Get your own domain and private email address, if you haven’t already 😅 Another “secure” email provider goes down. Two million users biting their nails as Notion, the company that took over Skiff and then unceremoniously announced it would simply shut it down in six months, closes the news with a tongue-in-cheek “We look forward to continuing to serve you.”

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/encrypted-email-service-skiff-gets-acquired-will-shut-down-in-six-months/

An important lesson here: never rely on proprietary email services. If you don’t own the product, the product owns you.

Losing your email address is probably worse than losing a phone number. And you can lose it for many reasons, such as:

• Business acquisition like the one above
• The provider who is allowed to read all your “free” emails decides that what you write is against their Terms and Conditions
• Winding down the service because shareholders complain that 10% annual profit is not enough
• Economic sanctions imposed on your country (the sad case of Venezuela where Adobe closed overnight in 2019)

What to do?

• Get your own Internet domain with email services. OVH, the largest European supplier, offers them from 1 EUR per month and you will also have a Wordpress website.
• Migrate the contents of your current email account using Imapsync. Done. Even if OVH goes bankrupt, the domain remains yours and you can move your email address to another provider. In the last 20 years I have moved my dear old email address at least 5 times, always looking for the best price/service!
• Keep the “free” one for another year, just set up a forward and change the Reply To address to the new one. Then gradually move to the new address, one online shop at a time
• Done

This is not a sponsored article or product placement, I am not affiliated in any way with OVH.