[motti_s]

This happened to me once and it took a while until they reinstated my account. To date I have no idea why it happened. I thought about moving to another service, but unless you setup your own SMTP server (probably not a good idea), you never really have full control.

Here is what I recommend you do (before getting locked out):

1. Use your own domain for email and host it on gmail (free) - do not use [e-mail], but [e-mail].

2. Create a secondary email account and have your primary account forward all emails to it.

If you get locked out, your account still accepts emails. I believe that forwarding still works as well, though I haven't been able to verify it (need to get locked out again...).

Then either respond from your secondary account, or change your mx records to point to another service, or even to your own temporary SMTP server.

It's not a complete / ideal solution. You still don't have access to emails you sent (could be done using IMAP, but I didn't bother) and to other Google services. But it might be OK as a temporary solution until you get your account back.

[ajross]

Why is setting up your own mail server a bad idea? I've been running my own for 13 years now (plain old postfix and dovecot on whatever linux distro I favor at the time). It works great.

[muyuu]

It's a bad idea for most of us.

I used to own and manage my own mail server when I had to do it for my business back in the day. I had to be up to date in all involved email server management and its perks anyway, so it wasn't a lot of extra work. Now it would be. For a normal email user, it would be a nightmare.

I'm the kind of person who's very disrupted by having a ton of small tasks in the background all the time. Maintaining your own email server adds a bunch of them, even if you are already knowledgeable (keeping your domain(s), storage & redundancy, having to maintain a server with good uptime and with a lot of security concerns - it's online and it broadcasts its IP in headers, it's immediately spotted as running an email server and targeted to be made a spam-relay or worse).

If you're not even knowledgeable about it, the amount of stuff you need to learn and be familiar with is ridiculous. Maybe they don't even occur to you off the top of your head now, but the amount of little things one learns over the years about server maintenance is massive and a lot of it is absolutely necessary to run an email server with guarantees. Having to "insource" all that shit work is something I've been trying to avoid but I'm afraid I will have to do. I rent, this means sometimes I have to move and keeping servers 365/24/7 is a problem. Typical home connections are rather shitty for an email server in terms of uptime - you'd have the occasional email silently not arriving (depending on sender retry config) and also the occasional bounce (server coming back up but not properly - happens) and that doesn't look good for serious communications this day an age. And like that, a large number of concerns both particular and common to each email user.

Having backups (also involves shit work but not as much) mitigates the problem but for some of us, simply to stop receiving email at a certain address for a couple of days can cause a lot of trouble.

[aperrien]

I agree with you. There are quite a few commercial webmail/imap/pop providers, though. I've been using one for years now. I refuse to do free email since I lost my yahoo mail over a decade ago, and I like the peace of mind of knowing I can call up some someone for support.

[runako]

1) Spam filtering. The Google spam filters are likely going to be orders of magnitude better than anything you run in-house.

2) You value your time. Some people don't, it's not really worth arguing this point. But it is a reason running a mail server is a bad idea for most people.

[ajross]

Orders of magnitude is an exaggeration. My account is very visible and very old, and gets 6-700 spam deliveries a day. Plain vanilla spamassassin catches 93% of those, and a little perl filter I wrote gets me to 98-99%. I get a handful of unwanted messages each day. That's just one order of magnitude from perfect; and I know for a fact gmail isn't perfect.

And #2 is just wrong, sorry. I spend minutes a week doing anything at all related to maintenance on that box (I use it far more regularly for productive purposes, though). If you can handle running a linux box from a console, you can learn to do it too. Or don't, it's up to you. But telling me I don't value my time is just out of line.

[runako]

Re #2: Sorry, I wan't directing that at you and meant no offense. Per your post:

>> I've been running my own for 13 years now (plain old postfix and dovecot on whatever linux distro I favor at the time).

For those of us without the experience of 13 years running postfix and dovecot (and spamassassin and writing perl filters), there will certainly be at least some time investment. That's what I was talking about: the price in hours to go from zero to competent. You may be too competent by now at email hosting to realize that it would not be a minutes per week affair for most people to do well.

Obviously if it works for you, great. Interesting to note that you started running your own long before GMail; the calculus of starting to self-host is different now.

Re #1, you should lend your spam filtering tools to Yahoo! In all seriousness, a handful of unwanted messages per day would be a dramatic improvement to my Yahoo! inbox. Whatever they are doing over there is not as good as what you're running.

[anthonyb]

GMail isn't perfect. I usually get at least one spam per day, usually for stuff which should've been picked up by any decent spam filter (all caps, or "Hello I am Mr. Otogonoyu from Nigeria and I have US$4.8M to give you...")

I sometimes wonder if GMail lets these through for certain people, and relies on the "mark this as spam" button as some sort of mechanical turk...

[icebraining]

Spam filtering got much easier for me once I started using different emails for each website and person. You can just route that particular address to /dev/null without affecting the rest of your emails.

