DEV Community: The G Man

Is Paying for Email Worth It? What Your Money Actually Buys

The G Man — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 20:19:02 +0000

"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product."

It's a great line. It's also doing a lot of work for people selling things, including us. So let's take it apart properly: what free email actually costs you, what paying actually buys and where even we think paying is the wrong answer.

We sell paid email. Read accordingly. We've still tried to write the version we'd want to read before spending money.

Somebody pays for every inbox. The only question is who and how.

TL;DR

Somebody pays for every inbox. The only question is who, and what they want in return.
Mainstream free mail runs partly on advertising and the data profile that makes it work. Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, GMX, mail.com: somebody other than you is helping pay the bill.
The ad-free free tiers are paid for too, by the subscribers of the same company. Which rather makes the point.
Inbox data has been sold. Yahoo and AOL scanned more than 200 million inboxes for commercial advertising data, and free email apps have built six-figure datasets from what their users received and bought.
Your inbox is extraordinarily valuable data and AI makes it more useful than ever. What governs its use is a policy, not an architecture, and the settings are confusing enough that even security researchers got them wrong in public.
Email services simply end. Providers have been shutting down and offloading mailbox products for years, and a mailbox nobody pays for directly is the easiest kind to cut.
Paying puts you and the provider on the same side. Your subscription is the revenue, so the product only has to do one job.
What money doesn't buy: immunity from the law, guaranteed delivery, encryption once your message reaches Gmail, or protection from your own mistakes.
The one thing paying doesn't fix: the address still sits on somebody else's domain. Only your own domain changes that.

Somebody Pays for Every Inbox

Running mail is not free. Servers, storage, spam filtering, abuse handling, deliverability work, engineers: all of it costs money every month, for every mailbox, forever. Nobody absorbs that out of generosity.

So when an inbox costs you nothing, the money is coming from somewhere else, and that somewhere decides what the product becomes.

For mainstream free mail, advertising is part of the economics. Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo, GMX and mail.com all show advertising in or around their free email products. Microsoft states plainly that free Outlook is supported by ads. GMX says advertising revenue finances its free service. The targeting models differ, and Google says Gmail ads are based on your wider activity rather than your messages. But in every case somebody other than the person reading the mail is helping pay the bill.

For the ad-free free tiers, the answer is other customers. Proton and Tuta give away a limited free account with no ads and real encryption, and they can do it because their paying subscribers cover the cost. Those free tiers are an argument for paid email, not against it. They exist because somebody pays.

Which leaves one model where the person paying and the person using the inbox are the same: you pay, and the only thing the provider has to get right is your mail.

That's it. That's the entire case for paid email, and everything below is detail.

What Actually Happens to Free Email

Let's be precise, because the vague version is easy to dismiss.

Gmail is the interesting case, because the easy accusation is out of date and the real problem is worse.

Google stopped using message content for ad personalization in 2017. It says it does not use Gmail content to train its Gemini models, and it has repeated that denial every time the claim resurfaces.

Now look at what happened in November 2025. A post claiming Gmail had quietly opted everyone into AI training reached millions of people. A respected security firm wrote it up, then published a correction the next day admitting it had confused Gmail's long-standing smart features with generative model training. Google said it had changed nobody's settings. A proposed class action was filed in California alleging Gemini got access to Gmail, Chat and Meet without proper consent, which remains an allegation rather than a finding.

Here's the part that should bother you regardless of who was right. The controls live in several places and Google documents three separate categories of them. Switching them off also removes things like inbox categorization, Smart Compose and summary cards, so the convenient features and the data access share the same switches. And when professional security researchers looked at the interface and couldn't agree on what it did, several hundred million ordinary users had no chance at all.

That's the actual condition of free email in 2026. Not a confirmed conspiracy. Something more corrosive: a system so complicated that "we don't do that with your mail" has become unverifiable by the person whose mail it is.

Your inbox is extraordinarily valuable data. Contracts, purchases, appointments, arguments, relationships and years of natural-language correspondence, all in one searchable place. AI makes that data more useful than it has ever been.

Google says it does not use personal Gmail messages to train its foundational Gemini models. The concern is broader than training. Depending on your settings, your mail can already be processed to categorize messages, generate replies, summarize threads and power personalized features across Google's products.

"We don't use your mail to train our models" is an important promise. It's also a policy commitment layered over a system that can technically process the mail. The architecture hasn't made the question irrelevant, it has just moved it into a settings menu.

A subscription-funded inbox doesn't need to monetize that processing to pay for the mailbox. That's the difference.

Everyone Else Is in the Same Business

Microsoft. In January 2026 a bug let Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat read and summarize emails that users had explicitly labelled confidential, bypassing the data-loss-prevention rules designed to stop it. Microsoft confirmed it and fixed it. In the same period the European Parliament's IT department switched off built-in AI features on lawmakers' devices, citing the risk of confidential correspondence being uploaded to the cloud. Those were paying enterprise customers with compliance controls turned on. If the guardrails leak there, think about what the free consumer tier looks like.

Yahoo and AOL. The clearest documented case. In 2018 the Wall Street Journal reported more than 200 million inboxes being scanned for commercial data sold to advertisers, sorting people into categories like "frequent traveler" from their receipts and booking confirmations. Only mail from companies, Yahoo said, and you could opt out. It was on by default.

Free email apps. In 2020, Edison Mail, Cleanfox and Slice were all shown to build commercial products out of their users' inboxes: purchase data extracted, aggregated and sold to corporate clients, with one dataset reportedly priced above $100,000. Edison's homepage said "No Ads, Just Mail." Perfectly true. The money came from somewhere else.

And the one nobody warns you about: email services simply end. Telecoms and internet providers have been shutting down or offloading mailbox products for years. Turkcell, for example, says its Mailim service closes completely on 31 October 2026 and that stored data becomes inaccessible after 1 December.

The problem is sharpest when email is bundled into something else. If nobody is paying specifically for the mailbox, it's easy to treat as a cost centre when priorities change. It's always somebody's line item, and line items get cut.

What Free Actually Costs

Forget the monthly price. These are the costs that show up later.

Ads in the place you read your mail. Promotions tabs, sponsored messages, inline units dressed up as email. You've stopped noticing them, which is exactly what makes them valuable.

A profile that outlives the inbox. Even where message content isn't used for targeting, your activity feeds the same advertising machine that funds everything else. The inbox is one input among many.

Deletion for inactivity. Google may delete personal accounts after two years of inactivity. Microsoft closes accounts not signed into for two years. A free account expects you to keep proving you exist, and quietly takes your address back if you don't.

Suspension with no appeal. Automated systems close accounts, sometimes wrongly. When mail, photos and documents all sit behind one free account, a bad automated decision takes all three at once, and your route back is a web form.

Storage you share with everything else. On Gmail, 15 GB covers mail, Drive and Photos together. Fill it with holiday videos and your mail stops arriving.

Changes you don't get a vote on. Gmail is ending Send As for outside addresses in January 2027. Yahoo cut free storage. AI features arrive switched on and the opt-out takes your inbox categorization with it. The product serves a strategy and you're not part of it.

An inbox that keeps becoming something else. Mail was a product. Then a tab in an ecosystem. Now an AI surface. Nobody asked the people reading their mail whether they wanted any of it.

What Paying Actually Buys

Here's the part where paid providers usually get vague. Specifics:

An actual support relationship. Not automatically a good one. Plenty of paid providers have terrible support and some free services do better than they need to. But paying puts you on the other side of a relationship where losing you costs something, and that changes what happens when your account locks on a Friday afternoon.
A business model that points the same way you do. If the money comes from subscriptions, the incentive is to keep you subscribed. If it comes from advertising or ecosystem lock-in, the incentive is to keep you engaged and inside. Neither is sinister. They just produce different products over ten years.
No ads in your inbox. Worth stating plainly, with the caveat below that a couple of free providers manage this too.
Storage built around your account, not an advertising ecosystem. Your mailbox capacity isn't competing with Google Photos or a consumer cloud bundle.
An account that doesn't expire just because you're quiet. A paid mailbox generally isn't going to disappear because you haven't logged in for two years.
The practical features. Proper IMAP, POP3 and SMTP access, so any mail client works. Aliases. Decent attachment limits. Export that isn't a maze. These vary by provider, so check rather than assume.
A provider small enough to care about your complaint. Not always true, but more likely when your subscription is a visible fraction of revenue rather than a rounding error.

What Paying Does Not Buy

Any provider telling you otherwise is selling harder than we are.

It doesn't buy immunity from the law. A provider in any jurisdiction responds to valid legal orders. Paid doesn't mean untouchable, and anyone implying it does is lying to you.

It doesn't buy privacy from the person you're writing to. Send mail to a Gmail address and it lands on Google's servers under Google's rules. Encryption in transit protects the journey, not the destination.

It doesn't buy guaranteed delivery. No provider controls what the receiving server does. Anyone promising inbox placement is promising something they don't own.

It doesn't buy protection from phishing. Good filtering helps. A convincing message from a real address, properly authenticated, still gets through to everybody.

It doesn't automatically buy better security than free. Several free providers have excellent security. Price is not a proxy for engineering.

The Thing Nobody Selling You Email Wants to Mention

Here's the strongest argument against paying us, and against paying any provider for an address on their domain.

If your address is you@gmail.com, you don't control the domain behind it. Google does.

But if your address is you@fuck.it, you don't control that domain either. We do. If we go out of business, get bought by somebody terrible or simply decide to stop, you're moving addresses and telling four hundred accounts about it, exactly as you would be if Google shut Gmail down.

Paying changes the incentives. It doesn't change who holds the domain.

