The dangers of depending on Gmail¶
Incidents of Google accounts being suddenly banned have been reported frequently.
Youtube and Google Documents data can be given up at worst, but losing access to Gmail and Google Drive can sometimes cause irreparable damage.
This is especially difficult if you are using Gmail as your main email.
The hassle of resetting the email address registered with each service to a new address is unimaginable... In my case, it would be several hundred cases.
There is also the possibility that you may need to contact your recruitment agent or private friends about the change of your email address every time.
My argument is simple: Don't let one service provider do everything for you and you should manage aliases for email.
It would be ridiculous to have all the services you depend on become unusable due to a case of inadvertent misuse or false positive detection of malicious data by the service provider.
It's fucking ridiculous to say the least, especially when an email address, which is a kind of signature on the Internet, is involved in such an accident and becomes unusable.
I have purchased a mail alias called linux.com and am currently routing to hey.
If by some accident my hey account gets locked, I can just switch the alias destination and I'm good to go. Completely no damage.
Since Gmail is a very useful email service, I think it is a great idea to set the alias destination to Gmail. It's not a good idea to centralize all your documents, drives, etc. in Google, but running a mail alias is an appropriate step to break the dependency on one service provider.
Yes, I think I talked about "email addresses registered to various services" in the previous section, but I think it would be an interesting idea to use one-time addresses as the addresses registered to services.
Firefox Relay is a good service for that.
In conclusion, those of you who use your Gmail address as your signature should imagine the value of your signature and how hard it would be to lose it and take appropriate action.
There are various kinds of risks involved, such as the risk of using it for personal communication or as an ID to register for services, which can be dealt with by using static aliases or relay services.