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Comment by 101008 | Hacker News Reader

My main fear about that is not doing it properly and my email stop working as expected. For the nature of my job (press) I send a lot of emails to people who don-t know me, asking for interviews, etc. If my email starts to fall into spam folder, my job would be impossible. Gmail gives me that and I don't have to worry about if this person received the email or not.

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you can somewhat limit the downside just by getting your own domain and setting it up as an email. Even still using this linked to gmail is better than nothing. when things go haywire you still control me@domain.com or whatever so you just take it to another service. I did this, and then a few months felt comfortable enough to move to fastmail. recipients have no idea, it's still me@domain.com, had no problems with deliverability.

I can vouch for Forward Email (https://forwardemail.net/). It's easy to set up if you have your own domain, you can continue using Google Mail if you like (for both receiving and sending), their message size limits are higher than Gmail's, you can set up multiple aliases and (optional) catch-all addresses, and they offer a free tier if cost is an issue. The big advantage of the reasonably-priced paid tier is privacy: paid subscribers don't have to put their real email addresses in the DNS records to configure the forwarding. It also helps to ensure that the service will remain viable into the future.

Oh neat, glad to hear about this. Do they have any blogs/content about why to do this for people like the parent of this thread?

While their FAQ seemed great to me, I'm someone already familiar with why this is important and generally how to do it. I could see it being overwhelming to someone just considering the idea. https://forwardemail.net/en/faq#table-of-contents

I don't believe Forward Email runs a blog, but this article[0] has a fairly good summary of how forwarding works and why one might want to set that up. The short version, in the context of this thread, is that it allows you to accept email on your own domain without running your own email servers. And if you ever want to change email providers in the future (or start running your own servers) you just need to edit some settings either in your DNS records or your Forward Email account; the email address everyone uses to contact you remains the same. Whereas if everyone knows you as username@gmail.com then you need to somehow get word out to your entire contact list—potentially without access to your old email account!—to let them know your new address.

Forward Email does a pretty good job with onboarding new users, in my opinion. Yes, some technical know-how is expected (you do need to know how to update DNS records for your domain, for example) but they give you step-by-step instructions both for setting up the MX and TXT records in DNS and for configuring your Google Mail account (or possible others, I didn't check) to allow sending email using your new address. I found it simpler to set up the forwarding itself than to go around to all my accounts and update the email addresses; that part is still a work in progress.

[0] https://medium.com/hackernoon/when-and-how-to-use-2019s-best...

Telling people to use an email forwarder sounds much easier than "host your own email". I'll try it next time.

I have the same fear. It's very daunting. It's not that I don't know how to set up an email server, it's that I know just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be reliable.

There's so much nuance and it's easy to let things lapse, or make a small mistake and silently get all your mail rejected, lose/corrupt a bunch of data, etc.

Something like Mail-in-a-box[1] is easy to setup, you can monitor the spam stuff yourself, comes with all the instructions you need to get the DNS side of setup correctly etc

I've not had any issues with email not reaching people - and I'm not sure that other mailservers would put gmail any higher, especially as they are used for a lot of spam

[1] https://mailinabox.email/

I prefer Mailcow. Mail-in-a-box requires the machine to be running a specific version of Ubuntu. Mailcow runs under Docker https://mailcow.email/

Maybe 1) remove everything else from Google and 2) Start paying for your Gmail account, which will hopefully make it more likely that the appeals process actually works? Gmail's service is clearly something you depend on and that is worth paying for.

It's hard to know what's best in terms of risk management here. The likelihood that you will be hit is small but the consequences are potentially devastating.

I agree the likelihood is small but when you're thinking along these lines[1] I think it's time to start making a move to give yourself some piece of mind.

[1] But my nightmare in here is that you lose access to your whole Google account and that would devastate me.

Dude, I'm a non-tech guy. I just frequent HN for intellectual stimulation.

If I can set up a custom domain, you can definitely do so.

I'm a freelance and my livelihood also depends on cold emailiing people. It's just a false belief that we need Google to handle important aspects of our life. No, we don't

If you really care about deliverability rate, there is often some impact from doing that.

If your email is that fundamental to your job you should 100% have a custom domain, so that you can switch email provider without causing disruption to your day-to-day job. It shouldn't cost more than ~$60 a year.

It took me a couple years to transfer all important online accounts and communications to a new email, one by one. Set up an auto-redirect, change the email in all accounts when you log in, slowly.

I feel free now.

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