What if protonmail, gmail or whatever email provider you are using goes belly-up? Are all your accounts doomed?
If so, what are some preventive measures? Adding backup emails to your registered accounts?
What if protonmail, gmail or whatever email provider you are using goes belly-up? Are all your accounts doomed?
If so, what are some preventive measures? Adding backup emails to your registered accounts?
Buy your own domain and use it for e-mails (there are many providers that support custom domains). If your provider shuts down, just switch to a different one and keep the same address.
This isn’t without its own problems. If you fail to renew your domain and someone else picks it up, they now have access to all your accounts. At least with a popular provider like Gmail, they don’t allow emails to be reused, and if they ever discontinue email services and drop the gmail.com domain, everyone will know about it and know that password reset requests should not be sent to these emails.
This is a terrible argument, IMO. Domains are almost always auto renew, and there are typically grace periods.
Using your own domain definitely makes it easy to get back up by just switching providers. But what about all your historical emails? If your original provider goes poof, what’s the plan? I connect via IMAP, so all my emails are stored on the provider’s servers, right? Or do email apps keep local copies, too?
Are there backup services for emails? I seem to recall Outlook having some kind of archive feature (I haven’t used outlook in decades), but I think I remember it was only recoverable in outlook and even then, it was a pain to search for a particular email.
The proper email programs have an option somewhere in the settings to either store a copy of the mailbox on the computer, or not do it. I’m pretty sure that’s in Thunderbird, Evolution, etc. I’m not sure about Outlook.
You can create an archive of your emails using Mail in MacOS also.
If you have access to some sort of basic Linux system (cloud server, local server whatever works for you) you can run a program on a timer such as https://isync.sourceforge.io/ (Debian package:
isync) which reads email from one source and clones it to another. Be careful and run it in a security context that meets your needs (I use a local laptop w/encryption at home that runs headless 24/7, think raspberry Pi mode).This includes IMAP (1) -> IMAP (2) as well as IMAP -> Local and so on; as with any app you’ll need to spend a bit learning how to build the optimum config file for your needs, but once you get it going it’s truly a “set and forget” little widget. Use an on-fail service like https://healthchecks.io in your wrapper script to get notified on error, then go about your life.
Edit: @[email protected] glanced at your comments and see you have a lot of self-hosting chops, here’s a markdown doc of mine to use isync to clone one IMAP provider (domain1.com) to another IMAP provider (domain2.com) subfolder for archiving. (using a subfolder allows you to go both ways and use both domains normally)
----Sync email via IMAP from host1/domain1 to a subfolder on host2/domain2 via a cron/timer. Can be reversed as well, just update
Patternsto exclude the subfolders from being cross-replicated (looped).isyncpackage:apt-get update && apt-get install isyncPasswords for IMAP must be left on disk in plain text
${HOME}/.securecontents on encrypted volume unlocked manuallyThe
mbsyncprogram keeps it’s transient index files in${HOME}/.mbsync/with one per IMAP folder; these are used to keep track of what it’s already synced. Should something break it may be necessary to delete one of these files to force a resync.By design,
mbsyncwill not delete a destination folder if it’s not empty first; this means if you delete a folder and all emails on the source in one step, a sync will break with an error/warning. Instead, delete all emails in the folder first, sync those deletions, then delete the empty folder on the source and sync again. See: https://sourceforge.net/p/isync/mailman/isync-devel/thread/f278216b-f1db-32be-fef2-ccaeea912524%40ojkastl.de/#msg37237271Simple crontab to run the script:
Main config for the
mbsyncprogram:${HOME}/.mbsyncrc
# Source IMAPAccount imap-src-account Host imap.host1.com Port 993 User user1 PassCmd "cat /home/USER/.secure/psrc" SSLType IMAPS SystemCertificates yes PipeLineDepth 1 #CertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt # Dest IMAPAccount imap-dest-account Host imap.host2.com Port 993 User user2 PassCmd "cat /home/USER/.secure/pdst" SSLType IMAPS SystemCertificates yes PipeLineDepth 1 #CertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt # Source map IMAPStore imap-src Account imap-src-account # Dest map IMAPStore imap-dest Account imap-dest-account # Transfer options Channel hasync Far :imap-src: Near :imap-dest:HASync/ Sync Pull Create Near Remove Near Expunge Near Patterns * CopyArrivalDate yesThis script leverages healthchecks.io to alert on failure; replace XXXXX with the UUID of your monitor URL.
${HOME}/bin/hasync.sh
#!/bin/bash # vars LOGDIR="${HOME}/log" TIMESTAMP=$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H%M) LOGFILE="${LOGDIR}/mbsync_${TIMESTAMP}.log" HCPING="https://hc-ping.com/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX" # preflight if [[ ! -d "${LOGDIR}" ]]; then mkdir -p "${LOGDIR}" fi # sync echo -e "\nBEGIN $(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H%M)\n" >> "${LOGFILE}" /usr/bin/mbsync -c ${HOME}/.mbsyncrc -V hasync 1>>"${LOGFILE}" 2>&1 EC=$? echo -e "\nEC: ${EC}" >> "${LOGFILE}" echo -e "\nEND $(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H%M)\n" >> "${LOGFILE}" # report if [[ $EC -eq 0 ]]; then curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 5 -o /dev/null "${HCPING}" find "${LOGDIR}" -type f -mtime +30 -delete fi exit $ECThanks, @[email protected]!
For historic emails, you could setup a forwarding rule from the primary to the backup. This would need to be done in advance of course