[vy8vWJlco]

Lots of ISPs block incoming SMTP and other "server" ports (to name one of several anticompetitive--I mean, security-enhancing--practices).

And MX records don't support an alternative port to my knowledge.

Unless you shell out for the "real internet" (the business package) it's like fighting an uphill battle to run your own servers anymore.

Ahhh the Internet... I remember that.

[michh]

There are paid services that relatively cheaply fix this by being your MX-record and forwarding mail to your own local SMTP server at a configurable port.

[vy8vWJlco]

Yup. There are free ones too (for example, http://domainmx.net/ -- if you are willing to trust any third party, with your data, or can convince everyone emailing you to use encryption) but, even the pay services put us squarely back in the realm of not owning our data. I can use Gmail that way already (as intermediate storage for when my server's not running, and I can use + in addresses to sort incoming mail for local users).

What gets me is that email was one of the first peer-to-peer networks, and 90% of people, including myself, on residential links, are excluded from using it as designed. It seems more wrong to pay to solve a man-made problem. Free webmail is "good enough" if I'm just going to pull my messages offline and use it as a relay...

I remember there being "more internet" on my 28kbps modem... Port 25 and 80 worked from home, SMTP servers didn't reject mail from anyone on a residential ISP. I actually wrote a letter to my ISPs when they started blocking SMTP (yeah, I'm THAT guy)... Their argument was "but spammers," and they wouldn't make an exception for 1 out of a thousand. I even wound up switching providers over it. A year later everyone was doing it and there was no stand left to make. Spam is our "airport security" scarecrow (among others... copyright, porn, etc)... We'll undo the whole thing if we have to.

And so Gmail it is, until Email 2.0 comes around, and is new enough not to be intentionally broken, or I decide to shell out and license the real internet from my oversubscribed ISP that throttles uploads so noone can offer new and interesting services using their networks that might compete with them.

Don't get me started on QoS -- the neutrality killer... (We moan when people throttle BitTorrent, but when it's called QoS, it's "Smart"!)

Behold, de-evolution.

claps the disappointed clap... of the disappointed :o)

[motti_s]

I agree, it's not necessarily a bad idea. I meant that most people (even most hackers) probably won't do it. I think the biggest issue is reliability, since if your SMTP server is down emails sent to you are rejected.

[ajross]

Meh. I had it running on a line at my home for years. It's been on Linode for the last 2.5 with near zero downtime (Linode had one outage in Texas, I've rebooted a few times, and did a distro upgrade once). Looking at moving it to AWS at the moment. Really, it's easy.

[KayEss]

Most SMTP servers trying to send to you will try for many days before giving up. A typical configuration for a sender may get give a warning after the first 24 hours and then a bounce after another 48 hours, so normally you'll need to get your server back up and running within three days before you'll actually lose mail.

[ocelotpotpie]

This is a bit of a misunderstanding of how SMTP works.

If you run and maintain your own SMTP server and it goes down, you won't be able to send email.

Everyone else will still be able to send email to you, and it will be delivered to you, and you'll be able to read it.

Now, if you break Postfix or something on your server and start bouncing emails then you can be in trouble, or if you mess up the DNS somehow.

But generally running your own mail server is a set it up and leave it alone type of affair. Any junior level hacker can cobble one together with guides online and have it up and running with no problems in a few hours.

[andreasvc]

Senders will keep mail for you in the queue only for a limited time, after a few days (IIRC) your mail will bounce. So if your host or ISP unfairly takes down your SMTP server and you have to go to court with them, you WILL lose mail.

Generally, running an SMTP server is quite a responsibility: not losing mail, not being exploited to send spam. What matters is not so much that you can set up in a few hours, but whether you want to take on that responsibility.

[ajross]

What? No. You just get another host somewhere (free amazon micro EC2, etc...) and point your DNS to that via your registrar. The only thing that can prevent mail service with longer than ~24 hours latency is a seizure of the domain.

[nknight]

No, the misunderstanding is yours. Postfix IS an SMTP server. SMTP servers connect to other SMTP servers to deliver mail. Your mail comes into an SMTP server just as it goes out an SMTP server.

[ajross]

ocelotpotpie meant that SMTP servers are designed to reliably queue mail and retransmit. If your mail server goes down, you don't lose mail. The senders will just try again later. Downtime on an SMTP server impacts delivery latency, not reliability.

[dybber]

I use https://www.backupify.com/ to back up all my emails continuously if this should happen.

[a3_nm]

> unless you setup your own SMTP server (probably not a good idea), you never really have full control

Why does it matter? You're not storing data on that server or anything, so the cost to leave is negligible.

[kijin]

Some paid services have a feature that forwards a copy of all of your sent messages to another address in real time. They do this by adding a BCC to every sent message. This allows you to have copies of every single message, both sent and received.