much ado about email

a tale of mega-corps and the increasing fragility of our identity on the modern Web

---

one: the saga

two: turning to higher powers

three: aftermath and now

postscript

---

one: the saga

Around December last year, my iPad's Mail app began to act a bit weird. Emails weren't coming in from my fumnanya@icloud.com¹ address. I initially chalked it up to my university's captive portal...occasionally, it'd try to reach out to the mail servers before I had authenticated and gotten access to the Internet, which made it spaz out and throw up errors.

So I didn't overthink it when new emails didn't arrive on the tablet; I had my laptop around after all, so I wouldn't miss anything.

Let's talk about fumnanya@icloud.com. It's basically my main email address—not my first, that's from a different provider and was "gifted" to me (and only used for less important things)—all my social media platforms, banking accounts, and capital-S Serious™ newsletters are tied to it. In a way, this email represents who I am on the Internet. If you, hypothetically, got into that email, for all intents and purposes, you're effectively me to anyone who asks.

A day later, I noticed Thunderbird wasn't updating on my laptop either. "Hm, that's weird", I thought. "Maybe it's just bugging out" Restart? Nope. "Well, maybe I'm just tripping". Sleep and check in the morning? Nope.

*deep sigh*

"Well, I'm a bit behind on my emails, I guess it's time for the big guns."

If you've used an Apple service on a non-Apple device, you'll understand why I was a bit reluctant to go down this path—Apple never seems to trust the device and always asks for a verification code no matter how many times you click "Trust this browser?". The smoothest experience I've had with appleid.apple.com and icloud.com was (not surprisingly) on a Hackintosh where the guardian angel down at Cupertino reached down and blessed my operating system to allow those cookies to reside in my browser's memory².

I gathered every Apple device I had on hand (just the iPad), navigated to the iCloud site, muttered some incantations, typed in my creds and the OTP, and stared lovingly at the homepage declaring I had 200GB of storage before scrolling down, to look for Mail.

"This is the last resort, I'd rather not use the website, but this is probably an app passwords problem, so before I start to fix it, let me just catch up on what I've missed."

I clicked Mail.

Oh.

two: turning to higher powers

Well...that's new.
Definitely not anything I've seen before.
What do you mean by "not available" uhm...maybe there's an outage?
System Status is all green.
Click again. Nope. Again. Nope. Again again.
Perhaps I'll just sleep, and maybe something will happen overnight and...nope, nothing.

At this point, I'm beginning to panic. I needed my email address. I couldn't do anything without it. I was already missing out on so many emails. I needed to fix this.

But how? A quick web search yielded a few results that basically said they had to contact Apple Support to get it cleared.

Now, Apple Support is marvellous. As far as I know, if you have a Google (Pixel) phone with a Google Account and are having trouble sending RCS messages with the Google Messages app, your only option for support is this thread. On the other hand, Apple has an online chat application and support phone lines³, which is fantastic.

But this support has caveats—for starters, like all other services the company provides, its availability depends on your location. If you reside in the States, for example, your experience with an iPhone differ from someone who lives in France, where the EU's Digital Markets Act mandates that alternate app stores be available. In the same vein, Apple Support can't be used everywhere and if you live outside where it is, then tough luck.

Now I live in Nigeria, (allegedly) the most populous country in Africa and sixth in the world (up there with Indonesia, Pakistan and the greats)⁴, so naturally, a ton of services aren't available here, some of which are:

• Navigation in Maps: It's pretty absurd since I can see traffic on the app and OpenStreetMap does this fine with zero hesitation⁵, but *shrugs* first thing I do on a new iPhone is yeet the Maps app into oblivion and get Google Maps (along with EvilScheme to make it the default if I can).

  

  Look at this, isn't it glorious (no traffic though, hm..)

• Payments with local-currency-denominated Mastercard/Visa cards: This isn't really their fault—the economy's not great and I assume they'd rather get paid in USD. So the usual flow of getting, e.g. Apple Music, became something like:

  • Check price (₦1000);
  • Acquire a dollar-denominated card by either having a domiciliary account or signing up with one of the many virtual-card-as-a-service fintech apps;
  • Get USD into the card (go to a bureau-de-change, hit up your neighbour with the bills...just don't use crypto because we're not sure if that's legal);
  • Get charged the equivalent of ₦1000 (about $0.62 at the time of writing⁶);
  • Repeat next month.

  (This was pretty much why I switched to Spotify from AM earlier that year, even though it was relatively new and I had to lose about 3+ years of content).

• Support: Yep, this too! No official presence means no phone lines/chat to help you if/when things go south.

It wasn't the end of the world, though. You could easily get around the third problem by changing your region on the support site, which would then give you the option to chat with an Advisor. They's typically look into your device and make you tap a popup to ensure you actually have it, and if all goes well, your issue gets fixed even if you aren't technically in that region.

The problem with this, even if I had done it many times before, was that the "Chat" option wasn't showing up for iCloud issues, which meant it was one of those ones that needed someone to talk to you (like getting locked out of your account).

So, how do I make a call to a UK line from another continent?
Enter Skype⁷.

Skype, to this day, has the ability to call real-world regular numbers, and since the support line is (thankfully) toll-free, I could do it at no-cost.

Alright, got the app on the iPad and called. Fumbled a bit until I got a real human, and...aha, here we go.

The Advisor is helpful, routing through the usual questions (have I updated my OS? and so on). They do some screen-sharing thing and watch me try to refresh Mail to no avail. I get put on hold for a bit, and they return, saying they need to escalate to a senior and that they'll call me back.

