for and configuring the new email server?
- I get an email from LinkedIn about jobs roughly every hour so wouldn't be long

Depends on how much you rely on it. If your contacts can't phone or otherwise contact you for your new address, they're gone.

If the services you use don't mail you OTP codes on every log in, you can still log in using your old email and update it.

You can also contact customer support of some services and have them change it, using other ways to autheticate, e.g. physical letters with generated OTP codes.

I think email is basically a joke these days. It's 99.9% spam. Almost everything I actually want in there are automated account confirmations, which don't have to even come via email. Even in the few professional situations I've had a work email, it was almost never used.

Like, I feel the same way about email now that we all felt about snail mail with the invention of email.

Not so bad. I use gmail as a backup for some accounts in case something happens to my VPS or domain, and my Amazon account is still linked to it out of laziness, but otherwise I never use it.

Oh. Except that I have an Android phone, and that's linked to my gmail, although I don't use any Google apps or services beyond Play. So I suppose my phone would stop working. Everything's backed up, though, so maybe it'd be a good thing; maybe it'd motivate me to pull the trigger on a Light Phone. I kinda want a Minimal Phone because my F&F uses Jami, but that'd still be an Android phone, so it wouldn't work either.

very, since most online services and government agencies depend on you having an email address to contact/let you use their service.

Wouldn't be too bad. I use Keepass for my bookmarks and most of my accounts with the database synced by Syncthing. If Syncthing and all of my devices also went down it'd be a pain but I'd have a fairly recent copy of the database which I backup to a pen drive I always keep with me. I'd have to spend a day logging into my accounts and updating the email but then I'd probably go back to just using Keepass from my pen drive and backing up to a second one like I used to until I found another solution for syncing it.

This happened to me.

Hotmail was my email from 1997 until last year. I still know the password. But it wants me to do a security check. By sending a code to my backup email.

Problem is, I haven't logged into my backup email in forever. So it wants to send a security code to my hotmail account.

......

.....

You see the problem, right?

Write down all your accounts and hope they'll send you a warning in advance, once they decide to go out of business. Then you're going to have to change all the accounts to a new email.

I'm pretty sure the big paid providers aren't going to fail you withoit a warning. And gmail etc are too big to fail. That's going to wreak havoc with a lot of other users... Though: If they decide to ban you or delete your account... You're going to be in big trouble. That regularly happens to people.

Only alternative I can imagine is to run your own email service. If you own the domain and server, it's your call. But you have to pay attention to maintain it and not get hacked etc. That would be another way to lose email accounts. (Running a mailserver is more complicated than hosting a website.)

Don’t run your own mail servers.

-Person who runs their own mail server
- I've had that discussion before, here on Lemmy. From my experience, like >90% of people will tell you not to do mail yourself. And there is a reason to it.
  
  I mean don't do it if you don't know about DNS, all the added antispam like SPF, IP blocklists and how the big players handle that. And don't make any configuration mistakes and become an open relay for spam. It's certainly doable, though. (With the proper Linux admin skills.)

I suppose if my email provider shuts down I would need to know if I had shut down my server, my server host went out of business, or someone has taken control of my domains