And that's why I moved most of my website registrations to a name@mydomain.com address and host the server myself on a $4/mo VPS. Still, my domain name is tied to my gmail address. Now I'm paranoid I'll lose access to my gmail, and my domain name quickly after. (remember the @N guy?)
Unless I manage to learn some social engineering skills or hire myself a marketing team I doubt I'd be able to get my stuff back. I'm no social butterfly, I'm not pretty and I've got some serious Eastern European accent.
So I'm considering maintaining two mail servers with different companies and different registrars, both pointing at each other. Such that in case I lose one, I can recover with the second.
What I'm planning to do is move the services I have registered with my Gmail account to a Fastmail account, and migrate my Gmail archive to that service. They handle contacts and calendars too, and their basic service is $3/month. That's cheaper and easier than running one's own mail server.
I've been test driving their service for a few days and so far it feels much more intuitive and faster than Gmail. It also works properly on every browser I've thrown at it, and their Android app is nice. I'm going to spend the next few days pruning my Gmail archive before transferring it so I don't have to buy the 25GB plan from Fastmail, then I'll tell all the services that use the Gmail address to use the Fastmail address instead. That second task will be the most time consuming and frustrating one, but it's worth the effort to break the chains of the big G.
(Edit: Corrected the price for Fastmail's basic service)
Good luck. I did the same and now I have all sorts of issues when employers send Calendar invites to my (ex-Google, now Fastmail) email address. I cannot accept them due to weird errors, etc. Not the best look if you're ostensibly an Operations guy. :)
We're not aware of any general issues like that. Please open a support ticket with the full details and we'll happily investigate: https://www.fastmail.com/action/support/
I don't use Google services for anything work related (we're government so we have "good old" Outlook and Exchange), just personal stuff and side work. Basically, as long as it can sync with the calendar and contacts on my phone, I'm set.
Thanks for the warning though, and maybe one of the FastMail devs will see your post and address it.
If you're concerned that your domain registration is tied to your Gmail address, consider having different addresses on different providers (e.g. Outlook.com, your own domain, etc.) and assign different addresses to the Registrant, Admin, Billing and Technical contacts. You could also use a separate Gmail account, though that could be slightly riskier if the accounts get linked somehow by the giant data vacuum.
Unless I manage to learn some social engineering skills or hire myself a marketing team I doubt I'd be able to get my stuff back. I'm no social butterfly, I'm not pretty and I've got some serious Eastern European accent.
So I'm considering maintaining two mail servers with different companies and different registrars, both pointing at each other. Such that in case I lose one, I can recover with the second.
Am I crazy?