What email service will not let me down if I disappear for 20 years?

Considering the history behind every "lifetime" plan I have ever seen in my life, no. They will all eventually change. Someone will buy the company, it could simply die, etc. There isn't a single entity you can trust in this scenario.

How likely is it that you are sent to jail for 20 years and still care about your emails? If so, download them all and store in durable media.

The hard part is "not to spend my funds". Money is fungible. Even if they keep "your" money in a bank, they can loan too much from another bank and/or go bankrupt.

Or just get sold to google/facebbok or a brilliant genius that have new grow hacking ideas.

PS: Yahoo! emptied my email twice. It is an old account from the times Yahoo! was the biggest thing in the Internet, that I'm not using regularly. So cross them out.

It's hard to think of many services that haven't disappeared or gone to shit over the last twenty years. Even if you have a friend in a company that manages this for you and could help you out they might not be around or at that company in twenty years. Speculation:

Best and most expensive. You'd probably need to make a contract with a third party to actively manage this for you. Ideally with your own domain to be able to switch providers. There are existing providers that do this type of thing: I have to do something similar with medical records retention and my retirement within a medical corporation in case I get hit by a bus tomorrow, but your timeframe is longer.

Cheapest. Practically if it's fairly hands off and reactive to cancellations or service outages you have a backup on another provider through forwarding or IMAP.

Middle ground? Business contact with Microsoft or a similar player. I'm not sure it's worth their time.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal or financial advice. Many service providers will allow pre-paying a credit to the account but if you want any kind of promise then I think you would need to reach out to them, set up a business account of sorts and get a contract that agrees to your terms in writing reviewed and signed by lawyers. The account should be set up in the name of a trust or business. Pre-paying may be important if you suspect funds may be seized. Even then that does not stop the business from going bankrupt which in most countries would nullify that contract unless the bankruptcy judge determines that some law requires the acquiring company to honor your contract which is unlikely and assuming the email provider is acquired and not liquidated. You could probably also pay a money management company to pay your bills from a legal trust which vary by state and country and have all your bills route to them. I am basing most of this off the myriad of chapter-11's, mergers and acquisitions I went through during and after the .com bust which led to some fun arguments with vendors.

Be sure to set up limited power of attorney with your lawyers so they can manage your email account. Set up forwarding to route emails to them as you won't have access to a computer or phone. If a prison had a shared terminal then the warden and staff would have access to your emails. Probably best to keep that between you and your lawyers. And/or set up email rules to forward emails with specific subjects to your lawyers. It would also be important to discuss all of this with the lawyers that would be involved in discussions with the sentencing judge so that for example the lawyers may be able to visit you with a laptop that has offline copies of emails as cell service may be blocked. Expect this to ultimately be paper hard copies.

As for specific companies it is probably best to research the founders, board members, financials and company history of several providers. It's hard to predict which tech companies will still be around in twenty years. Even golden children like Amazon could be replaced by a new golden child but that is a much bigger topic.

20 years is asking too much in this economy. You can't even keep a phone number for 3 months. Bank accounts are like 5 years.

Just look at which email service has already lasted 20 years. They are more likely to last another 20 years than any new shining idealistic email service you pick.

I'm thinking maybe something like a personal server at a university? Don't ask me how.

Not 100% what you want but the closest I know of is hey.com (I'm not a customer yet but I am evaluating them). As far as proof that they will, who knows, but so far they've kept this kind of promise for their other products over the past 2 decades...

> If I cancel, can I forward my @hey.com address elsewhere? Yes. As long as you’ve paid for your first year of service, you can forward any email you receive while your account is open, or after it’s closed, to any other email address you’d like. Trial accounts don’t include forever-forwarding either.

> If I cancel, does someone else get my @hey.com address? It depends. As long as you’ve paid for your first year of service, your @hey.com address is yours forever, even if you stop using HEY and don’t pay for HEY in subsequent years. That means no one else will ever be able to claim your email address, or receive password or security resets at your original @hey.com address. If you don’t pay for your first year, or you cancel and request a refund within the first year, or you never go beyond the free trial, your @hey.com email address will be recycled after 90 days and made available to someone else.

https://www.hey.com/faqs/

I'm not even sure the concept of emailing will still exist in 20 years.

Which crime you will do?

No.

pobox.com maybe