Whereas Fastmail charges by the user/month (or did when I was there), which can add up quickly if you've got a bunch of domains, Migadu does not. They charge by volume. You can add as many domains and mailboxes as you like. For some use cases - mine, and likely many of you - that ends up with a way smaller bill.
They're run by real people in Switzerland. I've been a customer for a couple of years now and it's worked flawlessly.
Usual disclaimers, just a happy customer, not affiliated.
This was back in the free tier days (though I had a paid account), so maybe its improved now.
Kind of sad that “it looks bad” if your email lands in spam. It happens, this is the technology.
Very cheap, pay-as-you-go, unlimited accounts and domains with routing. It's a 1-man company with rough UI but works well for keeping control of your own data.
Mapping all these accounts will be a big pain in the butt.
Mxroute provides a similar service that’s not based on users/mailboxes and is cheap enough for multiple domains and multiple mailboxes.
For those concerned with privacy and data stored in certain countries, Mxroute stores data in the U.S. (like Fastmail) and Migadu stores data in France (a 14 eyes country) even though the company is incorporated in Switzerland. Migadu also does/did not encrypt data at rest (as of a couple of years ago). So any seizure of its servers in France means your data could be exposed.
The e-mail announced that on October 1st 2020, free tier would be sunset, and immediately locked until upgrade to a paid account.
> They're run by real people in Switzerland.
Please note that the data centers used by Migadu are in France. This may be a concern for some people who are looking to avoid 14 eyes countries.
I switched to mxroute and it just works. Migadu's price is ok but the support and communication was really weak back then.
The only downside to be aware of is the lack of calendar support (technically yes via CalDAV, but that doesn't work for most users--e.g. Calendly won't work).
Edit: the way they handle domains and email aliases has simplified my email life.
I will give them a try but you might have provided me with the service to switch to from Google.
I already have replacements for storage (my second main use) and Documents. And I do not have a problem in general with proprietary solutions. But Google sadly more and more is not in line with what I see as values good for the internet nor humanity.
I keep forgetting that “the cloud” just means “a computer that belongs to someone else, that they can take back at any time”
Additionally, they regularly turn such data over to government snoops, without due process or probable cause, something that storing your data with them enables. This is a terrible thing for a free society even if you don't yourself personally care for or value privacy, as you opt in everyone who corresponds with you without their consent by using these systems.
I have nothing nice to say about google, so I'm not defending them, but didn't they announce our email is not getting scanned any more? Given that they reversed the do-no-evil motto, the sad part is that I guess they have enough information about us not to bother reading our emails.
There is nothing dangerous with being shown more relevant ads.
However, the collected data create an intimate, detailed portrait of you. Data aggregators can know how old you are, your general state of health, where you have been, your interests, including sexual interests, your political views both expressed and unexpressed, your associations, your associates, your family, your daily habits, your unusual habits, your credit score, whether that credit score is accurate, etc, etc.
And, this is true for everyone you come into contact with: friends, family, business associates.
An AI could, with this data, model you and your behavior more accurately than could your own spouse.
Moreover, not only must you trust the people with access to that data, and everyone they sell it to, to only ever use it for targeted ads, but you must trust everyone who will ever have access to it, forever.
While you may believe you're boring and your views are entirely uncontroversial, times change. Or, hell, with enough data and motivation, someone can paint a damning portrait of you made up whole cloth from true, innocuous details.
You have to just hope that neither you nor anyone you associate with become a political target, or the target of criminal activity, or garner just plain negative attention, for whatever reason, because if so, you and your loved ones will be trivially easy to find and manipulate.
To me this is a natural thing. It makes sense that computers are better at remembering and interpreting data than humans. YouTube is able to recommend me videos much better than I could myself. I don't remember the names of all the people I like, but YouTube does.
This is a true statement that doesn't address any of the arguments; a non-sequitur. Yes, computers are better at remembering and interpreting (some) data than humans.
What does that have to do with the humans who access and use that data for their own, very human ends? You skipped that part.
> It’s astonishing how quickly a silly hat becomes literal violent propaganda. I mean, in the same minute.
