I moved my custom email domain from gmail to NameCheap’s Private Email about a year ago. I wanted to free myself from the possibility that Google might arbitrarily ban me one day, as we’ve seen happen to people for various Google products for no reason and with no appeal.
Biggest mistake of my life.
Just as you say, I have no idea if my emails get through. The number of times I’ve had people tell me they found my email in a spam folder or just not at all is unacceptable. And you’re right, this is most prominent on outlook and gmail users but not exclusive to them.
How would you like your accountant or lawyer to miss your emails? It happens to me all the time now. These are not emails with cat pics.
I’m scared to move back, fearing an IMAP migration will cause me to lose a year of emails sent and received.
I think all you really need is to own your domain.
If you manage your domain and point your mx at google, and some ai decides your drive contents look bad or some non-official youtube app violates some api access rule and they kill your whole account, you just point your at any other service provider.
That will be an annoying few days, but you don't lose anything too important. Maybe for a day or so you can't receive password emails, but you will, just after the switch shakes out.
In the mean time, you're enjoying the convenience of a big mail service, and playing the odds that it's probably not going to happen to you, and it's ok to live with that risk because if it happens, it's just an inconvenience not a disaster.
As for losing old emails, I use thunderbird on my laptop, and that ends up getting a copy of all my gmail even though I also read those same emails on my phone. If google kills my account, I still have all my old emails even without my own domain.
I don't know if google even offers domain regisration to individuals, but if they do, I just wouldn't use them for the registrar. All other services can tolerate that risk as long as you use someone else as registrar (namecheap is good).
The client has download a copy already and wont sync back what it is already download. You can look into tools like imapsync https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync to copy data from two imap account
> IMAP synchronizes with the server, but keeps a local copy.
The local copy is client dependent. Mail.app on your iPhone will not keep a local copy of all your emails if you have a large number of emails spanning a long period of time. Other clients may vary.
Thanks for the reply. Fastmail is indeed nice (I've used them before but not hosting my own domain). But at this point, I'm not willing to risk moving to another player besides MS or Google.
Biggest mistake of my life.
Just as you say, I have no idea if my emails get through. The number of times I’ve had people tell me they found my email in a spam folder or just not at all is unacceptable. And you’re right, this is most prominent on outlook and gmail users but not exclusive to them.
How would you like your accountant or lawyer to miss your emails? It happens to me all the time now. These are not emails with cat pics.
I’m scared to move back, fearing an IMAP migration will cause me to lose a year of emails sent and received.
I don’t know what to do.