The only setup that genuinely puts your email address under your control is your own domain plus a provider you can replace. Then switching providers is a DNS change and nobody has to update anything. That's the real answer to "my email is infrastructure," and for a basic domain it can cost little more than ten or twenty euros a year, plus the discipline to never let the registration lapse.

It also isn't something we sell. We don't do custom domains, because the whole point of a fuck.it address is that it says fuck.it. If maximum portability is what you're after, we're the wrong shop and you should go buy a domain.

Credit Where It's Due

Two free tiers are worth naming, because pretending otherwise would be dishonest and you'd catch us at it.

Proton Mail and Tuta both offer free accounts with no ads and genuine encryption. Small storage, limited features, and both funded by the people paying for the full version. If budget is the binding constraint, they're a far better answer than an ad-supported inbox.

And Gmail, as a piece of software, is excellent. Best-in-class search, enormous app support, rock solid. We're not going to insult your intelligence by pretending it's badly built. The question was never whether it works. It's what it's for, and who it's for.

When Free Is Good Enough

Stay where you are if:

Email is a utility you think about twice a year.
Nothing load-bearing is attached to the address: no bank, no business, no clients.
The budget genuinely matters. A paid inbox is a luxury next to rent, and anyone implying otherwise is out of touch.
You're on one of the ad-free free tiers above and the storage limit doesn't bite.

When Paying Makes Sense

Your address is infrastructure. It's the recovery key for your bank, your password manager and a few hundred accounts. That deserves better than a free tier and an automated support queue.
You want out of an ecosystem. Separating your email from one company's account system is the first real step, and it's hard to do on a free tier run by that same company.
You need someone to answer. If a week without working email would cost you real money, buy a support channel.
You want the terms to stay still. Paid services change too, but they change with their customers in mind, because customers cancel.
You'd rather pay with money than attention. Perfectly respectable reason, and the honest version of the slogan at the top.

How to Judge a Paid Provider

If you decide to pay, the price is the least interesting question. Ask these instead:

Can you leave? IMAP access and a real export. If getting your mail out is hard, the lock-in is just a different flavor.
Who actually runs it? A named company in a jurisdiction you can find, not a landing page.
What happens if you stop paying? Grace period, read-only access, immediate deletion? Find out before, not after.
Is the storage honest? Shared across services or just mail?
What's the support promise? Email only, response times, and whether a human exists.
What do they claim they can't see? Then check whether the architecture supports the claim, or whether it's a promise in a privacy policy.
How long have they been around, and does the pricing look like a business or a land grab? Services with no revenue model die, and you have to move again.

Where [@fuck.it] Lands

No ads. No tracking. No bullshit. That isn't a slogan we picked because it sounded good, it's a description of our revenue: subscriptions, all of it. There's no second business, no ad network, no profile worth building and nothing to sell to anyone else, because selling you email is the entire company.

What that buys you: a mailbox whose storage isn't shared with a photo library, full IMAP, POP3 and SMTP access, a person on the other end of support, and an account that doesn't expire because you went quiet for a year.

What we won't pretend: we can't give you a custom domain, so your address lives on our domain and depends on us continuing to exist. We can't promise anything about legal process that any other provider can't. If portability above all else is what you're after, go buy a domain.

But let's be honest about what you'd be giving up. Nobody has ever raised an eyebrow at a gmail.com address. Nobody ever will. Ours is the best domain on the internet and the only one that tells people something about you before they've read a word. There's a reason you remember it.

An address on your own domain says you own a domain. An @fuck.it address says something else entirely.

See plans →

Sources & further reading:

Related reads:

This article was originally published on the [@fuck.it] blog at https://fuck.it/blog/is-paid-email-worth-it and is republished here by the author. [@fuck.it] is a privacy-focused, subscription-funded email service by Paradise Circus, Inc. — no ads, no tracking. Facts and product details are accurate as of October 13, 2026; check the original for the latest version.

The Nigerian Prince: A Brief History of the Internet's Most Famous Scam

The G Man — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 13:40:58 +0000

Originally published on the [@fuck.it] blog.

Everyone has had the email. A prince, a general, a dying widow, a bank official with a dead client and no next of kin. Millions of dollars, trapped. You, a complete stranger, are the only person who can help. There will be a small fee.

It is the most mocked email in history. It has its own punchlines, its own Wikipedia article and its own genre of parody. It also has a proper name: advance-fee fraud, a con in which the victim pays something small to unlock something large that doesn't exist.

Here's where it came from, why the stories are so hard to believe, what it turned into and what to do if it already got you.

TL;DR

The con is centuries older than email. It circulated on paper as the Spanish Prisoner letter.
"419" is a section of the Nigerian criminal code, the one covering fraud. The name stuck in the 1980s, when economic collapse turned the scam into an industry.
One proposed explanation for the absurd stories: a 2012 paper argued that implausible emails can serve scammers well, by weeding out everyone except the most promising respondents.
The country in the story tells you nothing about who actually sent the message.
It never went away. A family of related scams grew up around it: redirected invoices, romance scams and crypto platforms where your balance only goes up.
Already paid? Stop, contact your bank or payment provider immediately, keep everything and report it. Some payments can still be recovered.

The Letter Before the Email

Long before anyone had an email address, there was the Spanish Prisoner.

The setup went like this. A letter arrives from a stranger. A wealthy man of high birth is imprisoned in Spain under a false name. His identity can't be revealed. If you help pay for his release, you'll be rewarded many times over from his hidden fortune. There's also, in many versions, a beautiful daughter.

Variants are documented back to the era of the French Revolution. The New York Times covered it in 1898 under the headline "An Old Swindle Revived" and it was already old news then. The paper described letters written the way educated foreigners speak English, with the occasional misspelling and an odd turn of phrase.

The ingredients were all there and haven't changed since: a fortune you can't verify, a stranger who needs you specifically, a reason for secrecy and a modest payment up front against an enormous payoff later.

Why Nigeria

In the 1970s Nigeria was flush with oil money. In the early 1980s the oil price collapsed and the economy went with it. What followed was mass unemployment among educated young people, a currency in freefall and a government widely described as spectacularly corrupt.

Out of that came the letters. Millions of them, physically mailed around the world, often using counterfeit postage. They arrived with official-looking documents, letterheads from the central bank and occasionally the United Nations. The story was usually the same: money from an overinvoiced government contract or a dead dictator's estate, stuck in an account and needing a foreign partner to move it.

The scam picked up its nickname from Section 419 of the Nigerian criminal code, the part covering obtaining property by false pretences. In Nigeria the practice became known as "yahoo yahoo."

Then came the fax machine, which was cheaper than postage. Then came email, which was cheaper than everything.

Email Changed the Arithmetic

Paper costs money. Every letter is a bet: stamp, envelope, printing. Send a million and you've spent a fortune before anyone replies.

Email took the cost of sending one more message down to almost nothing, which means a very low success rate can still be profitable. The expense moves elsewhere, into the hours spent on people who reply but never pay.

That's the real reason the 1990s and 2000s were flooded with princes. Not because the story got better, but because distribution became almost free.

One thing worth keeping straight: the country named in the story is no guide to who sent it. These messages are routed through compromised machines and services all over the world, and "Nigerian prince" long ago became a template anyone could download. Treat the flag in the letter as part of the costume.

The One That Actually Worked

For all the jokes, the amounts involved were sometimes staggering.

It began with a fax. Between 1995 and 1998, Nelson Sakaguchi, a director at Brazil's Banco Noroeste, sent around $190 million out of the bank's accounts, chasing a promised contract to build a new airport in Abuja. He believed he was greasing the wheels of a Nigerian government deal. Counting interest and costs, the case is usually cited at about $242.5 million.

Nobody noticed until an audit in early 1998, carried out while the bank was being prepared for sale to Santander. It remains one of the largest advance-fee frauds ever recorded.

So: a director at a national bank, over three years, for nine figures. The victims of this con were never only the naive.

Why the Stories Are So Implausible

Here's the part that sounds like a joke and isn't.

In 2012, Microsoft researcher Cormac Herley published a paper with the magnificent title "Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?" His argument is an economic model rather than a confession from any scammer: implausibility can work in the sender's favor.

Think of it from the scammer's side. Sending email is nearly free, but replying isn't. Every conversation takes hours of work and most go nowhere. The expensive part of the business is time spent on people who were never going to pay.

On that model, the opening email functions as a filter. It would need to repel everyone who would eventually back out and keep only the people who might go all the way. A story about a Nigerian prince and twenty million dollars would do that job well: anyone who finds it ridiculous never replies, and the few who don't find it ridiculous have identified themselves as promising prospects.

It's a theory about incentives, not a proven account of how any particular scam was written. But it's the most convincing explanation anyone has offered for why the most mocked emails on earth never got better.

The People Who Fought Back by Wasting Their Time

In 2003, a British man named Michael Berry launched 419eater.com, and a sport was born: scambaiting.

The idea was to answer the emails and keep the sender busy as long as humanly possible. Baiters invented elaborate characters, fake charities and absurd conditions. The site's famous "trophy room" collected photographs that baiters had persuaded scammers to take as proof of good faith, often holding ridiculous signs. One celebrated bait, later featured on This American Life, ran for about 100 days and involved persuading a scammer to travel across Africa for money that did not exist.

It's funny. It was also always a bit uncomfortable. Plenty of baiting slid into humiliation of poor people in West Africa by comfortable people in Europe and North America. Sending someone into a conflict zone for a laugh is also hard to defend, whatever they did for a living.

In 2005, the Ig Nobel Prize for Literature went to the internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for enriching world literature with short stories full of rich characters, dramatic plots and money that never arrives.

What It Turned Into

The prince still circulates, but the money has mostly moved to quieter formats. These aren't all the same con. They're relatives, built on the same raw material: a trusted-looking story, time pressure and a payment that's hard to claw back.

