...and bada-bing, bada-boom, I'm back with Google. Sure, I ABSOLUTELY LOVE the idea of Proton Mail's end-to-end encryption. Hey, this introvert likes his space apart from prying eyes—even of the Cylons dressed in red! And I don't mind running down Android apps outside of Google's garden. But the thing is, it began to remind me of living out in the country, when I had to have a separate service for water, another for natural gas, an electricity vendor and had to haul out trash myself, all in a context of an aversion of login multiplicity! So, to make things work, I had my secured email and began researching cloud storage/backup providers, like the zero-knowledge SpiderOak. For the price of a monthly subscription to Spotify, I could get a secure setup....

...but, to what end? Yes, peace of mind is wonderful as it relates to privacy, though since my original foray into Gmail was invitation-only, no doubt Mountain View has REAMS of data about my psychological makeup! As it relates to cloud space, what's the extent I need? My GNUCash monthly budget would be a waste on the server rack space for the NSA's PRISM. Yes, it would be a fun exercise for me to do in principle, but in practice...well, to what end?

And while I love the idea of custom domain email, I'm at the mercy of the technical expertise of my domain's DNS administrators—they're a great bunch, but the best people in the industry work for places like Google. It's like when I used to host my website on an old Dell laptop running Linux on a library shelf: I never had the time to monitor server logs keep up with patches to ensure it was secure. It makes far more sense to use today's AWS solutions (if not just an outright webhost) with their 24-7 support TEAMS of folks. But, I totally get the mindset of doing things just because we can!

Ultimately, I want to focus less on system implementation for feel-good funzies . I'd rather waste time in other contexts.