Big tech giveth, big tech taketh away

Have you ever thought about what would happen if you suddenly lost access to your email? Would the years of conversations, supplier info, invoices … the whole connective tissue of your working life still be accessible?

If you’re old-fashioned enough to run an actual email client that stores data on your device, you might claw back most of it … might. If you’re on webmail, like most organisations are these days, you’re not clawing anything back.

A local organisation I’m now working with recently came to that realisation when one of their subcontractors had their Google account permanently disabled and their appeals rejected. Everything gone, not only email (the old “all your eggs in one basket” problem I keep harping on about).

Their long-term plan is to migrate everything to European providers but that takes time. Migrations always do. Until that happens, they want to protect themselves against similar evaporating accounts.

I wanted to build something for them that was more resilient than a local email client and a prayer. And it turns out Microsoft actually publish an API (a way for computers to talk to each other) called Graph that’s perfect for this.

I’ll skip the technical details but, for every mailbox in the organisation, a script watches for new emails, fetches them, and appends them to a backup mailbox at Infomaniak, a Swiss provider where actual humans reply to your support queries. Deletes, moves, etc are all mirrored too.

In the future, this same process can be used for calendars, contacts, even Sharepoint files. One migration at a time, though.

If your organisation depends on the continued goodwill of some big tech platform and their automated ban algorithms, think about building a mirror. At the very least, run a local email client and hope for the best.

Colin