Business email compromise. No prince. An invoice from a supplier you actually use, with changed bank details, arriving when you expected it. The goal isn't to promise you a fortune, it's to redirect a payment you were already going to make. It's one of the costliest forms of email fraud there is.
Romance scams. Months of real conversation, then a crisis. Sometimes there's a promised payoff, often there's just an emergency and someone you believe you know.
Investment and crypto scams. Closest to the original. The fortune sits in an account you can watch grow and withdrawing it requires a fee. Then a tax. Then another fee.
Recovery scams. The cruelest branch. Someone contacts a victim offering to recover the money they lost, for a fee paid up front. Lists of people who have already paid once are valuable precisely because they've already paid once.

How to Spot the Shape

The stories change. Several signals don't.

An unexpected windfall from someone you didn't know, for reasons you can't independently check.
A payment to a stranger to release it. Legitimate inheritances really can involve taxes and legal costs, but those are handled by an executor or an institution whose identity you verified yourself. A prize or a lottery win is different: being asked to pay anything to claim one is a scam, every time.
Secrecy. Don't tell the bank. Don't tell your family. Every version of this works by keeping you away from anyone who would say "that's a scam."
Payment methods that are hard to reverse. Wire transfers, gift cards, crypto. That's not a coincidence.
Urgency. A deadline exists so you don't have time to check anything.
Changed bank details. Any invoice with new account numbers gets a phone call first, to a number you already had, never the one in the email.

If You've Already Paid

This matters more than any of the history above and speed matters.

Stop paying. There is never a final fee. The next request will have a new and excellent reason.
Contact your bank or payment provider immediately, whatever you paid with. Some payments can be stopped, recalled or disputed and the odds fall with time.
Keep everything. Emails, headers, account numbers, chat logs, receipts. Don't delete the correspondence out of embarrassment.
Report it to your national fraud or consumer protection body and to the police. Reports are how patterns get traced, even when individual money doesn't come back.
Expect a second approach. Someone may offer to recover your money for a fee. That's the same con, wearing a rescue uniform.

And for what it's worth: people who fall for this are not stupid. A bank director lost nine figures to it. The con is old because it works on normal human reasoning under time pressure.

Why It Keeps Going

Email filtering has become very good and the crude versions mostly die before you see them. That didn't end the con, because the con was never really about email.

It's about a person believing a story. The Spanish Prisoner worked by post, by telegram, by fax and by email, and it works now over messaging apps and dating sites. Every time a new channel opens, the same letter walks through the door in new clothes.

The same offer, for centuries. There is a fortune. It is nearly yours. It needs just one small payment first.

The hard version has no links, no attachments and no malware. It's a plain message from a real address, properly authenticated, asking a reasonable question. Modern filters look at more than malware: impersonation patterns, unusual correspondents, display names that don't match their addresses. Those signals catch a lot. They don't catch everything and passing SPF, DKIM and DMARC only proves a message came from the domain it claims, not that the request inside it is honest.

So when money and urgency show up in the same message, slow down and verify through a channel you chose yourself.

Sources & further reading: The Boston Globe: The long, weird history of the Nigerian e-mail scam · Cormac Herley: Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria? (PDF) · Basel Institute on Governance: Tracing Stolen Assets, p. 96 (PDF) · ICC: The Banco Noroeste fraud (PDF) · FBI: Business Email Compromise · FTC: Refund and recovery scams · Wikipedia: Spanish Prisoner

Disclosure: We run [@fuck.it], an email service, so we see a lot of this in the filters. Make of that what you will.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC Explained Without the Migraine

The G Man — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 20:33:09 +0000

Email was built on trust. Specifically, on the assumption that nobody would lie about who they are.

That assumption lasted about ten minutes. The protocol that moves your mail, SMTP, will happily let any server claim to be sending from any address. There's no password, no check, nothing. Writing an email that appears to come from your bank is about as hard as writing a letter and putting their address on the back of the envelope.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC are the patches bolted on afterward to fix that. Three acronyms, three DNS records, and one shared purpose: proving that mail claiming to come from your domain actually does.

Here's what each one does, how they fit together and what changed in 2026.

TL;DR

SPF lists which servers may send mail for your domain. It checks the envelope sender, not the address your recipient sees.
DKIM signs each message, proving which domain signed it and that the signed parts weren't altered.
DMARC requires one of those to match the From address your recipient sees, tells receivers what to do when neither does, and sends you reports.
You need both SPF and DKIM. Forwarding often breaks SPF, while a DKIM signature can survive it. Mailing lists often break DKIM, and SPF usually can't rescue it, because the list passes for its own domain.
2026 update: DMARC is now a real standard (RFC 9989). The pct tag is gone, t=y means one step softer rather than off, and three old tags should be deleted.
Roll out slowly: p=none first, read the reports, then quarantine. Whether reject is right for you depends on how your domain is used.

Why Any of This Exists

When you send a message, two different "from" addresses are involved, and that distinction is the key to everything below.

The envelope sender is what the sending server tells the receiving server during the SMTP conversation. Think of it as the return address on the outside of the envelope. Nobody reads it except the postal system.

The From header is what your mail app displays. That's the one humans see, and the one scammers care about.

They don't have to match. That gap is where spoofing lives, and it's why SPF alone was never enough.

SPF: Who's Allowed to Send

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a list of servers permitted to send mail for your domain, published as a TXT record in DNS. It looks like this:

v=spf1 include:_spf.example-provider.com ip4:203.0.113.5 ~all

Read it left to right: this is an SPF record, mail may come from the servers that provider lists, also from this one IP address, and anything else is suspicious.

That last bit matters:

~all (softfail) means "probably not authorized." Receivers are told not to reject on that result alone.
-all (fail) means "not authorized." Even then, it's a result, not an instruction. What happens next is the receiver's decision.
+all means "anyone may send as us." If you ever see this, something has gone badly wrong.

Worth being clear: SPF produces a verdict, not a delivery outcome. No setting guarantees the inbox, and none forces a rejection.

Three things that trip people up:

Only one SPF record per domain. Two records is a configuration error, and receivers may fail the check entirely. Merge everything into one.
Ten DNS lookups, maximum. Every include: costs lookups, and each service you add brings its own. Go over the limit and the check fails outright. Three or four providers is enough to get you there.
Forwarding usually breaks SPF. If someone forwards your message, the forwarding server becomes the sender, and it isn't on your list. This isn't a bug you can fix. It's why DKIM exists.

DKIM: Proof It's Really You

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) takes a different approach. Instead of listing servers, your sending server signs each message with a private key. The matching public key sits in your DNS, and the receiver uses it to verify the signature.

What a valid signature proves is narrower than people assume: that the domain in the signature signed this message, and that the signed parts arrived unaltered. That signing domain doesn't have to be the domain in the From address, which is exactly the gap DMARC closes. Canonicalization rules also allow some harmless reformatting, such as whitespace changes, without breaking the signature.

The result is a header on every message that looks roughly like this:

DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; d=example.com; s=selector1; ...

The d= is your domain, and s= is the selector, a label that tells the receiver which key to look up. Selectors let you run several keys at once, which is what makes key rotation possible without downtime.

Why DKIM is the more resilient of the two: the signature travels with the message rather than the connection. It can survive several forwards, provided the signed content stays intact under its canonicalization rules.

What breaks it: changes that alter the signed data beyond what the canonicalization rules tolerate. Some whitespace changes are tolerated, depending on the canonicalization rules used. Mailing lists that add a footer or rewrite the subject line are the classic breakage, since both touch signed content. Some lists add their own signature afterward, but yours is already broken by then.

Practical notes: use 2048-bit keys, since 1024 is considered weak now. Rotate keys periodically with a new selector. And check that every service sending on your behalf has DKIM set up, not just your main mail server.

DMARC: The Part That Ties It Together

Here's the gap SPF and DKIM leave open. Both can pass for a domain that has nothing to do with the From address your recipient sees. A scammer can pass SPF and DKIM for their own domain while putting your bank's domain in the visible From address.

DMARC closes that gap with one idea: alignment.

Alignment means the domain that passed SPF or DKIM has to match the domain in the visible From address. A message passes DMARC if either check passes and aligns. One is enough, which is why having both matters: plain forwarding usually breaks SPF while a DKIM signature survives it. Mailing lists are the harder case. A list that edits the message breaks your DKIM signature, and although SPF may well pass for the list's own domain, that domain isn't yours, so it doesn't align and DMARC can still fail.

Alignment comes in two flavors. Relaxed, the default, accepts any subdomain of the same organizational domain, so mail.example.com aligns with example.com. Strict (adkim=s, aspf=s) demands an exact match. If your setup looks broken, check which mode you're in before you start changing records.

A DMARC record is a TXT record at _dmarc.yourdomain.com:

v=DMARC1; p=none; np=reject; rua=mailto:dmarc@example.com

The parts worth knowing:

p= is what receivers should do with mail that fails: none (nothing, just report), quarantine (spam folder) or reject (refuse delivery).
rua= is where daily aggregate reports go. These XML files tell you who's sending as your domain and whether it passes. DMARC without reading reports is a smoke detector with the battery removed.
sp= sets a different policy for subdomains.
np= sets a policy for subdomains that don't exist at all.

What Changed in 2026

For eleven years, every DMARC record anyone wrote was based on RFC 7489, an informational document from 2015. Not a standard. A description of what the big mailbox providers had agreed among themselves, which everyone then implemented slightly differently.

In May 2026 that changed. DMARC became a proper IETF Standards Track protocol, split across three documents: RFC 9989 for the core protocol, RFC 9990 for aggregate reports and RFC 9991 for failure reports. Together they replace RFC 7489.

