[scholia]

Well, you locked yourself in. It's easy to buy your own domain name and use it with Google. Then you can switch to a different email system and take your address with you.

Even without giving up your Gmail address in the short term, you could move to Outlook.com, import all your Gmail, and use Outlook.com instead. You can also send Gmail from Outlook.com

Either way, you shouldn't have all your email in Gmail or any other service with no back-up. Set up email forwarding so copies of incoming emails are sent to a different address. Use Thurderbird (or whatever) so you have back-up copies on your hard drive.

[eropple]

> It's easy to buy your own domain name and use it with Google.

Consider historical context. It wasn't easy a decade ago.

[microtonal]

It was. I had domains in ~2000 or so. And even then, many registrars then provided DNS servers, e-mail forwarding, web forwarding, etc.

[eropple]

That's easy for a moderately to highly technical person. The problem tseabrooks identified is exactly that it's not easy for everybody else--especially when that everyone else doesn't have a lens through which to view the potential problem.

[scholia]

Context: It's not so easy for everybody, but it's actually not hard. It's well within the capabilities of the average HN reader...

[eropple]

Fixing the problem for "the average HN reader" doesn't fix the problem.

[scholia]

True, but this was an HN post. It wasn't about everybody.

[tomasz207]

1&1 advertisements from the back of Wired magazine 10 years ago prove otherwise.