Cautionary tale and advice if you use smaller email providers
from loaExMachina@hexbear.net to degoogle@lemmy.ml on 31 Oct 10:45
https://hexbear.net/post/9921928

TD;DR : Make sure to back up important mails on a local folder so they don’t get deleted in case of hardware failure on the server side. This is good advice in general, but especially if you use a smaller mail provider.

Email is a thing that’s seemingly very easy to degoogle, as there are many providers, but when you look into it it’s not that easy to get something significantly better than google.

It’s a service that involves storing your data on a server, which isn’t free for the provider so it usually abides the “if it’s free, you’re the product” rule of thumb.

Most free providers are from companies just as bad as google, that probably sell your data as well.

Those that seem better on privacy like proton or tutanota paywall some important features such as using a third party client (like Thunderbird).

Self-hosting may not be possible for you even if you have a home server depending on your ISP.

There are some better options if you’re willing to pay, but of course, paying for a service you used to get for free may not seem very desirable if you’re not currently in the best financial situation.

In all this, what seemed like the best option to me was disroot: A free email service provided by a netherlands-based non-profit organization, funded by donations and offering to pay for extra space of needed. The free storage space is smaller, but I can just watch out to delete the useless mails so it can fit: with a few smart filters you can already place mails that are only temporarily useful in a separate box with an auto-deletion policy, and there aren’t that many mails you do need to keep.

Now, disroot has had a critical server failure a few days ago, and it hasn’t been fixed yet. Thankfully, they were quick to set up a temporary storage solution so that mails that arrived after the failure are still delivered, but it’s impossible now to send mails from their servers or to access older mails.

The later part if what caughy me off-guard. I use thunderbird and K-9 mail, which synchronize mails locally, and mails from servers where my account no longer exist are still here… But in this case, the clients did synchronize with the servers, and the mails weren’t there anymore, so it deleted them locally too.

My salvation was this old thinkpad I sometimes used and had by chance booted just a few days prior and turned off. It has a physical switch that disables wifi (something that had so far mostly caused me trouble when I spent hours trying to troubleshoot my config, even tho only issue was that I had accidentally pushed a switch I’d forgotten about). By pushing the switch before booting it, my mails weren’t synchronised and I got to copy them to a local folder. Yippee!

I don’t know yet when Disroot will have solved this problem, or whether old mails on their server are recoverable or corrupted. My mails are saved either way now, but if I didn’t have that thinkpad, or if I had turned it on before noticing the problem, there’d be a real risk of permanently losing all my mails.

I do intend on still using Disroot if they manage to get it running like before, I think their service is good, and I can accept this risk, I will just need to watch out not to put all my eggs in the same basket agakn, and make of habit of copying all important mails to a local folder, and also re-take the habit of backing up all my files on an external hard disk (something I’ve neglected to do of late).

I do not blame Disroot at all, I understand that sometimes stuff happens even if you did everything right, and that they’re doing their best to fix it, despite one of them also going through a personal tragedy at the same time. Failures like this can also happen with GAFAM services, but they have more redundancy and more employees so it generally get fixed faster. With a small non-profit, you have to be more patient. As a great spider man once said, with great power comes great responsibilty; so it’s understandable that taking power back over our data also means taking back responsibility over it, and learning more about how email clients store mails is an important part of it. Your email server failing can be an acceptable risk if you’re well prepared for it.

#degoogle