Will not using G OAuth and probably delete all photos from my Picasa, now that they were automatically moved over to G+.

You never know what the automatic image scanner may think it has found in those photos that violates some G+ rules. I don't want to lose all my data in my G account, only because an automated scanner thinks my friend's face was a bare female breast.

If you buy a domain, nowadays, you have few options with respect to getting an email that sounds legit, mature, and isn't long and/or uses easily misspelled words.

I have a bunch of domains, but none of them are particularly appropriate for an email address I would verbally communicate to someone. bluh.org is my main domain, but when you say 'bluh' out loud to someone, you inevitably have to spell it. I once owned thereisnocharles.com, which was a goofy thing and I used that as my main email address before gmail came along. But it's long, and it doesn't sound professional at all.

I guess we could all just use something like gmail as a simple forwarder service to our owned email addresses, but even then, it's not a foolproof solution.

I don't see this as a valid issue to deter anyone from getting their own domain.

I own (for now.. I'm not sure if that can be disputed if more people with my rather rare last name apply) lastname.name

So - you can reach me, if I finally finish my migration and stop being a lazy bastard, at [email protected] - which is rather good imo.

Sure, I've got other legacy addresses, but this could be a viable alternative to a gmail _identity_.

I found a registrar that sold this domain to me, anything you throw at it ends up on one of my machines.

Although I was once told 'sorry, you must use a Hotmail, Yahoo! or Gmail address'...

Solves the problem you raised.

;0)

Mine is [email protected] for example.

you want to see how bad it turn when you do chin, li, etc? soon we will run out of website names!

But let's be realistic... it's not like the world of internet users suffered from a supposed problem with miscommunicated email addresses before "geemail.com" came around. We managed just fine.

My username, across the Internet, is spiffytech. I registered http://spiffyte.ch. It's fun and a little clever, but since most people haven't heard of .ch domains I'm constantly saying "w-w-w dot spiffy t-e dot c-h. No, not .com. No, put the dot between the 'e' and the 'c'. Spiffytech. Like my username.". Even to tech-savvy friends.

Sure, maybe that's an artifact of my particular domain, but I'd much prefer if I could get the .com and just tell people spiffytech.com and avoid the confusion.

I also primarily use an IMAP client which saves a local copy of all my email, so although the "identity" issues (and non-email data) bother me a bit, I do have at all times essentially a backup of all my mail.

This is why I trust Apple. They might be slow, or silent, but they've never left me hanging (and I've been a customer of theres for decades before google existed.)

That said, my iCloud account is where media and non-essential information will get stored. If Apple disappears it one day, at most I'll have lost music and movies. But everything real lives somewhere I can control and backup.

I use GMAIL, but with POP access, and I store my email locally.

However, it is time to get off of gmail and move anyway. It is just such a PITA to manage your own email servers....but I expect a company that does it for a living will provide better support than a company where I'm the product rather than the customer.

I thought you looked familiar.

Google owning your data is not the problem here, while you can backup it. The real problem is them owning your identity.

What if your domain registrar simply fails and loses your records?

The US government has been seizing domains associated with sites accused of violating laws; are you with a registrar who will fight that?

I'm not saying that you shouldn't own the domain for your email address--it's simply that you should realize that it solves one problem but creates others.

Once you look at things at detail, almost everything in your life is dependent on trust. Knowing how much to trust different aspects and how to evaluate risks is key.

How can I reach you? You don't have Facebook!

For example: I can download all my mail from gmail (using POP or IMAP) regularly. If I lose the account I still have my mails. I can't change the mail amazon (or whatever other site) knows about unless I have access to my gmail account (I realize you can probably talk to their customer support but it doesn't scale well at all. I have about 120 different logins using my @gmail.com address...).

THE PROBLEM is that many places only accept google/facebook if not facebook alone. Although I have no freaken' idea why, it took a minute after adding google login to my site to add facebook, openid, etc..