And who’s to blame for that? If I was allowed to serve my own email server I would. Gmail just gives email out for “free” to basically electronically kidnap your data.
Hey! I want my data in my own server that I can easily access from anywhere… I can do that with Lemmy, with music, with images. But e-mail somehow nope.
It would be easy if I could download the data… Hey you can! Here’s a 4 day download for 2 gigs of data! In a random ass format all twisted and crumbled so you can’t do much with it!
Ok, I’m a technical guy but can I not pay you and keep using my gmail account fucking name? Nope sorry gmail owns that. It’s like some asshole wants 50 cents every time you go check your mailbox because maybe he installed the mailbox. Okay, get that fucking box out of my property then! No! You can’t! It’s part of the house! And oh by the way everyone who needs to get in touch with you officially has to use this box.
Ok I’ll get a proton account… But it’s a different asshole who will one day have much more data on me and wants his 50 cents every time I need to use it. And it’s not my account, it’s my account @ SomeAssholes’ box. Com. That’s the part that irks me.
Here’s a bunch of text I’m posting on someone else’s website. Fuck me! I want control of my own shit but it’s always frowned upon to setup your own this or that. Sure you can do email but what if power goes out?
Can’t there be a happy medium… myaccount@myownFQN.com that I serve at my place but I can shop around for a storefront who will be there getting my mail in case the power goes out. I’m sure there is.
But regardless, I’m frustrated. How do you think my mom, a non tecky person who is in her 70’s feels? Will she be able to escape Google? Nope.
Fuck Google! Fucking assholes! You fucked up email for everyone.
There’s fetchmail and some other options to move mail from one IMAP sever to another. This can be used to sort of hybrid self host. Gmail would receive your inbound mail, but it would be moved to your self hosted IMAP server, freeing up space on gmail. You’d point your mail client to your server. You could still use gmail for SMTP.
As far as actually self hosting IMAP, you can have multiple receiving servers set up with different priorities (via DNS MX record). Even with just 1, the normal practice is for a sending mailserver to retry for a few days, so you’re unlikely to lose mail with normal self hosting down time (although I guess this can vary a lot for some).
If you just use Thunderbird to fetch the email using imap there’s no need to have a server except maybe for a backup
Also if you have Thunderbird remove the email from the server then you can’t have 2 email clients with access to all of the emails (phone + laptop for example).