Your existing records still work. But four things changed:

pct is removed. This was the "apply my policy to only 10% of failing mail" dial, and receivers implemented it so inconsistently that nobody could tell what it was doing. A binary t tag replaces it.
t=y is not an off switch. It asks receivers to apply the next less strict policy: reject becomes quarantine, quarantine becomes none. Receivers that haven't adopted RFC 9989 ignore the tag and apply your policy in full, so don't treat it as a safe universal test mode.
Watch out if you sit at a fractional pct. A receiver following the new spec ignores the tag and applies your full policy.
np moves into the standard. It sets the policy for mail that fails DMARC while claiming a subdomain that DNS reports as nonexistent, meaning the lookup returns NXDOMAIN rather than merely lacking one record type. The tag isn't new; it came from the experimental RFC 9091 in 2021, but it's part of the core spec now. Check your real sending subdomains resolve before you publish np=reject.
rf and ri are removed. rf named the format for failure reports, which use an ARF-derived format. ri requested an interval between aggregate reports, which are XML. Receivers are encouraged to report daily, but nothing obliges them to send reports at all, which is what made a requested interval meaningless. Delete both tags.

One more change happens behind the scenes: receivers used to consult the Public Suffix List, a big crowd-maintained file, to work out where your organizational domain ended and subdomains began. That's replaced by a DNS tree walk, which queries your DNS directly. As a sender, you just need your DMARC record published at your organizational domain.

Adoption won't be instant. Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft will each move on their own schedule, so for a while a message might be judged by either the old rules or the new ones. Records that work under both are the safe play, and that's what the examples here are.

Rolling It Out Without Breaking Your Mail

The order matters. Do it backwards and you'll silently delete your own invoices.

Publish SPF and DKIM for every service that sends on your behalf. Your mail provider, your newsletter tool, your CRM, your billing system, that cron job from 2019. All of them.
Publish DMARC at p=none with a rua address. Nothing changes for your mail. Reports start arriving.
Check your subdomains, then consider np=reject. Confirm every subdomain you actually send from resolves in DNS, and you can close a whole class of spoofing cheaply.
Read the reports for a few weeks. You'll find senders you forgot about. Fix each one so it aligns.
Move to p=quarantine, watch for problems, and then decide whether reject suits your domain.

That last word is deliberate. RFC 9989 advises against p=reject for domains whose users post to mailing lists, because redistribution breaks authentication and legitimate mail dies. It also tells receivers to treat a reject failure as quarantine unless their own analysis supports rejecting, and says any domain publishing reject should have working aligned DKIM rather than leaning on SPF. A parked domain that sends nothing is the easy case for reject. A transactional domain can get there too, once you've confirmed every sending path authenticates and watched for forwarding problems in the reports. A domain full of humans who join mailing lists may be better off stopping at quarantine.

The slow part is step 4, and skipping it is how companies discover their payroll notifications were going to nobody.

How to Check Your Own Setup

Three commands tell you most of what you need:

dig +short TXT example.com # your SPF record
dig +short TXT selector1._domainkey.example.com # a DKIM key
dig +short TXT _dmarc.example.com # your DMARC policy

Then check from the other side. Send a message to an account elsewhere and look at the raw headers for the Authentication-Results line. It names each check and whether it passed. That's the receiving server's verdict, which is the only opinion that counts.

What This Does Not Protect You From

Authentication proves a message came from a domain. It says nothing about whether the domain belongs to someone honest.

Lookalike domains. yourbank-secure.com can have perfect SPF, DKIM and DMARC. It's still a scam.
Display-name spoofing. Most mail apps show "Your Bank" and hide the actual address. The name field is free text and always has been.
Compromised accounts. If someone steals real credentials, their mail authenticates perfectly, because it genuinely is you.
Content. A properly signed message can still be a phishing attempt.

Authentication answers "did this really come from that domain?" It never answers "should I trust that domain?"

Why This Became Mandatory

Through 2024, Google and Yahoo started requiring authentication from bulk senders: SPF and DKIM, a DMARC record, one-click unsubscribe on marketing and subscribed mail, and complaint rates kept low. Microsoft followed in 2025 for high-volume senders to Outlook.com.

That turned a best practice into an entry requirement. Fail it and your mail may be rejected, rate-limited or dropped into spam, depending on the provider and the failure. A rejection at least bounces back to you. The quieter outcomes, throttling and the spam folder, are the ones you discover weeks later from a customer.

For small senders the rules are looser, but the direction is clear. Unauthenticated mail is becoming the exception, and exceptions get treated with suspicion.

Where [@fuck.it] Lands

If you're sending from an [@fuck.it] address, all of this is already handled for you. Our domain is authenticated and monitored, the reports are read, and keeping it that way is a permanent part of the job rather than a thing we set up once.

If you run your own domain somewhere else, the records above are yours to publish. Start at p=none, check which subdomains resolve before adding np=reject, read the reports, and let them tell you how far toward enforcement your domain can go. It's an afternoon of work and a few weeks of patience.

The alternative is finding out from a customer that someone has been sending invoices in your name.

Sources & further reading: RFC 7208: SPF · RFC 6376: DKIM · RFC 9989: DMARC · RFC 9990: DMARC Aggregate Reporting · Google: Email sender guidelines

Disclosure: I run [@fuck.it], a paid email service, so I deal with these protocols for a living. The advice above applies wherever your mail lives.

IMAP vs POP3: Which One Should You Actually Use?

The G Man — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 22:00:00 +0000

Originally published on the [@fuck.it] blog.

Somewhere in every mail app's setup screen there's a question most people answer by guessing: IMAP or POP3?

If you guessed wrong, you probably found out later. Your phone showed emails your laptop had never heard of. You deleted something on one device and it lived on, undead, on another. Or you replaced your laptop and ten years of mail went to the recycling center with the old one.

Here's what the two actually do, which one you want and the one situation where the old one still earns its place.

TL;DR

IMAP keeps your mail on the server and syncs it to every device. Read it on your phone, it's read on your laptop. Use it by default.
POP3 downloads your mail to one device and usually deletes it from the server. Simple, offline, single-device.
Neither one sends mail. That's SMTP's job, and you need it either way.
Use POP3 only if you read mail on one computer, want your archive stored locally and are prepared to back it up yourself.
Gmail's POP news is about Gmail fetching other accounts, not about your mail app. Apps can still connect to Gmail with either protocol.

The Post Office vs. the Filing Cabinet

The names give it away.

POP stands for Post Office Protocol, and it works like a post office box. You go in, empty the box and take everything home. What happens to the letters after that is your business. The post office neither knows nor cares.

IMAP, the Internet Message Access Protocol, is more like a filing cabinet that stays at the post office. You can read letters there, sort them into drawers, flag the important ones and leave everything in place. Come back through a different door with a different key and you'll find the same cabinet in the same state.

That's the whole difference. Everything else follows from where the mail lives.

POP3: Download and Done

POP3 does one thing: it fetches the messages in your inbox and hands them to your mail app. It was built for download-and-delete, and the people who maintain the standard have said explicitly that's what it should stay.

In practice:

It only sees your inbox. Folders on the server don't exist as far as POP3 is concerned.
Nothing syncs back. Read, flagged, moved, deleted: all of that happens on your device only.
"Leave a copy on the server" isn't sync. It helps, but your phone and laptop each download their own copy and keep their own separate opinions about it.
Sent mail stays put. It lives on whichever device you sent it from.

The upside is simplicity. Your mail sits on your own disk, readable offline, independent of the provider.

IMAP: One Mailbox, Every Device

IMAP was designed in 1986 for exactly the thing POP3 doesn't do: working with a mailbox that stays on the server. The current version, IMAP4rev2, was published in 2021 as RFC 9051.

In practice:

Everything stays in sync. Read status, flags, folders, deletions: change it on one device and every other device agrees.
All your folders are there, including Sent, Drafts and Archive.
New device, same mailbox. Sign in and your mail is there. Nothing to copy.
Offline still works. Your app keeps a local copy for speed and offline reading, but the server holds the real thing.

The downside: you depend on the server. Your storage quota applies to everything you keep, and if the provider is down, you're reading whatever your device has stored.

Neither One Sends Mail

A common source of confusion: IMAP and POP3 only receive. Sending is handled by SMTP, a separate protocol with its own server settings.

Every mail app asks for both: an incoming server (IMAP or POP3) and an outgoing server (SMTP). If you can receive but not send, check the SMTP settings first.

So Which One?

Use IMAP if:

You read mail on more than one device. That's almost everyone with a phone.
You want folders, flags and read status to follow you.
You don't want to lose your mail when a laptop dies.

POP3 still makes sense if:

You read mail on exactly one computer and like it that way.
You want your archive on your own disk rather than a provider's server.
You're up against a storage limit and want the server emptied regularly.

There's a privacy argument for POP3 too: mail you've downloaded and deleted from the server isn't sitting there anymore, apart from whatever backups the provider keeps for a while. It's a fair point with a catch. Your computer now holds the only copy. If it's stolen, broken or unencrypted, that's on you. Encrypt the disk and back it up, or your privacy win turns into a data-loss plan.

Settings Cheat Sheet

Your provider lists its exact server names. The ports are usually standard:

Protocol	Port	Encryption
IMAP	993	SSL/TLS
POP3	995	SSL/TLS
SMTP	465	SSL/TLS
SMTP	587	STARTTLS

Always pick an encrypted option. If your app offers "None" as a security setting, that's the one not to choose. Your password would travel in plain text.

