If Gmail goes belly up, you won't have a problem. Every service will have a problem. You can just ride along with all the other customers.

Not at all, since I run my own. https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

This happened to me.

Hotmail was my email from 1997 until last year. I still know the password. But it wants me to do a security check. By sending a code to my backup email.

Problem is, I haven't logged into my backup email in forever. So it wants to send a security code to my hotmail account.

......

.....

You see the problem, right?

I’d be fine. If my email provider goes away, my troubles are over, because my email provider is me!

Buy your own domain and use it for e-mails (there are many providers that support custom domains). If your provider shuts down, just switch to a different one and keep the same address.

All my shit is in the Google ecosystem. I am fairly confident that Gmail is not going away anytime soon. However, I am more afraid that some obscure ToS violation will forcibly disconnect me from their ecosystem, and I will have to scramble to make sure all my contacts have my alternate info. I am doubly screwed, as a Google Fi customer. If we all get suddenly degoogled, I lose a phone number that I have had for over 20 years.

As good a deal that Fi is for me (I normally don't use bandwidth unless I travel internationally), I may switch soon just to reduce my exposure to Google.

Register your own domain and use that. Then if your email provider dies then you can take your domain elsewhere.

I figure I'd be mostly ok, the email I use for things I'd need to save is stored locally by thunderbird so I could still access those emails, the only problem would be changing the email on a few services.

The hardest part would be replacing that email address. That said, anyone have a rec for a good email service, preferably free, with IMAP/POP3 for use with tbird, that is at least ostensibly private (I know, email is inherently not private, but ykwim), and doesn't just get shoved in spam on gmail (since that's what everyone else has)? Riseup would be cool for instance but it's impossible to get an invite. I'm thinking I may just pay mailbox.org but I'd prefer not to. Unwilling to self host, evidentially it's easy to fuck your shit up by self hosting email.

I recently lost my oldest email and I didn't plan accordingly. Roadrunner email. It's still a pain in the butt. I've managed to change almost everything (that I can REMEMBER) to my newer email, but there are two that haven't been changed because they require an email to the old email first... It's gone.

That email was probably 20 years old and I have no idea what services I had signed up through it.

The moral of my story is to read emails from your email provider. Apparently they sent out warnings 6 months in advance, but I always ignored their emails.

The only way to protect yourself from something like this is to own your own domain name.
You can still use something like Google as a provider but you can switch providers and recreate the same email addresses.

Write down all your accounts and hope they'll send you a warning in advance, once they decide to go out of business. Then you're going to have to change all the accounts to a new email.

I'm pretty sure the big paid providers aren't going to fail you withoit a warning. And gmail etc are too big to fail. That's going to wreak havoc with a lot of other users... Though: If they decide to ban you or delete your account... You're going to be in big trouble. That regularly happens to people.

Only alternative I can imagine is to run your own email service. If you own the domain and server, it's your call. But you have to pay attention to maintain it and not get hacked etc. That would be another way to lose email accounts. (Running a mailserver is more complicated than hosting a website.)

I suppose if my email provider shuts down I would need to know if I had shut down my server, my server host went out of business, or someone has taken control of my domains