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Another thing to think about is OAuth. If you if you lose an account at Google or Facebook that you've used to sign into another site, you lose them too.

Good thought.

Will not using G OAuth and probably delete all photos from my Picasa, now that they were automatically moved over to G+.

You never know what the automatic image scanner may think it has found in those photos that violates some G+ rules. I don't want to lose all my data in my G account, only because an automated scanner thinks my friend's face was a bare female breast.

The problem with having your own domain for email is the communication factor. When I tell someone my email is charles.lastname@gmail.com, there's no miscommunication. Worst case I have to spell out my last name, but generally if someone's asking for email they already have my last name.

If you buy a domain, nowadays, you have few options with respect to getting an email that sounds legit, mature, and isn't long and/or uses easily misspelled words.

I have a bunch of domains, but none of them are particularly appropriate for an email address I would verbally communicate to someone. bluh.org is my main domain, but when you say 'bluh' out loud to someone, you inevitably have to spell it. I once owned thereisnocharles.com, which was a goofy thing and I used that as my main email address before gmail came along. But it's long, and it doesn't sound professional at all.

I guess we could all just use something like gmail as a simple forwarder service to our owned email addresses, but even then, it's not a foolproof solution.

Also, no, it's not a matrix reference, it's a ghostbusters reference.

i@yourname.com

Solves the problem you raised.

Except it's an impossible solution for a lot of people, including myself. My name as a domain name is taken, and was taken long ago.

On all available tlds? Really?

well having me@lastname.ly would require you to explain "that's a .ly not .com" and therefore not solve this particular problem

Ditto. .com is safe to tell people, anything else can lead to confusion.

I have never had any trouble with "jon@jrock.us". People type the characters in your email address verbatim. They do not randomly add stuff.

Hey, where're the salary poll results?

For a good portion of my people (in my experience, at least 50%) any domain but .com might as well not exist. With them, ".com" is four characters that must ritually be applied to all domains to appease the computer gods.

Doesn't pass the verbal test. Is that "I" or is that "eye" or is it "aye"?

Right. I use me@...

Is that me or mee (noodles) or mi (musical note, do-ray-mi...)?

;0)

As someone who has my own domain, I find it very rare that I actually have to tell someone my email address out loud using my voice. 99% of the time they get it from an online profile, or my website, or by receiving an email from me, or by me filling in a form, online or physical, or a business card, or by me writing it down.

I don't see this as a valid issue to deter anyone from getting their own domain.

firstname@lastname.[com|net|org].

Mine is bertjw@regeer.org for example.

john@smith.com

you want to see how bad it turn when you do chin, li, etc? soon we will run out of website names!

What about the .name TLD?

I own (for now.. I'm not sure if that can be disputed if more people with my rather rare last name apply) lastname.name

So - you can reach me, if I finally finish my migration and stop being a lazy bastard, at firstname@lastname.name - which is rather good imo.

Sure, I've got other legacy addresses, but this could be a viable alternative to a gmail _identity_.

Actually the domain you own is almost certainly firstname.lastname.name, but the email is setup so firstname@lastname.name works. It's particular to the .name TLD.

No, I certainly own (and the convention you talk about is why I'm not sure if it holds up forever) for now the domain mylastname.name.

I found a registrar that sold this domain to me, anything you throw at it ends up on one of my machines.

There is also the .me TLD - not sure if it has the same intentions as .name, but it is less used so more widely available. I own my lastname.me domain, and so I can (if I ever set it up properly) send mail to firstname@lastname.me, which is slightly shorter but works just as well.

.com is a ghetto, move on.

Picking another TLD is tempting, but I find it confuses people, even tech-savvy people. Maybe not if you have something kinda common like a .tv, but take what I did:

My username, across the Internet, is spiffytech. I registered http://spiffyte.ch. It's fun and a little clever, but since most people haven't heard of .ch domains I'm constantly saying "w-w-w dot spiffy t-e dot c-h. No, not .com. No, put the dot between the 'e' and the 'c'. Spiffytech. Like my username.". Even to tech-savvy friends.

Sure, maybe that's an artifact of my particular domain, but I'd much prefer if I could get the .com and just tell people spiffytech.com and avoid the confusion.

I have a short domain (xk7.net), doesn't cause any problems over the phone (occasionally people comment on the fact that I have my own domain/mail) and doesn't sound immature.

Although I was once told 'sorry, you must use a Hotmail, Yahoo! or Gmail address'...

