The only thing worse than hanging your identity on @gmail.com is @comcast and the like.

If you can, your own domain backed by a fastmail or a proton is the sweet spot of easy and flexible, or at least an @fastmail, @proton or similar. With payment comes the possibility of human support, which I have received easily from fastmail.

I have my email going to my own domain, but can’t figure out how to ground it out in anything other than someone else’s tld.

So, now I’m in a situation where, if my gmail account gets banned, and the DNS provider decides to reset my password, then I’m permanently locked out of everything. I could point my DNS provider at my “real” email address, but that’s even worse, since needing to update the MX record could lock me out.

Does anyone have any creative solutions to this problem?

I would probably recommend two things: 1. Move away from Gmail as soon as possible, to a service like Fastmail or Proton Mail; 2. Have an email from that provider as the “last resort”, i.e. [email protected], while using your domain name based emails for most other things.

This doesn’t solve the “everything is in one basket” issue, but you don’t hear stories of these email providers just “closing” an account and causing immense trouble for the person, at least in part because they have actual support.

> I have my email going to my own domain, but can’t figure out how to ground it out in anything other than someone else’s tld.

What do you mean "ground it out"?

As a consumer, I suspect hosting a "holding" domain, and possibly email, with AWS Route53 DNS might be a sensible approach that wouldn't break the bank. AWS has policies on account and password recovery that even include a notarised affidavit.

It might help to further separate your AWS account from the Amazon account you use to shop with, since there's a chance Amazon might be trigger-happy with banning if you violate one of their shopping policies with too many returns.

> As a consumer, I suspect hosting a "holding" domain, and possibly email, with AWS Route53 DNS might be a sensible approach that wouldn't break the bank.

This is what I do.

Totally isolated AWS account that owns `my-account-recovery.com` in my country-code TLD (because I have legal rights and strong and easy access to appeals processes with that, so unlikely the domain could be wrestled from me and likely I could eventually regain ownership if lost).

I use Amazon SES for incoming email to simply drop all incoming messages as objects in a S3 bucket.

I have SNS notifications going out to my regular operational email whenever a new message comes in with the metadata (sender, subject, etc but not the body as that could contain actual reset/account recovery links) so I can keep an eye on what's coming in.

Haven't looked at my bills lately, but including domain renewal and stuff this is maybe $100/yr to establish this as a root of trust/access. Even if other accounts are breached/suspended/etc, I will still have access to this account and can recover my way down from there.

I'm putting all my eggs into the AWS basket here, but I've had a good experience with them in the past and I really can't find any examples of people being locked out of their accounts in the same way I can with Google. And I know from experience that it's not impossible to get in contact with a real live person when it's required to resolve an issue.

Shouldn't you still be able to prove your identity to your DNS provider through your name, address, birth date, security questions, past correspondence, bank statements etc.?

Use someone with backup codes.

Without going to the step of moving photos, mail, contacts, etc. off of Google services. Are there automated tools available to periodically export that data?

You can use the "download your data" feature of Google to download a copy. However you have to manually trigger the export. Also no incremental download so it can be a lot of data being transferred.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en

Edit: Looks like Google Takeout lets you schedule the download (ie once every month)

Unfortunately, you still need to manually download the data each time. There's no way to automate this. There's also no way I know of to directly upload a takeout zip to another service and continue. There's also a (generally long enough, except when you forget) time limit on downloads, as well as a download limit (have a crappy internet connection, and lost access to a file? Start a new takeout, wait for it to be available, and try again)

If takeouts could be configured to download automatically through Google drive, that would be amazing.

> If takeouts could be configured to download automatically through Google drive, that would be amazing.

They can. And Dropbox, and various other cloud providers.

Google does support delivery via email, Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or Box.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en

I love protonmail! I made the switch a couple years back and haven't looked back, with one exception- my city's utilities company blacklists protonmail, so in the handful of times I've emailed them (specifically there were three times they've shut off my water because someone with a very similar looking address didn't pay their bill) with proof of something-or-other, it supposedly doesn't make it to their communal or "personal" inboxes. This is the only time I've had this kind of problem though- protonmail has served me well.

If they’re incorrectly shutting off your water, read up on your legal rights, and then send a polite letter to their legal department and the local utility regulatory board.

Public utilities are highly regulated, and do not have the right to interrupt your service.

I agree! However I move at the end of the week, so I won't worry this time around.

> with one exception- my city's utilities company blacklists protonmail

Why do they do this? Did you contact them about it? I would say it seems, at face value, that your city's utilities company did not serve you while Protonmail did.

> that your city's utilities company did not serve you while Protonmail did.

That's fair- that's a better way of saying it. Every time I've had to email them (which admittedly has only been a handful of times) with proof of something, I always end up calling them up and they'll say "but protonmail isn't on the blacklist that IT posted, so you're lying or you sent it to the wrong place," then I'll send screenshots from a different email provider proving that I sent the protonmail email(s) to the right place, then they'll say "oh, I promise to talk to IT to get this straightened out."

It's pretty obnoxious.

There are a few things that protonmail is not good at, but I guess I've learned to live with them.

1. You can't search message content. gmail is very good at this, so I've had to become more organized to make sure that I can find a particular message in protonmail.

2. Notifications on mobile do not clear if I've read the message on another device. I have to open up the app and sync to stop them from popping up with outdated information.

3. I wish that there was a way to mark a message as archived and read from the mobile notification.

Other than that, I can't complain.

all these issues sound more like client issues than protonmail service issues. why not just use a different email client to connect to protonmail, such as Spark?

Because they don't support standard protocols like pop3, smtp and imap. It's why I switched.

(They do have Protonmail Bridge now, but it doesn't work great for alternate mobile clients unless they've changed it)

Protonmail integrates with its client (web app, iOs/Android app), unless you use the additional Protonmail Bridge service.

The only issue I've ever encountered with Protonmail was Digital Ocean. For some reason receiving a password reset email through Protonmail took forever. I thought I'd entered my email incorrectly, but nope. Eventually came through, but from what I could find, it was a known problem.

Have you switched on your [email protected] account? That at least doesn't have protonmail in the name.

Did you sign up and enter a fake birthday? Google doesn't allow creation of real accounts for minors under 13 years old unless you use family link[0].

0: https://families.google.com/familylink/

Of course not -- Family Link was introduced in 2017 and this account was created in 2008. I don't remember the specifics, but I do recall having to provide my information since she was under 13.

edit: Family Link is also for android devices and chromebooks. She doesn't have a phone / android device or a chomebook.

I did sign mine up using fake birthdates well over ten years ago, my children are 13 and 16 now.

Long story but fairly serious legal issues issues with their mother making false claims of care/activities etc and needed things like calander and location tracking services and this was just by far the easies way at the time. For safety reasons I put a forward to my gmail of all their incoming emails, once again best known option at the time.

I sense a problem possibly looming, but not seeing that coming clean and engaging with Google likely to be a happy experience.

Anyone got any advice, other than abandon current accounts?

God, the dreaded endless loops. I've had it in Music, Play and several others. More fun is when a human enters the "loop." Yes, I've cleared cache and cookies, yes I've rebooted. In fact, with Music I'd even bought a new computer in the meanwhile, since the loop happened for literally years.