Yes, this is one of the wonderful benefits of federation. Thanks to IMAP, you can constantly keep an offline copy of all your emails. If Purelymail stops working for whatever reason, you can just sign up somewhere else, point your domain MX records to the new server and upload your emails there via IMAP or their own import tool. Migrating takes less than an hour, and even that is only because it takes a while for the DNS MX records to propagate.

The single point of failure setup with Purelymail does indeed give me the occasional worry. But fortunately there are a lot of standard tools and processes for migrating email content from one server to another via IMAP and email archives. You can e.g. have a Thunderbird client running at all times, connected to your Purelymail server via IMAP, that will download an offline copy of everything you have in your Purelymail account(s). If Purelymail goes down tomorrow, you can find another provider that supports IMAP, update your DNS MX records, upload your Thunderbird archive to the new provider, and start using your new email provider as never even happened.

Email migrations from hosting provider to another have been among the easiest migrations I’ve ever had to work with. You only have to convince both parties to open up an IMAP server interface for you. ProtonMail can do this with Proton Bridge, but they also have a tool for importing raw .mbox files from Thunderbird.

I’m definitely spending more time on Lemmy. For me this place resembles early Reddit or StackOverflow, where giving just a small piece advice, even though not perfectly written or formatted, can genuinely help someone to make a decision or solve a problem. I’m posting like 10x what I would post on Reddit.

If on Reddit you might occasionally run into a newish post you feel you have just the right competence and writing skill to give a great answer for. But, alas, the post was over 1h old, and someone had already made the “isn’t that putting Descartes before the whores?” comment, and after that there’s just nothing you can do or say to top that so you just forget about it.

Of the low-cost options, Purelymail at least claims they store all data encrypted at rest, provided that you do not enable password recovery and server-side search indexing options.

ProtonMail is becoming really, really expensive for what they are (basic email with on-disk encryption) so I’m planning to move out when my current subscription period ends. For alternatives I’m looking at https://purelymail.com (although the longevity and reliability of that one is a bit questionable) and Tutanota.

In my ideal world I could actually self-host my email on my on-prem physical server, but the chances of getting whitelisted by Gmail and Office are nonexistent. Basically all emails sent from self-hosted instances to Gmail/Office email addresses are going to go straight to spam (sometimes even deleted directly), even if they are replies to emails sent from those accounts.

I have a somewhat unpopular take on this. If the service supports hardware tokens, I will use it, any only it, as my 2FA method. However, if the service doesn’t support hardware keys I scan and store the TOTP code in 1Password alongside the password of the service. I realize this will cause some eyerolls because it’s not real 2FA, BUT the 1Password login is protected with a hardware key and it’s extremely convenient.

I played around using TOTP with Yubico Authenticator in the past, but it turns out you can fit only so many TOTP codes into a single Yubikey (something like 20-30?) This is a showstopper for me since I have hundreds of accounts with TOTP enabled.