Ask HN: Does any use a separate email just for account registration?

3 points

4 years ago

The horror stories about getting kicked off of Google for arbitrary reasons and the kafka-esque process of attempting to get an account reinstated have me thinking about how I'd want to move off of google at some point. However, I'm hesitant about moving to another service, mostly because I generally do find gmail convenient. I like that it auto uploads attachments that are too large to GDrive. I like being able to verify the receiver by the preview of their google profile picture if they're also a gmail user. There's also the question of, if I move all my stuff to another hosted email address, that service getting shut down. And there's plenty of reasons listed on the internet for not hosting your own email server (though it seems like it may not be as bad nowadays with some of the open source projects out there)

So then I had a thought - What if I host my own email server, only for inbound email, and use that for account registration? That way, if I ever do get arbitarily kicked off google, I won't be in _total_ registration hell. I could even generate an email address per service, so that I'll have more traceability for people who sell my email information. And I can keep my gmail for personal use.

Some open questions I have: * Will services that I register for fail to deliver emails to my server somehow? Or do I need to concern myself with IP reputations still? * Do I care about spam? for example, if I know that the email I registered for example.com is hello.example@myemailserver.com and correlate it with the domain it's for, I can basically ignore all emails that don't come from those domains. I don't know enough about email protocols to know what the threat vector here is. * How hackable are email servers? Ideally it would be nice to be able to provision email addresses per server, forward them to a single place, and filter them / categorize them based on how actionable they are. * What are the gotchas for managing your own email server? Inbound deliverability? Up time? spam / bots? updates and monitoring? disk space?

I'm curious if anyone else has thought about this and set it up for themselves, or any other self-hosters that do something interesting with their setup.