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Comment by mjthompson | Hacker News Reader

It'd be nice if Gmail could get with the times and add proper custom domain support to the consumer grade service. These email forwarding services aren't really ideal, and people shouldn't need to use them. They're never really going to have the tier of security as, say, Gmail.

More generally, the problem of email address exhaustion on consumer services is getting worse. Imagine being a kid making your first email account on Gmail or Outlook.com that doesn't look totally unprofessional. I got lucky to get full name @ gmail. (But, it's to Google's credit that they don't do the inane Yahoo approach of recycling addresses.)

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Not defending gmail, but for them offering a gmail.com address is working out for many. Outside HN and tech, I doubt people care if their email suffix is `@gmail.com`.

Google Apps (or whatever they call it these days) is very affordable and gets many aspects of emails right. There are other well established alternatives too, like protonmail

Yeah, but suppose for argument's sake that your name is John Smith. I suspect pretty much every variant of that name is taken.

So, unless you resort to an unreasonable suffix of digits, or a potentially unprofessional moniker, you've got no choices.

Then again, email may not be a viable personal communication method in the future. Looks like the future is chat apps.

> if Gmail could get with the times and add proper custom domain support to the consumer grade service

Yes please. Especially since Microsoft offers it to a limited extent on Outlook.com for Microsoft 365 Home subscribers ('limited' in the sense, the domain must be registered with GoDaddy).

In case any Google employees are reading this: this would be a very useful feature for one.google.com.

> More generally, the problem of email address exhaustion on consumer services is getting worse.

And there's another pernicious problem: if you have a firstname@gmail.com or first.lastname@gmail.com, you're likely getting a ton of misdirected email even if your name isn't that common.

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