This is only true depending on how seasoned a netizen someone is. True story: I have a friend of mine whom I once verbally communicated a (now long-gone) gmail address to, with Swedish pronounciation. The result was him smirking a bit, and some time later asking me if I got the pictures he sent to my "gaymail.com address". This could just as well have ended up being "geemail.com" or "yeemail.com" had I gone with English pronounciation. He just didn't know what google or gmail was. He doesn't use the net in the same ways we do.

But let's be realistic... it's not like the world of internet users suffered from a supposed problem with miscommunicated email addresses before "geemail.com" came around. We managed just fine.

I have Google Apps Free for my personal domain and I am considering moving to the paid one, just to be able to phone them if anything ever goes wrong. (The Android remote-wipe feature that comes with it might be worthwhile too, just-in-case.)

I also primarily use an IMAP client which saves a local copy of all my email, so although the "identity" issues (and non-email data) bother me a bit, I do have at all times essentially a backup of all my mail.

This, and the impossibility of resolving the issue, is why I don't trust google. I had my own experience with google unfairly preventing me from using its service-- one where I was trying to give them money-- and I realized they really don't have any customer support.

This is why I trust Apple. They might be slow, or silent, but they've never left me hanging (and I've been a customer of theres for decades before google existed.)

That said, my iCloud account is where media and non-essential information will get stored. If Apple disappears it one day, at most I'll have lost music and movies. But everything real lives somewhere I can control and backup.

I use GMAIL, but with POP access, and I store my email locally.

However, it is time to get off of gmail and move anyway. It is just such a PITA to manage your own email servers....but I expect a company that does it for a living will provide better support than a company where I'm the product rather than the customer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damocles

I thought you looked familiar.

This made me concerned. I have my own domain which indeed uses Google Apps, but I just forward all my mails from there to my @gmail.com account. This needs to switch.

I'm trying to avoid doing precisely that, but I want into Google+... I wish they would just add support for Apps domains.

But you own your domain. In your case, if Google disabled your Gmail or Apps accounts, it'd be just a minor annoyance, because your e-mail address would still work after a DNS change.

Google owning your data is not the problem here, while you can backup it. The real problem is them owning your identity.

Do you really <i>own</i> your domain? You're likely dependent on a registrar where you're probably a $10/year (i.e. nearly nothing) paying customer.

What if your domain registrar simply fails and loses your records?

The US government has been seizing domains associated with sites accused of violating laws; are you with a registrar who will fight that?

I'm not saying that you shouldn't own the domain for your email address--it's simply that you should realize that it solves one problem but creates others.

Once you look at things at detail, almost everything in your life is dependent on trust. Knowing how much to trust different aspects and how to evaluate risks is key.

This is probably a little hyperbolic. I have a gmail address and I don't expect it to disappear. If it does, however, I will still survive (after going through some temporary pain). I feel like you're telling me I shouldn't use a credit card because someone could steal my identity. Or that I shouldn't use closed-source software because my "freedom" is in jeopardy.

I'd recommend you use Free software because when it sucks (and all software sucks), you have a chance of actually fixing it.

I hope I'm wrong, cause I really love email, but I don't think many people will care about it in 10 years. Most don't care much about it anymore today.

How can I reach you? You don't have Facebook!

How does this solve said issue? Using Google Apps means the big G still controls all your data.

Data you can download, identity is hard to change.

For example: I can download all my mail from gmail (using POP or IMAP) regularly. If I lose the account I still have my mails. I can't change the mail amazon (or whatever other site) knows about unless I have access to my gmail account (I realize you can probably talk to their customer support but it doesn't scale well at all. I have about 120 different logins using my @gmail.com address...).

He was talking about identity, not data. If google closes your account and you control your identity, you can take it elsewhere. If google controls both your identity and your data and then closes your account, you're screwed.

If you download all your mail for backup purposes using, say, POP3 then if Google does nuke your account you can switch to hosting yourself and maintain your email address.

This is what I do, but if Google ever fails me I'd probably switch to fastmail.fm or similar service instead of setting up a server. Unless you're interested in the ins and outs of setting up and maintaining an email server, it's something I'd outsource on a cost/benefit basis.

He's suggesting that if your account is shut down for some reason then your email address still works.

Actually that works quite well. If your photo accounts, your whatever accounts etc are all tied to a non-google login, then it won't matter that your google account is gone.

THE PROBLEM is that many places only accept google/facebook if not facebook alone. Although I have no freaken' idea why, it took a minute after adding google login to my site to add facebook, openid, etc..