Switching From POP3 to IMAP Without Losing Anything

If you've been on POP3 for years, your old mail probably lives only on your computer. Here's how to move it without an accident:

Back up first. Copy your mail app's data folder or export your mailbox before you touch anything.
Add the same address again as an IMAP account alongside the POP3 one. Don't remove the POP3 account yet.
Drag your local folders into the IMAP account. That uploads them to the server. Big archives take a while.
Check the server copy. Log in to webmail and confirm the folders and message counts match.
Only then remove the POP3 account. In some apps, removing an account also deletes its locally stored mail. That's exactly why steps 1 and 4 come first.

About Gmail "Dropping POP"

You may have read that Gmail is dropping POP. That's about Gmail's own "Check mail from other accounts" feature, which used POP to pull mail from other providers into Gmail. It stopped taking new users after the first quarter of 2026 and ends completely in January 2027.

It doesn't affect mail apps connecting to Gmail. Google says third-party apps can still reach Gmail over POP or IMAP. POP3 as a protocol isn't going anywhere. It's just losing one of its bigger fans.

The full story is in our guide to Gmail's Send As changes.

Sources: RFC 9051: IMAP4rev2 · RFC 1939: POP3 · RFC 8314: Cleartext Considered Obsolete · Google: Changes to Gmailify & POP in Gmail

Disclosure: I run [@fuck.it], a paid email service, so I deal with these protocols for a living. The advice above applies wherever your mail lives.

The Fucking History of "Fuck": Tracing the Origins, Evolution and Endurance of English's Most Notorious Word

The G Man — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 22:00:00 +0000

Originally published on the [@fuck.it] blog. Fair warning: this post is about a swear word, so it contains that swear word roughly 200 times.

Few words in the English language are as simultaneously infamous, ubiquitous and oddly satisfying to utter as the word "fuck." This four-letter vulgarism has a unique distinction: it's considered one of the worst swear words, yet it's also among the most versatile and enduring. The mere sound of it – the fricative "f" rolling into that hard "-uck" – can function as a cathartic release, a bonding gesture or a verbal hand grenade. Psycholinguists even note that yelling "fuck" can physically boost strength and dull pain, as if the word carries its own power.

But where did this legendary profanity come from? How long have people been saying it (and writing it) and what did it originally mean? This irreverent but well-researched journey will delve into the linguistic and etymological roots of "fuck," from its shadowy medieval origins to its modern grammatical free-for-all. Along the way, we'll bust some popular folk etymology myths (no, it's not an acronym for anything) and compare "fuck" to its cousins in other languages. By the end, you'll see that "fuck" is not a recent vulgar upstart, but a word with deep historical roots and surprising linguistic longevity – a true survivor in the lexicon of swearing.

A page from the 15th-century poem "Flen flyys" containing one of the earliest coded references to the F-word in English literature.

Medieval Origins: The Earliest Recorded F-Bombs

It may surprise some to learn that "fuck" is old. In fact, the word is so old that scholars have to sleuth through medieval manuscripts and dusty court records to catch its earliest appearances. For centuries, "fuck" was likely common in spoken English, but few dared put it in writing – which makes early written examples precious (and hilarious) finds.

The earliest clear reference to the word in English comes from the Middle Ages, hidden in coded form in a 15th-century poem. An anonymous satirical verse from around 1475 titled "Flen flyys" ("Fleas, Flies") contains a line that, once deciphered, drops the F-bomb on some lascivious monks. The line was originally written in a playful code: "Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk." When you replace each letter with the previous letter in the alphabet, it reveals a cheeky macaronic phrase: "Non sunt in coeli, quia fuccant uvivys of heli." In plain English, that means "They are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of Ely."

Yes, a medieval poet literally accused Cambridge friars of fornicating with local women and he encoded "fuccant" (a fake-Latin conjugation of an English root) to avoid openly writing the dirty word. This bawdy joke suggests that by the 1400s "fuck" was already risqué enough to require a cipher. It's uncertain whether medieval readers would have been as shocked as a modern audience – but the very need for code implies the F-word carried taboo weight even then.

A recreation of the 1310 court record mentioning "Roger Fuckebythenavele" – possibly the earliest recorded instance of the F-word in English.

However, our story doesn't start (or end) in 1475. In recent years, historians have pushed back the timeline of "fuck" by finding even earlier instances – some clear, some debated. One of the earliest known uses appears in English records from 1310, albeit in a highly unusual context: a man's name. A Cheshire county court roll from that year repeatedly refers to a fugitive outlaw by the name of "Roger Fuckebythenavele."

This jaw-dropping surname (pardon the pun) was discovered by medieval historian Paul Booth, who believes it was likely a nickname meaning "Roger the navel-fucker". The unfortunate Roger was cited multiple times between 1310 and 1311 as authorities attempted to arrest him (apparently unsuccessfully, since he was ultimately declared an outlaw). The repetition of the name across several entries shows it wasn't just a one-off joke by a scribe – it was his actual recorded nickname.

What could inspire such a moniker? Booth offers two interpretations, both richly obscene: either Roger had a clueless youthful attempt at copulation "through the navel" (suggesting gross sexual ineptitude) or the term was figurative slang for an idiot – essentially calling Roger a dimwit "who'd think that's how sex works". There's even a third possibility that it referred to an act of "frottage" – rubbing against the belly to avoid actual conception. In any case, Booth is convinced this "fuck" in Roger's nickname carries a sexual meaning, not a non-literal one. If so, it predates the coded Flen flyys usage by 165 years, marking 1310–1311 as the new (possible) birthdate of written "fuck."

Even Earlier Hints of the F-Word

A 1278 court record mentions a man dubbed "John le Fucker" – though linguists caution this might derive from "Fulcher" (meaning soldier) rather than anything rude. In other words, John le Fucker might sadly have just been John the Knight, not John the copulator. Supporting this, no one has actually located the original source for this name in 1278, so it remains an intriguing footnote – possibly a false alarm.
A 1287 record from Sherwood Forest (yes, Robin Hood's turf) cites men named "Ric Wyndfuk" and "Ric Wyndfuck de Wodehous" – possibly referring to a kestrel (known as a "windfucker" for hovering in the wind). If windfucker is related to "fuck," it would be an example of the word used in a non-sexual sense (perhaps meaning to strike or beat the wind or simply describing the bird's motion).
The same Sherwood records list a "Fuckebegger" (1287), which appears to mean "strike-beater" – suggesting an earlier, action-oriented meaning of fuck ("to hit" rather than "to shag") – or they could be unrelated words entirely.

A page of the Bannatyne Manuscript (1568) containing the line "wan fukkit funling" – one of the earliest recorded uses of "fuck" (spelled fukkit) in literature.

After the semi-coded 15th-century Flen flyys poem, the F-word pops up more overtly in the early 1500s – particularly in Scotland, which seems to have been way ahead of the curve in recording vulgar language (thank the lively tradition of Scots poets!). One famous instance comes from a poetic "flyting" – essentially a rap battle in verse – between William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy around 1500 at the court of King James IV. In this contest of creative insults, Kennedy zings Dunbar by calling him a "wan fukkit funling". In good Scots dialect, that means "weak/poor fucked foundling", implying Dunbar is a wretch who has been, well, thoroughly fucked (either literally or metaphorically ill-used).

This zinger, preserved in the 1568 Bannatyne Manuscript, is one of the earliest clear uses of "fuck" (spelled fukkit) in English/Scots literature. Amusingly, modern readers might not even catch the F-word in "wan fukkit funling" because it looks so odd – one commentator noted it hardly seems like English at first glance. That raises an interesting point: is this English or Scots? At the time, Scots was a distinct Anglic language closely related to Middle English. Whether you consider it a dialect or its own language, Scots definitely embraced "fuck" early. But as we'll see later, England can claim its own swearing pioneers, so Scotland doesn't get sole credit for inventing the word (they just weren't as shy about writing it down).

A recreation of the 1528 monk's annotation "O d fuckin Abbot" – the first known use of "fucking" as an adjective in English.

Meanwhile, back in England, a certain sassy monk was about to make lexicographic history. In the year 1528, a monk copying a Latin manuscript of Cicero's De Officiis apparently reached the end of his patience with a misbehaving abbot. In the margin, next to a note about the abbot's dubious work, this fed-up scribe scrawled: "O d fuckin Abbot." In plain terms, that's likely "O [damned] fucking abbot."

Congratulations, dear monk: you just wrote the first known adjectival "fucking" in the English language! This fiery little annotation sat quietly in the manuscript for centuries until modern scholars identified it as the earliest usage of "fucking" as we know it – possibly the first instance of someone using "fucking" to emphatically insult a person. Now, it's possible the monk meant it literally ("that abbot is literally fornicating too much"), accusing the abbot John Burton of breaking his vows of chastity. But it's equally possible he meant it as pure invective – the medieval Latin equivalent of "that damned fucking abbot!" said in frustration. If the latter, this monk was truly ahead of his time: using "fucking" as an intensifier wouldn't become common in print for another 300+ years. Either way, this margin note shows that by the 16th century, "fuck" had fully arrived in written English, albeit in private jottings rather than published works. Tellingly, the monk censored himself only on the "damned" (writing just 'O d') but not on "fuckin", as if eternal damnation was the bigger linguistic no-no than sexual slang. Priorities!

From the Renaissance to Victorian Times: Changing Usage and Spelling

By the late 16th century, the word "fuck" was sufficiently established (if still very impolite) to merit inclusion in a dictionary. In 1598, an Italian-English dictionary by John Florio – titled A Worlde of Wordes – famously listed the Italian verb fottere ("to copulate," itself a vulgar term) and gave a string of English equivalents: "to jape, to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy." There it is in black and white: fucke – sitting alongside other then-vulgar synonyms. (For context, jape meant to have sex, sard came from Old English seordān meaning to copulate, swive was an old term meaning "to swivel" that euphemistically meant sex and even occupy had a sexual overtone in those days.) It's delightful to imagine some Elizabethan scholar thumbing through Florio's dictionary and discovering that naughty little entry. In fact, occupy became so associated with carnal meaning that by the 18th century it was seldom used in polite writing. "Fuck," on the other hand, remained beyond the pale for most published texts – but not entirely absent.