That...can't work, I don't have a Skype Number that can receive calls from outsiders, and I don't really have the means to get one. I try to ask and see if maybe I can call back in a few days myself, and I get a response of "Uhh, well, probably not". I do call back later though, and give the case ID, which gets me the same response. I try one more time and tell the Advisor that I don't have a UK phone right now (*wink wink*) and I'm in Nigeria. He asks for my +234 number, and obviously the system rejects it, which leads him to refer me to the South African support line (because it's the "closest" to me geographically)...which isn't free to call.

And so...I'm stuck.

I try to investigate what's wrong and send an email from my backup address and get this:

Welp, I guess some intern at the spaceship accidentally garbage-collected my entire email account...and @icloud.com addresses are tied to your Apple ID⁸ , so I can't even go "screw it, I'll just burn it all and start over".

It had been a few days at this point, and it was becoming clear that the best thing to do would be to change my email to something I had control over so I didn't get locked out of anything. So I did just that—dredged up fumnanya@outlook.com⁹ and switched everything I could. My bank accounts were the last to go because I couldn't change them until I got back home to my personal documents, so I stretched them out until end of term.

---

sidebar: why not Gmail? The default inbox splitting into Primary, Social, etc., is annoying...just give me a reverse-chrono feed.

(Yes, I still have a Google Account; I need it for my YouTube watch history and Photos)

---

three: aftermath and now

At the end of all this, I didn't lose too much because of the email switch, the only things I can recall happening are:

• A student ambassadorship for a certain fintech kind of just...fading away because no one replied to my emails from the new address;

• And a quirk of Mozilla's Bugzilla which wanted me to verify my email because I'd logged in with GitHub...but the address didn't exist anymore, and I couldn't change it so I had to abandon the account (not that I've talked much with it hehe...)

Oh, and I found out that LinkedIn removes an email from your account if it realises the emails aren't being delivered, neat.

The more privacy-focused reader might ask "Why not something more like Proton's services, or better yet, self-hosting your email?". And to that I answer:

Email is complex.
Email is important.
Email is your telephone number on the Internet, your identity.

And corporations know this; that's why gating access to people's emails is pivotal—it's an avenue to be targeted with messaging, to be tracked across the Web, to be _____. It's also why it had to be protected at all costs; no one wants everyone to ignore all their emails because most of them are unsolicited. This, in turn, leads to spam filtering of incoming mail, which can be a wee bit too aggressive and delete legitimate emails (Outlook is incredibly hyper with this...it throws email from everyone into Junk; Notion, Pinterest, the company formerly known as Twitter, everyone is sus).

That begs the question, how are you even supposed to judge these emails? You can look at the contents, check the addresses if they're spoofed or misleading (easier said than done), check the originating IP address if it has a history of bad behaviour, check adherence to lots of rules and protocols...you get the gist.

So, being a law-abiding email provider that actually gets your emails delivered takes a fair bit of work (and money), especially if you're doing it all yourself. You can see this in action with the countless threads and anecdotes of complaints about doing all the right things and still not having their emails go through. This is why most email providers charge a fee of some sort (of course, bandwidth is an issue too), with the self-hosters being few and far between, even though we all generally accept the free provider's ones are most likely harvesting data from inboxes.

And to be honest, I don't have those kinds of resources—whether to self-host or pay for Proton. I don't have a spare computer to plug in the kitchen to, at least, receive emails¹⁰. Perhaps I could rent a VPS somewhere that's hopefully not blacklisted, implement all the acronyms (DKIM, DMARC, SPF, DNSSEC, and so on) and maintain it, but then we circle back to the problem of payment anyways.

---

That's the truth for many people worldwide—privacy and security are expensive, in time, in effort, and in money. Most people I know don't use password managers because of inertia from their current "use my middle name and birthday until it complains" approach. I share my location with Google 24/7 because Maps is the easiest way to keep track of my family members (and them of mine). I use Chrome, okay actually no, I don't use Chrome; I open Chrome occasionally because some websites refuse to accept anything that isn't it¹¹.

Even when faced with an abundance of "better" options, the fact is the cost of switching is far too high for most people to do so. You can see this with GitHub/SourceHut, Discord/Zulip, Twitter/Mastodon, and basically any popular platform with an open-source alternative.

And...I don't know.

Maybe we should try and make migrating to more private alternatives easier, lower the barrier of entry, things like that, as opposed to making them more complex—not many people care that Signal has post-quantum security or that some random three-letter agency *might* take a look at their inboxes, they just want to talk to their friends and read newsletters.

So maybe we should keep that in mind...I don't know.

postscript

I originally meant for this to be a tiny rant about me switching email addresses, not this incoherent, spelling-error-laden mess...something I could push out a week after making this blog.

It's been two months.

Not like I've done much of anything after vacating from final exams , mostly just been lying around and scrolling the dreaded Orange Site™. And Reddit¹². And Twitter. And Mastodon.

What else is happening? I'm getting a kick out of our Minister for Education going "The problem at hand is that children are going to school too early, and we need to stop that". Rust-for-Linux is getting some drama and I might as well check out Redox while I'm at it. I downloaded the source code for Servo and built it and...bam, 14GB¹³ of build artefacts. I'm scouring the Internet for jobs, and it's funny how many are Remote (but like the States and Europe only pleaseandthankyou). I'm wondering if it makes sense to pursue a Masters degree.

Fun¹⁴.

Oh, and we got a brand new internet provider with a speed-based data-unlimited plan, and while some people might scoff at 20Mbps sustaining a family, I've downloaded Fortnite¹⁵ and watched some streams, so I'm not complaining (the previous provider has such terrible "unlimited" plans that wouldn't even pretend to be unlimited, they have a cap right there).

And...that's that.
Gonna stop here.
Bye.
Toodles.