A lot of folks suggest getting your own domain name for having control over your online presence but the question that I have always had is what would happen to them when I die?
Wouldn’t the domains eventually expire and anyone else would be able to register it and access my email attached to that domain? With that email, they can theoretically get into all my accounts which don’t have 2FA on (a lot of the sites just don’t have the option to turn on 2FA) via the ‘Forgot my password’ services?
Similarly, if I have a blog or website that I have poured my heart and soul into for my entire life, wouldn’t that just go down forever when the domain expires? Maybe services like The Internet Archive would help in that regard but I don’t know how many people are actively searching for an archived version of a website when they can’t access it on it’s actual domain.
I understand that after I die, all of this wouldn’t by my concern and wouldn’t matter but I still think about this a lot.
To the people who have their own domain, email and/or blogs, what are your thoughts on this?
The email is stored on a server. The domain DNS points the appropriate URL at your matching email configuration. Someone registering your domain doesn’t give them information about the previous DNS configuration, name servers, and certainly not your server cpanel login credentials. So no, they wouldn’t get access to your emails. They could re-create the same email address using their new setup, but all of the previous email contents would still be sitting on your server. Someone could potentially use the matching email address to retrieve account resets from services you’re registered to, but they would need to know your exact email address and there would probably still be some additional roadblocks.
Regarding your blog and that sort of stuff. If you want it to persist after you die, then you should will it to someone, along with renewal information, admin access, and probably some money to cover the expenses. If you use a password manager like LastPass then you can set someone up as an emergency contact, and they can retrieve all of your logins after you die. They basically send a retrieval request, and if you don’t respond to block it in the given time period, it allows them to log in as if they were you.
If they control the domain, they can see all incoming mail delivery attempts to sniff for addresses that were used. They’d still have to know the domain of the email address for the login they were attacking, which might not be super useful if they’re going after a certain login. But, going the other direction would be more fruitful: buy a domain, dump all incoming mail into a catch-all box, and start looking for bank alert emails or other periodic/promo emails. You might find services that just use email addresses for a login name, or ones that have a “forgot username” feature that only uses email for recovery. Multi-factor auth spread across multiple services (email, SMS, authenticator codes…) would help mitigate significantly by making them also have to take over a phone number or get an old device. Not impossible, but then you’re making them work harder for it, and when good account recovery services heavily mask the available targets, it makes it harder to know what else to acquire (e.g., a specific phone number) even if they get as far as full email domain control.
That’s all true, but it seems like a long shot. To be safe, if you have assets after you pass and you want to leave them to someone, then definitely leave instructions on how to login to the domain and keep the email active, or remove it from every valuable service and shut it down. If neither of those things are true, then you’ll be dead and it wouldn’t matter. That’s kind of morbid and sad, but such is life (and death).