A recreation of John Florio's 1598 dictionary entry listing "to fucke" among English equivalents for the Italian "fottere".

Moving into the 17th and 18th centuries, direct written uses of "fuck" were still uncommon (prudery was on the rise), but the word certainly didn't disappear from speech. It lingered in the margins – literally in margin notes or private writings – and in certain niche publications. One such niche was the world of slang dictionaries. In 1785, Captain Francis Grose published A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, a compendium of colorful slang. Did Grose include "fuck"? He included a lot of taboo terms, though often delicacy or fear of censors led writers to use dashes or euphemisms. For example, the phrase "I don't give a fuck" – today a very common vulgar idiom – first showed up in print in 1790 in a poem by St. George Tucker. There, it was coyly printed as "I'd not give -- for all you've read." Scholars agree the blanked-out word was "a fuck," making this the earliest record of that now-common expression. It seems our ancestors were already not giving a fuck long before the 20th century – they just couldn't quite spell it out.

By the Victorian era (19th century), "fuck" was fully entrenched as extremely taboo – arguably more taboo than in earlier centuries due to the era's prudish norms. Yet it still crept into writing in winks and nudges. An 1893 slang dictionary by Farmer and Henley acknowledges both the adverbial use of "fucking" (as in "blooming" or "bloody," but stronger) and the adjectival use (as an intense insult) – noting that fuck is like "bloody" but "more violent". Clearly, people were saying it often enough to compare its intensity to other swears. Linguist Geoffrey Hughes noted that by the mid-to-late 19th century, the modern usage of fuck was in place and fairly stable. In other words, by around 1850 or so, English speakers were using "fuck" in roughly the same ways we do today – as a blunt term for sex, as an expletive expressing anger and in various idiomatic curses – even if these uses were largely confined to spoken or lowbrow contexts, away from genteel print. The Victorian gentility might have acted shocked, but behind closed doors (or in pubs and barracks) the F-word was alive and kicking.

It wasn't until the 20th century that "fuck" really burst into public print with the force of a frag grenade – appearing in literature (e.g. Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1928 scandalously used it), in the courtroom (the obscenity trials of the 1960s) and eventually even on broadcast media. But those cultural battles are another story for another article. Our focus here is on the word's linguistic journey and by the time the 1900s rolled around, that journey had produced a fully-fledged, flexible swear word understood around the English-speaking world. In summary, fuck managed to survive and thrive through centuries when it was either hidden in code, scrawled in margins or excluded from "proper" writing – only to emerge as arguably the king of all curse words in modern times. Talk about linguistic endurance!

Germanic Roots: "Fuck" and its Family Across Languages

So where did this delightful word actually come from? Linguists assure us that "fuck" is a word of Germanic origin, not a recent acronym or import. In fact, it has siblings and cousins in many Germanic languages, indicating it likely hails from a common ancestor word way back in the misty centuries of early medieval Europe. The Oxford English Dictionary traces it to either an unattested Old English word or more probably to Middle Dutch or Low German sources. Let's meet the Fuck Family:

German has the verb ficken, which has meant "to have sex" (vulgar) for many centuries. It's pronounced with a short "i" (closer to "fick-en"), but clearly akin to "fuck." Interestingly, in older German, ficken could also mean "to rub" or "to strike," not just sexual intercourse.
Dutch has fokken, which today commonly means "to breed (animals)" or by extension "to breed or beget children". Centuries ago it also carried meanings of hitting or poking and likely sexual ones too. Afrikaans, derived from Dutch, similarly has fok for "have sex" (and as a general swear).
Old Scandinavian dialects give us forms like dialectal Norwegian fukka ("to copulate") and dialectal Swedish focka ("to strike" or "to copulate"), with fock even meaning "penis" in one Swedish dialect. Icelandic has fokka, used more innocuously as "to mess around" or rush, but you can see the resemblance.
Old English itself doesn't give us a clear ancestor (no fūcan or fuccian is recorded), but there was the word fuccant in that 1475 poem which hints that some form existed orally. Some scholars think English fuck might have been a later borrowing from, say, the Middle Dutch fokken during the late medieval period, rather than a direct carryover from Anglo-Saxon.

The heavy Norse influence on northern English and Scots dialects has led to speculation that fuck could have been reinforced or introduced by Vikings (Old Norse had the word fukka meaning "to copulate," very close to modern usage). Indeed, Scots' early and abundant use of "fuck" might reflect Norse input in Scotland. But since we have "Roger Fuckebythenavele" and others down in England in the 14th century, English can claim it locally too. Most likely, all these Germanic tongues inherited or shared a similar root concept.

So, is there an ultimate Proto-Germanic or even Proto-Indo-European root for this? Possibly, but it's tricky. The OED and others suggest a link to a Proto-Germanic verb *fuk(k)on (hypothetical) meaning "to strike, rub or have sex". This in turn might come from an Indo-European root *peuk- or *peug- meaning "to strike or stab." In support, they point to Latin words like pugnus (fist) and pugno (I fight) which come from a root meaning "to prick, punch or fight". If you apply Grimm's Law (which explains sound changes from Indo-European to Germanic), a PIE *p sounds like f in Germanic and *k might align with a Germanic k. So *peuk- could, in theory, yield a Germanic fuk-. The idea is that the original sense was hitting or moving back and forth – something physical – which later took on the meaning of the physical act of love (or at least physical act of something!). As one slang etymologist put it, "fuck" almost certainly comes from a root meaning "to prick, punch or penetrate." That would certainly fit the sexual context.

A simplified Germanic language family tree showing the relationship between languages that share cognates of the word "fuck".

However, we should note a couple of caveats that linguists raise. First, outside the Germanic languages, none of the supposed cognates (Latin, etc.) carry a sexual meaning – pugnus = fist, not exactly sexy. That suggests that the sexual sense of this root developed within Germanic culture specifically. Second, there's some weirdness with vowels: for example, German ficken has a different vowel (i) than Dutch fokken (o) or the English u in fuck, which complicates deriving them all from one neat proto-word. Some think perhaps we're looking at a regional North Sea slang that spread around medieval England/Scandinavia, rather than an unbroken line from ancient Proto-Indo-European. But at the end of the day, all these words sound related and act related, so we can comfortably call them cognates.

Importantly, "fuck" has no known connection to Latin futuere or French foutre, despite surface resemblances. Latin futuere (to have sexual intercourse with) is indeed the ancestor of French foutre, Italian fottere (as in Florio's entry), Spanish follar, etc. It looks a bit like "fuck" and means the same thing, so you'd think maybe English borrowed it from French after the Norman Conquest. But etymologists say "almost certainly not." The Latin/Latinate words come from a completely different root (likely from futu-, possibly related to fundere, "to pour out," or some obscure origin – Latin scholars aren't 100% either). The lack of a clear trail from Old French to Middle English for this word, plus the strong presence of a Germanic alternative, means English "fuck" probably grew from Germanic roots independently. So don't credit the French for this one – it seems we came up with it (and our Germanic cousins too) all on our own.

Debunking the Folk Etymologies: It's NOT an Acronym

No discussion of the word "fuck" would be complete without addressing the colorful urban legends that have sprung up about its origin. Perhaps because people are uneasy about profanity, they love inventing clever backronyms and stories to explain the F-word. Let's make this crystal clear: "Fuck" is NOT an acronym for anything. All those stories you heard are fucking false. Here are a few persistent myths that need a good debunking:

"Fornication Under Consent of King" – According to this tall tale, in the Middle Ages a town had to get the king's permission to repopulate after the Black Death, so couples would be granted a royal license to procreate with a sign reading "F.U.C.K." It's a fun story – and utterly unsubstantiated. No record of any such practice or sign exists. (Also, medieval folks weren't shy about making babies; they didn't need kingly signboards to encourage it.)
"For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (in the Nude)" – A similar myth claims that in olden days adulterers were put in stocks with a sign reading "FUCKIN" above them. Creative, but again, no historical records support this phrase ever being used. It's an obvious acronym back-formation – someone in modern times thought it'd be cool if "fuck" secretly stood for a punitive phrase. Alas, it doesn't.
The Plucky Archers: "Pluck Yew" turned to "Fuck You" – This one holds that English longbowmen captured by the French had their middle fingers cut off (so they couldn't pluck the yew bowstring). Victorious archers would wave their two-fingered salute and yell "We can still pluck yew!" which supposedly morphed into "fuck you." It's a load of bollocks historically. The whole finger-cutting story is dubious and adding an F-word twist is pure embellishment. English bowmen probably did taunt the French at Agincourt, but not in those words!

Renaissance romance – no kingly permission slip required.

In short, "fuck" wasn't born from any polite or technical phrase – it was always a blunt word for a blunt concept. The straightforward Germanic etymology we explored is the real deal, even if it's less amusing than kings and acronyms. It's telling that the myths usually try to sanitize or legitimize the word (tying it to law, history, etc.), when in reality fuck has always been a bit of a linguistic outlaw. As one scholar wryly put it, these acronym claims are "at best a so-called 'backronym'" – an invented explanation long after the fact.

