I'm sorry this happened. This is my digital nightmare scenario!
It is disturbing how much of our digital and physical life (utility accounts, medical insurance, etc. etc.) are tied to email addresses and these email addresses are something we can never ever truly own. If you are locked out of email, you are also locked out of at least half a dozen critical portals that send password resets, OTPs and all kinds of authentication fragments to your email address!
Most email addresses are on somebody else's domain and they can lock you out anytime. Even if you manage to set up your domain name, you are still renting the domain name from someone. One missed payment or you somehow mess up the admin work of your domain name or you lose your domain name for any reason (yes, it happens!), nobody in the world can reach your email address!
How did this happen? Weren't the old days of snailmail better? You could own a house or you could rent a house and get actual physical letters at your home. If you moved houses, you could have the new tenants of the old house forward mail to your new one until everything settled down.
Email addresses seem like good secondary mode of communication but I find it disturbing that all around the world, email addresses have become the primary mode of communcation and sometimes the only mode of communication!
Does anyone else feel extremely uncomfortable that so much of our critical digital and physical lives are tied to email addresses, things that we can never truly own and can be taken away from us anytime?
> While you dont own a domain name, you have legals means to get it back.
Can you or someone else share more about this? Do these laws work across countries? Can someone in Bhutan exercise their legal right to get back their .com or .org domain name? Must someone in Bhutan always buy a .bt domain name? I'd like to learn more about how the legal framework works and protects the customer from loss of their domain names?
Provided you're in the same coutry as the registrar and using your passport for registration. And you don't miss your pay date (they usually don't allow to pre-pay for many years in advance). And payment remains available (I once had to resort to paying with cash(!) because of banking troubles). And registrar doesn't get bought, go bankrupt, etc. After losing an important domain I can't say it's THE way to go. Also, self-hosting e-mail is a nightmare. Not only because of ridiculously complex software, but also need to be trusted, which, in e-mail world, is hard as...
How do you actually get it back? Friend of mine has a portfolio website in their name they’ve been maintaining for well over a decade, they missed one payment and some scoundrel bought it up and is demanding thousands of bucks for it.
It is disturbing how much of our digital and physical life (utility accounts, medical insurance, etc. etc.) are tied to email addresses and these email addresses are something we can never ever truly own. If you are locked out of email, you are also locked out of at least half a dozen critical portals that send password resets, OTPs and all kinds of authentication fragments to your email address!
Most email addresses are on somebody else's domain and they can lock you out anytime. Even if you manage to set up your domain name, you are still renting the domain name from someone. One missed payment or you somehow mess up the admin work of your domain name or you lose your domain name for any reason (yes, it happens!), nobody in the world can reach your email address!
How did this happen? Weren't the old days of snailmail better? You could own a house or you could rent a house and get actual physical letters at your home. If you moved houses, you could have the new tenants of the old house forward mail to your new one until everything settled down.
Email addresses seem like good secondary mode of communication but I find it disturbing that all around the world, email addresses have become the primary mode of communcation and sometimes the only mode of communication!
Does anyone else feel extremely uncomfortable that so much of our critical digital and physical lives are tied to email addresses, things that we can never truly own and can be taken away from us anytime?