Fastmail to end support for operamail.com email addresses

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500003586261-End-of-support-for-operamail-com-addresses

by alexmcc81 • 5 years ago

44 47 5 years ago

dltj• 5 years ago

Your email address is too important to leave in the hands of a third-party provider. This isn’t to say that using a third-party provider to run your email is a bad idea. You should own the domain, though.

toomuchtodo3• 5 years ago

Perhaps it’s time for the development of a standard where your email address isn’t tied to a domain; instead, email is addressed to an identity and the underlying plumbing automatically handles routing and delivery. Very similar to how your mobile phone number is portable between providers.

We can’t expect everyone to own a domain to control their messaging sovereignty.

umanwizard• 5 years ago

What should it be tied to? Who would maintain the mapping of names to addresses, and wouldn’t this just be reinventing the domain name system?

flurdy• 5 years ago

Wasn't that the idea behind .name TLD initially? Until they sold out and became yet another ccTld

thombles2• 5 years ago

Sounds a lot like the nomadic identities in Hubzilla and the Zot protocol.

https://zotlabs.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project https://zotlabs.org/help/en/developer/zot_protocol#What_is_Z...

hyakosm• 5 years ago

Yes. I also made the choice to pay for my email hosting from a reliable provider, it's cheap (1.5$ month) and I'm considered as a customer, I can have a support with real humans.

adenner• 5 years ago

Care to share which company?

guitarbill3• 5 years ago

True, but an added complication is that you have to be really, really careful about your domain. You have to trust your registrar, set up 2FA, and make sure it never expires, etc. So in the end, owning your domain isn't foolproof either, it's also another point of failure (similar to Google deleting your account, although one you may have more control over).

For what it's worth, I use Fastmail + a custom domain and couldn't be happier. But I'd hardly recommend it to everyone for personal email.

throwawaysea2• 5 years ago

As someone considering either Fastmail or Protonmail, could you share what your experience is like and why you chose Fastmail?

djrogers• 5 years ago

Owning a domain with a registrar like Hover (or if only for email, through your mail provider) is really not that complicated or difficult. You get an email once a year that it will be renewed, they charge your card, and it’s done.

And 2FA? Yeah, if you’re not already doing that for PayPal, Venmo, eBay, and others, you’re not gonna add it for your domain. If you are already doing that, it’s no extra burden.

tzs• 5 years ago

For making sure it never expires, I recommend (1) initially buy it for multiple years, (2) every year on your birthday (or on Christmas, or on some other date that is significant to you) add another year, and (3) put a recurring entry on your calendar a week or two after the date from #2 to check to make sure you remembered #2.

I'd recommend for #2 picking a date that you do other annual preventative stuff on, such as changing your smoke detector batteries. That way you build an association in your mind between that other stuff and extending the domain, making it further unlikely that you will forget.

Generally, you can start out with 10 years. Some registrars offer even more, but the underlying registries generally only support 10 years. The registrars that offer more do so by doing 10 years with the underlying registry and then automatically extending that every year transparently to you. If they go out of business more than 10 years before the end of the term they purported to sell you, those remaining years will go poof.

Also have on your calendar reminder for #3 a reminder to check to make sure your contact information still works, particularly email. If you own domain X and use it for email, you probably don't want to use an @X email address as your contact address for the registrar you registered X from. If something goes wrong with your account or domain at the registry and they try to contact you, you don't want their email to you to get eaten by whatever problem they are trying to contact you about.

Aardwolf• 5 years ago

Don't you also depend on a third-party for your domain, though?

kroltan2• 5 years ago

Yes, but if one goes out of business you can buy your domain from someone else! Or even transfer it, if you are warned a nonzero amount of time in advance.

Being able to keep your address across service providers being the important part here, that way your online life doesn't get in a huge jumble when your provider goes away.

AdmiralAsshat• 5 years ago

And yet you literally can't run your own mail server in most situations. ISPs will block you.

What's the solution?

Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL2• 5 years ago

Running your own mail server, having problems due to shared IP is only one of the problems. Some more:

Spam filtering for one. Uptime and updating without downtime. You would absolutely need redundancy (complexity of the solution required starts building up quickly). Keeping tabs on mail server security and the vulnerabilities discovered in your particular software stack. A 15 second down time means an important mail might not reach you. If your mail server crashes due to unknown reason at 4 am, do you really want it to be your problem to fix? And it will of course happen when it least fits your schedule for the day. On most days I could live with my website being offline for a few hours because I've screwed up, but with E-Mail?

The solution?

The more you think it through, own the domain, yes, but use a mature and reliable (and paid for) provider you trust to do the hosting for you. For someone technical enough to securely own a domain and not let it expire that seems like the best solution really, unless maybe you own your own hosting service? :P (but then, technically, I guess it's not your own private mail server either)

pan69• 5 years ago

This is exactly the reason I'm using Fastmail. I can BYO my own domain.

poglet• 5 years ago

Fortunatley the process for changing to to another alies is trivial, buy I imagine this would be extramly frustrating for many people.

Many services make it difficult to change login or email (My Steam login is an email I havent used in over 15 years).

wlesieutre• 5 years ago

Does this not work? https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3176-RTK...

Or when they say "Steam Support will immediately email you a link to click on to verify your new email address" do they mean it's sent to your old email address where you can't get it?

ficklepickle• 5 years ago

Ugh, paypal is bad for this. I have to keep an ancient hotmail account alive, just because it is the email I used to create the account 10+ years ago.

I can login with my more recent email account, so it would be easy to forget the old hotmail account is even tied to it.

tyingq• 5 years ago

Wait a couple of years and I bet Opera lets the domain expire, and someone will pick up a relative treasure trove of email traffic for $10.

deeblering4• 5 years ago

My bet is on a domain squatter snapping it up and then reselling it for with hugely inflated asking price.

jbverschoor• 5 years ago

The problem is that you don’t know for sure where your email has been used.

thombles2• 5 years ago

An underappreciated benefit of using a password manager consistently. It might be a long and unpleasant chore but you can have some confidence that you're updating everything that matters.

sneak• 5 years ago

I recently wrote a guide about how to stop relying on a domain you don't own for receiving email. I've heard a ton of positive feedback about it. This incident is a really good example as to why your whole email address should always ultimately be under your own control (i.e. at a domain you own).

https://sneak.berlin/20201029/stop-emailing-like-a-rube/

jraph• 5 years ago

The operamail.com domain is owned by Opera, not Fastmail. We've handled mail at this domain on Opera's behalf since Fastmail staff bought back the company in 2013. Opera has since advised us that they will no longer allow us to handle mail through this domain.

Why though?

How come Fastmail handles mails on Opera's behalf, and why Opera now prevents Fastmail from doing it? How come they couldn't manage to agree on a way to avoid losing their users' email addresses?

floatingatoll• 5 years ago

Fastmail was temporarily (see below!) called "Operamail" until they bought themselves out from Opera in 2013.

AndrewDavis• 5 years ago

Fastmail was originally an independent company that was acquired by Opera. Later they became independent again.

reustle• 5 years ago

The new owner of Opera is a Chinese company. If they want to implement their own email project with the same name, I'm sure they've got a few strong requirements that fastmail wouldn't want to comply with.

Fastmail to end support for operamail.com email addresses

Related Stories