The Sound and Fury: Why "Fuck" Feels So Good to Say

Linguists and casual swearers alike often comment on the visceral sound of the word "fuck." It's monosyllabic, starts and ends abruptly and tends to explode out of the mouth with a force that softer curses (like "darn" or "shoot") just don't have. The word lands like a punch – which makes sense given its likely origin meaning "to strike." There is a kind of perverse beauty in its phonetics. As one writer observed, "it just feels good to say. It feels good in the mouth, giving shape to catharsis... satisfying a strong emotional need." Unlike many longer or more polite words, "fuck" has a plosive final consonant [k] that you can really hit hard, adding to the sense of release when cursing. You can whisper "fuuuuck" or shout "FUCK!" and in both cases that K is like a verbal exclamation point.

Interestingly, there's even a (semi-serious) scientific hypothesis about the F-word's emergence related to human anatomy. A 2019 article in the journal Science suggested that when humans transitioned to softer diets with agriculture, the alignment of our teeth changed (we developed an overbite) which made it easier to produce certain sounds like "f" and "v." Before that, those sounds were rarer across languages. So as one humorist summarized: an overbite "cleared the way for words like 'fuck'." While this is a tongue-in-cheek take on linguistic evolution, it highlights that the F-sound is relatively rare in the oldest Indo-European languages. English is actually pretty fond of the "f" sound and fuck is our star player with that sound.

From a linguistic perspective, "fuck" fits into a broader pattern of English words: the f- + short vowel + -k/t pattern. Think of words like flick, flicker, flip, flit, fiddle, fidget, fork, frisk. Many of these have a sense of quick movement or agitation. "Fuck" with its original sense of moving back and forth vigorously slots right in. It's almost as if there was a template in our language for punchy little f-words and "fuck" just happened to become the most taboo of them. Even an archaic word like "frig" follows this pattern. So phonetically and structurally, fuck isn't an outlier – it's tapping into some of the most fundamental sounds of English to get its point across.

Graffiti on an abandoned tank in Culebra, Puerto Rico spells out "WTF?" – even in casual tags, fuck finds its way into our language.

Another aspect of "fuck"'s sound that makes it potent is stress. In English intonation, a one-syllable word ending in a stop consonant can really carry stress and emphasis well. And if one syllable isn't enough, English speakers got creative: we started inserting "fucking" in the middle of other words for extra oomph. This is called expletive infixation. For example, "fan-fucking-tastic" or the classic "abso-fucking-lutely." Because of how English stress patterns work, certain insertions sound natural (in-fucking-credible works, whereas incredi-fuckin-ble does not). The rule of thumb is you stick "fucking" before the syllable that has the primary stress in a word. This playful use shows how comfortable we've become with the phonetics of "fuck" – we treat it almost like a prefix or a piece of word-building we can snap into place. Linguists love this example because it's a clear case of a profanity interacting with the nuts and bolts of language structure in a rule-governed way. Even when we break the rules with "fuck," we're following rules.

Finally, let's not forget the simple emotional weight the word carries. Swear words activate emotional and pain centers in the brain more than neutral words do. "Fuck" in particular has punch. It's often cited in studies of swearing as one of the most cathartic expletives, useful for pain relief and for bonding. One could argue that centuries of taboo have only enhanced its impact – it has that transgressive thrill. Yet interestingly, as it becomes more common and less strictly taboo than, say, 50 years ago, it hasn't really lost its core punch among peers. People might say it more, but they still feel it.

The Ultimate Grammatical Multitool: Fuck as Noun, Verb, Adjective... and More

One reason "fuck" is often crowned the champion of curse words is its grammatical versatility. As a popular internet meme once demonstrated in a mock dialogue, you can practically replace every word in a sentence with "fuck" and, through tone and inflection, still communicate meaning. Comedian Lewis Black showcased this with a tongue-in-cheek sentence: "Fuck fucking fucked fucker fucking fuckups fuck fucking fucked fucking fuckup fucking fucker's fucking fuckup." Believe it or not, that string of F-words, chaotic as it looks, can be parsed by the English-speaking brain into a coherent statement with subjects, verbs, adjectives, etc. While we don't recommend trying that in a formal essay, it underscores a point: "fuck" is a shape-shifter.

"Fuck" as Every Part of Speech

Verb (transitive): "Alice fucked Bob"
Verb (intransitive): "They were fucking all night"
Noun: "I don't give a fuck," "He's a dumb fuck"
Adjective: "Where's my fuckin' keys?"
Adverb: "They fucking cheated me over"
Interjection: "Fuck! That hurts."
Conjunction/Filler: "It was late and fuck if I knew where to go"
Pronoun (jokingly): "Hand me that fucker, will ya?"

In formal terms, fuck can fill any part of speech. As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, there are indeed documented uses of "fuck" as virtually every part of speech, pronoun included. Few, if any, English words can claim such a range. It's like the Swiss Army knife of words – crude, but incredibly adaptable.

Then there are the derivatives and compounds. Add "-er" and you get fucker, a noun (which can be an insult or even a rough term of endearment depending on context, e.g. "you lucky fucker"). Add "-ing" and you have fucking, which as we've seen can be a verb, adjective or noun. You can slap fucking in the middle of other words or at the start of phrases for emphasis. English speakers have tacked "fuck" onto countless other words to create compounds: motherfucker, fuckface, fuckwit, clusterfuck, fuckboy and on and on.

There's a perverse creativity to it. By the 20th century, we even see acronyms incorporating it, like the military slang SNAFU ("Situation Normal: All Fucked Up") and FUBAR ("Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition"), both dating to World War II. These arose because soldiers found fuck to be the most emphatic way to describe a messed-up situation – standard language just didn't cut it.

A diagram illustrating the grammatical versatility of "fuck" – one of the few English words that can function as virtually any part of speech.

Grammatically, one of the most fascinating uses is "fuck" as an infix. This is relatively rare in English – we don't usually stick whole words inside other words – but "fucking" is the classic example. As an intensifier, "fucking" can also attach as a prefix or suffix. Unlike many intensifiers that weaken over time (think "very"), "fucking" has stayed strong due to its taboo aura. Even people who might not otherwise curse will admit there's a special expressive power to saying something is "fucking [adjective]" versus just "really [adjective]."

From a grammar standpoint, you might wonder: how can one little word be so many things? The answer lies in context and stress. Tone and position in the sentence do a lot of work. The fact that our brains can so easily parse these on the fly shows how entrenched the word is in our linguistic circuitry. We subconsciously know the difference when a friend says "you fucker" (noun, a mild teasing insult perhaps) vs "you fucked up" (verb, you made a mistake) vs "that is fucking beautiful" (adverb intensifier, surprisingly positive). Some languages have multiple distinct words where we have this one multitasker.

It's worth noting that "fuck" hasn't always held all these grammatical roles uniformly through time. The core use was as a verb. The use as a noun came somewhat later. Adjectival and adverbial uses really blossomed in the modern era, especially as the word became more common in everyday speech by the mid-20th century. But once the floodgates opened, "fuck" filled every niche available. By the 21st century, linguists catalogued over 100 different set phrases and compound usages in English involving "fuck" and its variants. It's an entire mini-lexicon unto itself.

Linguistic Endurance: How "Fuck" Has Stood the Test of Time

Considering its age and infamy, fuck is remarkably resilient. Many old swear words have fallen out of use (zwounds! anyone? or calling someone a "coxcomb" or "strumpet"?). Even "swive," which was the Middle English f-word equivalent (Chaucer uses swive to refer to sexual intercourse in his tales), eventually faded from the language. But "fuck" came roaring in to take its place and never left. Why has this word endured from at least the 15th century to the present day, whereas others died off or were replaced?

One key factor is taboo. Paradoxically, being taboo helped "fuck" survive. It was considered so vulgar that for long stretches people avoided writing it down – but that very status gave it a kind of underground longevity. It became the go-to crass term for intercourse, precisely because it was offensive. Other polite or technical terms (fornicate, copulate) never challenged it in casual speech because they lacked the emotional force. By the time some of the older vulgar terms like swive or jape started to sound quaint, "fuck" was there to fill the void.

Another reason is linguistic productivity. We saw how many forms and combinations "fuck" can generate. It's a word that creates colorful expressions easily. This makes it useful. Speakers love a word that can slot into many idioms – it becomes hard to replace. Consider expressions like "to fuck up" or "fucked up." We don't have another single word that quite captures the same meaning or force. "Ruin" or "spoil" are too mild for fuck up. Likewise, shouting "fuck it!" to resign from something has a unique finality that "forget it" lacks.

Culturally, despite attempts to censor it, fuck has permeated every level of society. Soldiers used it liberally in World War II (hence those acronyms and quotes like the RAF mechanic's famous complaint, "Fuck! The fucking fucker's fucked!", a perfectly grammatical sentence of frustration). The counterculture of the 1960s embraced it in music and art. Comedians like George Carlin highlighted its ubiquity in routines like "Seven Dirty Words." Each time someone pushed fuck a little more into the open, it lost just a bit of its stigma. In linguistics, there's the idea of the "dysphemism treadmill", where shocking words become ordinary over time. We might be seeing that with fuck – it's far more publicly acceptable now than a century ago – yet it hasn't lost its core meaning or emotional oomph entirely.

One interesting observation: in Scotland, fuck and its forms showed up more frequently in writing because the Scots apparently had a more relaxed attitude about that particular word. Meanwhile, in England, the upper crust were clutching their pearls at the thought of printing it. This difference meant early Scots texts preserved fuck when English ones didn't. However, discoveries like the 1310 Chester record and the 1528 monk's note prove fuck was there in England too – just mostly hidden. Once we hit the modern era, fuck became a shared inheritance of all English dialects. It's a unifier across Englishes, in a weird way.

Lastly, the endurance of "fuck" can be credited to its sheer expressiveness. Language is ultimately about expressing what we feel and mean. Sometimes, only a fuck will do. Whether it's the ecstatic "fuck yes!", the furious "fuck you!", the despairing "we're fucked..." or the comic relief of "what the fuck?", this word captures intensity in a compact form.

