Email with no inactive policy to be used as recovery email
 

ProtonMail had this policy where you paid once (one month) and then your free account will "forever" be exempted from inactive account policy. However there is a twist to this recently whereby Proton removed this clause and reverse the promised "forever" term and now all free accounts are bound to the same inactive account policy whereby you need to login at least once in a year. I know they're not asking too much for a free account.

Some people read about the previous policy and paid once then leave their account inactive (used as recovery email only so why bother to login). So when Proton renewed their policy here they don't send email or rather it's hard to reach out to this group of users (since they never bother to login regularly) and a year or two lapsed in a blink of an eye, account deleted and voila! you're still unaware and in the dark.
Original inactive account policy:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/...ccount_policy/

New policy that supersede the old one above:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/...tive_accounts/

I know big corps like Google tend to reverse or change their policies all the time so we as the users are already used to this but when it comes to Proton, this is something new to me. And although I should never trust the term "forever" or "lifetime" nowadays, I still wonder, do you know about any of such email providers where they never terminate your account after many years of inactivity? Since some of you have been around 15-20 years in this forum and may have hundreds of free accounts, I guess you're the best person to provide any insight on this topic :)

Answering my own question, seems like EUMX is a pretty good example of not having an inactivity policy, because I have a 15 year old account and still able to login after 10 years :cool:

Are you referring to this service "http://eumx.net/"? (not https)

It appears that you have to request or invite to establish an account.

Yes, it actually has a valid SSL roundcube mail. I've already an account long long time ago when an invite was not needed.

https://ssl.eumx.net/ ;)

There used to be an interface where you could upload a text file to configure domains and users. I lost those instructions, does anyone have them?

Spamgourmet has been around for more than 20 years.
You never need to login after initial setup.
I haven't checked what the terms say, but I use it for more than 20 years and sometimes never login for years.
About "lifetime": it almost closed because the original owner was terminally ill. Eventually someone took it over. So I guess it's in its second "lifetime" now.

True, but this isn't an email provider as such. Spamgourmet is a forwarding service, with some (useful) extras, like disposable addresses. But you do need a proper email provider to receive messages.

It's good as a recovery mail, since you can redirect it anywhere you want, and it doesn't expect you to ever login. Still I use subdomains of my own domain for recovery (except for recovery at the domain registrar) since I have absolute control over it (inasmuch as "absolute" means anything).

I've had a EuMX account for 11 years, but I wouldn't dream of using them as a recovery address.

No offence to Fabule (BTW, is he still involved with EuMX?) and EuMX, but I would want recovery addresses to be with - not only a long standing provider - but a dependable large provider that isn't likely to disappear and has a good track record.

I would not want to be in a situation where, having a real immediate need to recover some account, only to find that the recovery address is no longer valid because the provider had closed down their service.

IMHO you will not find any email provider that won't change policies from time to time, especially the small providers. At least with the big ones you are more likely to learn about the change in policy before it bites you! Why not just use Gmail or another biggy and put a reminder on your calendar to log in once in awhile, and maybe have a newsletter or something else sent to the account and then forwarded to your main account? Another thing you can do, at least with Gmail, is have a backup phone logged into that Gmail account. I keep at least one previous generation phone around as a backup in case something happens to my main phone, and I periodically take it out, charge it up, install updates, etc. I have thought through the recovery email thing and have gone the Gmail route as being the most reliable in the longterm.

Do you really believe in "forever" or "for life" when it comes to email? I wouldn't trust any provider that claims to be "for life". We don't know how email and the internet in general will evolve... And how could any provider assure to never go bankrupt or go inactive because of other reasons?

I remember here in Belgium you had AdValvas.be and in our neighbouring Netherlands there was ilse.nl. Both services claimed to be "for life". However, if I recall well, they were both gone within the couple of years.

If there is any provider that may come close to "for life" it will, unfortunately, be the big players like Gmail, Outlook/Hotmail, Yahoo, ... Those companies are so big and wealthy that it's unlikely they'll disappear. But even with them I wouldn't dare to say "for life" with certainty. The internet changes too rapidly, I wouldn't dare to predict how it'll look and function like in two decades from now.

So they were "for life": the life of the service.
I think the true meaning of "for life" is the life of the product.
For some strange reason people seem to interpret "for life" as meaning their own life. People tend to be egocentric.
Most companies would not make a commitment for a person's lifetime, because some people live forever. Especially in Belgium.

Well, POBox.com does feature this slogan right at the top of their homepage:

https://www.pobox.com/

When advalvas.be and ilse.nl were still around (which was like 20 years ago) they also gave me the impression they wanted to provide you an email address that you could keep for the rest of your life, not for the duration of the email service's life. Maybe I misinterpretated their slogan, but anyways both services disappeared not too long after I signed up.

I think the only players that you can be sure they won't disappear in the forseeable future are the big players, sadly enough other smaller services don't have the financial guarantees that Microsoft or Google have. So if you really insist you never want to change email address again, then I would advise to stick to Hotmail/Outlook or Gmail. Maybe Yahoo could be an option too.

But then the phrase own your email address links to the page that explains that everyone should use their own domain (with POBox as email provider for the domain).