Something that would be super useful is a script that can be run against a local Gmail mailbox file that does a comprehensive search for "account created" type confirmation emails and produces a CSV of domain, date, etc. Something that would enable user to delete old accounts, or migrate them to a new email service.
And then taking a week off of work so that I can change 672 passwords.
The rest that are non-important I'll just let languish in the Gmail account, assuming I'll be able to go back and get them if needed, yet, also not being heartbroken if I get screwed by some faceless algorithm like OP.
We think the things we've built up over the years are important, but really they're just digital sandcastles. The only account you have online that matters is your bank account. When everything else goes, it turns out it doesn't affect you in the future. You just create new accounts and move on.
Can’t you just visit your bank office in person and reset it? Or if they can’t do it, just withdrew all the funds and create a new account?
Yes it's probally against YouTube's ToS to get people to pay for content in unlisted videos, but the terms of service doesn't explicitly talk about using YouTube to host paid-for content - it is covered in a border statement though in their ToS [0]
But they should still at least be able to talk to a real human about it and get told the actual reason "Your account was terminated for commercial use of unlisted videos" instead of automated email bot responses/Or have been given some warning "This is against our ToS, your account will be terminated in 7 days"
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/38348285?hl=en
2. OP didn't say the videos contained ads. And why can't unlisted videos contain ads anyway?
3. YT weren't complaining about ads anyway. It was "cyberbullying" in one video.
It's most likely against ToS if you use said videos in a commercial way. Youtube isn't your companies private video hosting service.
> OP didn't say the videos contained ads.
No, but they were used to run their business. So it was commercial in nature.
> And why can't unlisted videos contain ads anyway?
Mostly a quirk of how Youtube works.
> And why can't unlisted videos contain ads anyway?
Looks like I was wrong about this one, sorry. It does seem like unlisted videos can indeed run ads. That being said, it still seems like a bad idea to run company crucial part of your business off of a free ad-based service.
You can also navigate to Settings > Security > Signing in with Google to see everywhere that you've used Google Sign in (oAuth).
I only need to worry about not losing control of my domain name. If my mail provider decide to kick me out, I just need to get a new host.
I've bought a bunch of decentralized domain for this reason on handshake, sol, etc. They aren't super usable yet as most email services won't resolve the alternative DNS but who knows what future holds.
Namecheap acquired namebase (namecheap of handshake world), recently.
https://www.namebase.io/blog/namebase-has-been-acquired/
So I've hope it will go somewhere.
But without objectivity about how often this happens, there’s probably a lot of other far worse problems that deserve our attention.
> but losing access to gmail does not mean I can’t login to those websites anymore. It just means recovering an account is more difficult (but in most cases not much more difficult).
I think this is pretty naive though, this thread is really a story about how automated systems are making the digital world more challenging to navigate and how getting a human to help you is becoming harder in many cases, making those automated decisions final. If all you needed to sign up for something was your email address, it's possible they will have no way to verify you are the owner if you lose access to that, even if you can get in contact with a human.
I’m curious though, which online services would be really bad to lose access to (for you personally)?
One example is when I lost access to an email account tied to a Digital Ocean account. It had been hosting a project VM and I never had a need to log in to it until the project shut down. I try and log in and although the credentials are right, it needs me to verify a one time code from my email address to prove I am not a bot. Couldn't do that. I never gained access back, DO required me to give them a full suite of proof of ID before I could even get them to disconnect my credit card, and even to this day it periodically restarts charges against my card and I have to contact them. Each time they escalate to engineering and engineering says they "Fixed the issue". Now times that experience by potentially dozens of accounts.
But I agree that there might be situations where it could be bad, especially if you work as a consultant/freelancer, and/or own a small business.
Pro-tip: if you use a password manager, it’s as easy as searching for your Gmail address. For all other accounts, I’ve been able to find them by searching for the phrases “verify your email” or “verify email” or “verification” in Gmail.
Just imagining the nightmare that would happen if I got locked out of my Gmail account (10 years of accounts)…I can’t believe I didn’t do it sooner.
You can also do a full export of your Google data, which I highly recommend.
Switched to fastmail recently for my personal domain and could not be happier with the service. It costs money every month, so they have actual human support if anything goes wrong.