Protecting your data: A look into Vend Email's contingency plan

This document is a working draft. Your feedback is encouraged and welcomed, please submit your thoughts below.

Running a secure email service comes with great responsibility. Therefore, for complete transparency and honesty for all existing and future customers, I will outline our worst-case scenario contingency plan in the event of the unlikely need to close down the Vend Email service.

Ideally, the service will continue to be supported and run by a nominated and well-trusted third party. If that is not viable, the executor will conduct the following migration plan only in the case of an emergency or unexpected event.

Overview

The step-by-step migration plan is shown in the following diagram and explained in further detail below.

Click to enlarge image

Backups

All customer data is backed up on a rolling basis securely and in an encrypted manner. Heroku's PostgreSQL database service handles this automatically.

Managed domains

Vend Email owns and manages many domain names that our customers use.

All domains are purchased for at least five years and have auto-renewal enabled. We aim to extend all domains to a ten-year renewal for maximum resiliency.

Vend Email will transfer all domains to those mentioned earlier upon closure.

We will migrate nameservers and DNS records for all domains to Cloudflare, a free and globally recognised service. Cloudflare has benefits akin to Vend Email, ensuring forwarders still work in a fundamental sense. See the proposed overview below.

Forwarders

Maintaining basic forwarder functionality will be ensured by programmatically creating a Cloudflare email routing rule for each customer forwarder in the database at the time of closure. Each forwarder recipient would be set as the user account email unless email addresses overrode it in the forwarder recipient field.

NB: Cloudflare email routing does not support sending or replying.

When you reply to emails forwarded by their email routing service, the reply will be sent from your destination address (like [email protected] ), not your custom address (like [email protected]).

This migration process will be handled as smoothly and as seamlessly as possible by the third-party using detailed instructions provided by the current operators.