Imagine you hop on your computer one morning to suddenly find that you’ve been locked out of your google account. You’ve been banned. It’s not just your email account you don’t have access to — it’s everything linked to it. All your single sign-in google linked accounts on other websites, your google drive, your email 2 factor authentication (including medium itself, which sends you an email sign in link rather than deal with passwords), your Youtube account, purchases made on Google Play, videos and photos on Google photos. The list goes on.
Your email these days isn’t just a point of contact. It’s inextricably linked to your online identity
Don’t believe it can happen to you? Here is a story on reddit from a user who returned their google purchased phone device. They returned their google purchased phone device but due to a putative mix-up in the RMA process, part of their system failed to recognize that the device was returned. The subsequent credit card charge back flagged the account as potentially fraudulent causing the subsequent ban. Though we can’t fully verify the authenticity of the story, we can certainly take heed as at the very least a warning sign.
Your online identity shouldn’t have one point of failure. Doubly so if you are conducting your business through a free gmail account. So what is the alternative?
Purchase your own domain name and set it up with an email host
If you’re use to the Gmail interface and still want to use it, you can! You can set up a Google Workspace account and have google as your email host. If there’s ever a hiccup, you can quickly switch to a new host by changing your domain name MX records. There are a lot of good, affordable options. I’ve listed some of them below:
- ProtonMail (8€ / mo)
- TutaNota (3€ / mo)
- Postale.io ($1 / mo)
- Google Workspace ($6 / mo)
Another benefit of setting up your own domain name for your email is having a catch all system in place. For every website I sign up to I have the name of the site @mydomain.com. You can have medium@yourdomain.com, airbnb@yourdomain.com, github@yourdomain.com etc. If you ever get spam, you’ll know who sold you out.
And if you still use your google account to sign in to other websites and services, consider weaning off them and creating a dedicated email login — so that you still have access to those services regardless of what happens with your google account. And if you haven’t already, consider using a password manager such as Bitwarden of 1Password.
Edit: I wrote a follow up piece on how to go about setting up your own domain name email for anyone interested in doing so.