TL;DR

So here we are: over 700 years since a probably very confused medieval clerk wrote "Roger Fuckebythenavele" in a court ledger, the word "fuck" is alive and kicking (and kissing and hitting and... you get the idea). Its journey from medieval marginalia to mainstream slang demonstrates an incredible linguistic survival story. Few words have traveled so far for so long, all the while refusing to be gentrified.

The word "fuck" may be vulgar, but it is venerable – a historic part of our language with roots entwined in our Germanic heritage and branches that have spread through literature, speech and even graffiti and internet memes. It has evolved from meaning a literal act, to a general insult, to an all-purpose intensifier, all without losing its core identity. One might say that "fuck" embodies the no-filter spirit of the common tongue – it's direct, it's raw and it doesn't give a... darn who knows it.

In the immortal (though possibly apocryphal) words of a World War II serviceman, summing up a messy situation: "Fuck! The fucking fucker's fucked." – A sentiment that, in its own profane way, beautifully illustrates why "fuck" remains unparalleled in our lexicon. It just works. And that's the fucking truth.

More in this series on the [@fuck.it] blog: The F-Bomb Revolution: How "Fuck" Conquered Media, Tech and Branding and The (Bleep)ing History of Censor Tones.

Disclosure: I run [@fuck.it], an email service named after the word in question. Make of that what you will.

How to Change Email Providers Without Losing Your Digital Life

The G Man — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 11:59:25 +0000

Originally published on the [@fuck.it] blog.

Changing email providers is a lot like moving house. Packing the boxes takes a weekend. Updating your address with the bank, the tax office, the dentist and that one magazine you forgot you subscribed to takes the rest of the year.

That second part is why most people never switch. Not because moving mail is hard (it isn't) but because their email address has quietly become the key to everything: banking, shopping, social accounts, the password manager, the phone contract. Change the lock and you'd better know every door it opens.

Here's how to do it without locking yourself out of your own life.

TL;DR

Don't close your old account. Not now, maybe not for years.
Set up the new account first and secure it: unique password, two-factor authentication, a recovery option.
Forward the old address to the new one so nothing gets lost while you move.
Export contacts and calendars, then import them.
Decide what happens to your old mail: leave it and connect it, migrate it or archive it offline.
Move your logins in order of importance. Recovery-critical accounts first, newsletters last (or never).
Keep the old account alive. Providers delete inactive accounts, and an abandoned address can lock you out of everything still attached to it.

The Mail Is Easy. The Logins Are the Move.

Every account you've ever created remembers your email address. Many use it as your username. Most use it to reset your password. Some send your login codes there. That's the real inventory, and most people have a few hundred entries in it without knowing.

So switching isn't a single event. It's a migration with a long tail: a busy first week, a steady month of updates and a year of "oh right, that one."

The steps below follow that order.

Step 0: Don't Close Anything

The most expensive mistake is deleting the old account on day one. Everything still pointing at it goes into a void: password resets, receipts, that letter from the tax office.

Your old account stays open during the move and for a good while after. We'll get to how long.

Step 1: Set Up and Lock Down the New Account

Before you move anything in, secure the place.

Use a unique password you don't use anywhere else, ideally generated by a password manager.
Turn on two-factor authentication.
Set up a recovery option you'll still have access to in five years.

This account is about to become the master key to your digital life. Treat it that way from day one.

Step 2: Forward the Old Address

Forwarding is your mail redirect. It catches everything people keep sending to the old address while you update them.

In Gmail, go to Settings → See all settings → Forwarding and POP/IMAP and add your new address. Gmail sends a verification link to the new address. Confirm it, then choose to forward a copy of incoming mail. Other providers have a similar setting.

Two details matter:

Keep a copy in the old inbox. If forwarding ever hiccups, the original is still there.
Spam isn't forwarded. Gmail forwards everything except spam, so check the old spam folder now and then. Legitimate mail lands there more often than you'd think.

Forwarding also doubles as your to-do list. Every forwarded message tells you someone still has the old address. Update them, and eventually the forwarded mail dries up.

Step 3: Move Contacts and Calendars

These are the easy wins.

Contacts: export them from your old provider as a vCard (.vcf) or CSV file and import them into the new one. Spot-check a few afterward. Some systems keep only one home and one work address per contact, so extra addresses can quietly disappear.
Calendars: export as an .ics file and import it. Recurring meetings and calendars shared with other people are worth rechecking by hand.

Step 4: Decide What Happens to Your Old Mail

You have three options, and mixing them is fine.

Leave it and connect it. The old mail stays where it is and you view it from your new inbox. No migration needed, but the old provider keeps holding your history.
Migrate it. Copy the folders into the new account. The most reliable DIY method: add both accounts to a desktop client like Thunderbird over IMAP and drag folders from old to new. Big archives take a while, so run it overnight and compare folder counts afterward.
Archive it offline. Export everything and store it yourself. Gmail users can download their entire mailbox as an MBOX file through Google Takeout. Good for history you want to keep but rarely search.

Before you migrate twenty years of mail, check the size. A 40 GB archive won't fit into a 10 GB mailbox, however motivated you are. Delete the obvious junk first: newsletters, notifications, "your order has shipped."

Step 5: Move Your Logins (the Actual Work)

Now the long tail. First, find your accounts:

Your password manager. If you use one, it's already your inventory.
Your old inbox. Search for "welcome," "verify your email," "confirm your account" and "password reset." Every hit is an account.
Your browser's saved passwords, if you've been living without a password manager. Consider this your sign to get one.

Then update them in this order:

Recovery-critical: your password manager, your Apple, Google or Microsoft account, your phone carrier and anything tied to your identity. If one of these can only be recovered through the old address, it's a problem waiting to happen.
Money and paperwork: banks, payment services, tax office, insurance, health, utilities and your domain registrar if you have one.
Work and people: professional profiles, clients, anyone you invoice or who invoices you.
Shopping and social: stores you actually use, social networks, subscriptions.
Newsletters: don't migrate them. Unsubscribe from what you don't read and resubscribe to the few you miss. Moving is the best inbox cleanup you'll ever get.

Two traps while you're at it:

"Sign in with Google" (or Apple, or Microsoft). These logins belong to that account, not to an email address. Change your address all you like: if you close that account, every login attached to it goes too. Switch those services to a regular login first, or keep the account.
Recovery addresses. Many accounts keep a backup email for recovery. Update those too, including the recovery settings on your old account, so you can still get into it later.

Step 6: Tell the People Who Matter

Send a short note to the people and businesses you actually correspond with. Then set an auto-reply on the old account saying you've moved, and update your email signature, website and business cards.

Keep the auto-reply short. Everyone who writes to the old address sees it, spammers included.

Step 7: Keep the Old Account Alive

This is the step people skip, and it's the one that bites a year later.

Free providers delete accounts nobody uses. Google may delete a personal account after two years of inactivity, and a deleted Gmail address can't be used to create a new account. Microsoft closes accounts that haven't been signed into for two years.

If that happens before you've moved every login, anything still tied to the old address becomes very hard to recover. So:

Sign in to the old account at least once a year. Put a reminder in your calendar.
Keep forwarding and the auto-reply running.
Keep its recovery options current.

When nothing important has arrived for a year, you can start thinking about closing it. Not before.

Mistakes That Hurt

Closing the old account in week one.
Migrating newsletters instead of unsubscribing.
Forgetting the "Sign in with..." accounts.
Forwarding without keeping a copy.
Updating 200 online shops and forgetting the bank.

The Bigger Lesson

An email address feels like a contact detail. It's actually infrastructure. It sits underneath your accounts the way plumbing sits under a house: invisible until you try to move it.

If you never want to do this again, the real fix is an address on your own domain. Then you can change providers without changing the address. The trade-off is that the domain becomes your responsibility: renew it, secure it and never let it lapse. For most people, a carefully chosen address at a provider they plan to stay with is the simpler answer.

Sources: Google: Automatically forward Gmail messages · Google: Inactive Google Account Policy · Microsoft: Account activity policy · OX App Suite: Importing contacts

Disclosure: I run [@fuck.it], a paid email service, so I have a stake in people switching providers. The guide above works regardless of where you're moving to.

[Boost]

The G Man — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 23:54:25 +0000

The G Man

Jul 26 '25

Why I Built [@fuck.it] - The Email Service for the Rest of Us

#webdev #privacy #webmail #productivity

1 min read

Why I Built [@fuck.it] - The Email Service for the Rest of Us

The G Man — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 09:14:01 +0000

Most email providers want you to behave.
We didn’t.

They want your real name, your data, your consent to be tracked.
We wanted something better.
Actually, we wanted something that gave zero fucks.

What the hell is [@fuck.it]?
It's an email service, yes.
But not just that.

End-to-end encryption
No ads, no tracking, no compromises
IMAP, POP3, SMTP - full client support
Hosted in Germany, GDPR and ISO 27001 certified
Powered by OX Guard on private infrastructure

And... it looks and feels cool as hell. It's the first email address you gonna be actually proud of having.

But also:
It’s a digital art gallery. A statement. A rebellion. A secret club in plain sight.

Why build this?
Because the world is full of noise.
Because Gmail feels like wearing beige.
Because we were tired of being polite in a digital space that never asked for our permission.

Because fuck it - that's where life happens.

Who’s it for?
Artists. Musicians. Rebels. Hackers. Creators. Weirdos.
Anyone who's tired of inboxes that look like spreadsheets from HR.

Want in?
We don’t do mass invites.
You either get invited or earn your spot.

Visit https://fuck.it
If the gate's closed, knock harder.