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securing my email

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Tokyo, 2020.06.26

I'm moving my mail hosting for werneburg.ca from the service included with EasyDNS to a Belgian company called Mailfence. It costs €30/year, but the "free" service from EasyDNS wasn't doing the job: I frequently couldn't reach the servers in Toronto from here in Tokyo for some reason. So far, so good with Belgium.

The bigger plan is to de-Google our lives. It won't be easy, but when we tried building Google accounts for the kids based on our emuu.net domains, things got ridiculously difficult fast. The entire concept of hosting a domain's services with Google seems to have originated with corporate clients (they once gave away free domain accounts, which is why I have several) but now they've tacked kids account controls onto the whole thing, yielding an unworkable mess that to this day has made it virtually impossible for our kids to use their emuu.net accounts on Google.

rand()m quote

Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

—Anton Chekhov