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Comment by Masema | Hacker News Reader

I did this! Kind of. I bought a domain and was lucky enough to get in to a custom domain email (and more) service with a big company years ago when they had a free version.

Unfortunately... it was Google (so kind of hiring the wolf to care for my sheep, as it turns out).

And now they're cutting off all of us free tier folks. Which I can't fault them for, but still blame them for. Because I'm petty and entitled or whatever.

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Same here and it's a massive problem because nearly all of my digital presence is associated with, not just that email address, but that Google account specifically.

I'll lose important things like my Google Voice number that I've had for a decade unless I pay for a business account.

You can transfer your Google Voice account to a regular GMail account despite their documentation claiming otherwise. See:

https://github.com/marwatk/gsuite-to-gmail/#google-voice

Keep in mind you can port out a Google Voice number, also if you pay for Apple services domain hosting is free for iCloud+ users now, although you don’t get as many addresses.

It is very frustrating. I did a lot with Google Apps on that domain, and migrating that stuff out to a consumer account is a painful process.

You can port your number out. I'm working on doing that myself. I think Google charges like $3 for some reason to do it, but whatever.

Same situation here. Have you done the research yet to decide on a new service, or are you planning on starting to pay?

For me ideally I would like to move to something else (even paid) just because someday Google deciding to block me for whatever reason scares me quite a bit after having everything for the last decade attached to this account. I would like to export my emails, switch my domain to the new service, and import everything - but I have no idea how realistic that will be yet.

I’ve been really happy with ProtonMail. I use their professional account with a catch-all email address on my domain, and I give each vendor I interact with their own dedicated email address (I.e. homedepot@mydomain.com, ticketmaster@mydomain.com, etc.)

It lets me track who is sharing my email address and gives me control over that (set up simple filter to automatically delete any email received at ticketmaster@mydomain.com when I start getting spam on it).

It’s been really effective - such a part of my day-to-day flow now I can’t go back.

The transition was pretty painless. I setup an email forward from gmail to my proton inbox using gmail@mydomain.com, every email I received at that address I’d go update my contact information with. After a bit, I was able to turn off the forwarding. Basically the classic strangulation pattern for microservice migrations applied to email.

That sounds pretty good. I do something similar but use POP and Thunderbird, which I'm looking to move away from. Does ProtonMail automatically set the From address when you start writing an email to a company you have a dedicated address for?

Having had my primary Gmail account blocked twice in the last two months, apparently through VPN usage, I became sufficiently terrified to decide to start to move all my email to my own domain.

I adopted Fastmail for my domain email, and it has been a good experience (I do know that Fastmail is a five-eyes company with all the related issues around privacy, and I researched alternatives for several weeks, but I guess in the end I was willing to trade privacy for ease-of-use, uptime and various other factors).

Now I am looking into getting away from other Cloud-provided backups such as Prime Photos, iCloud, etc., moving to self-hosted NAS storage.

The only alternative I found to Fastmail that was somewhat competitive in terms of tech & security features and not one of those countries was mailbox.org but their webmail is not Fastmail's and Germany isn't far behind those 5.

I've been working on this but my family is pretty hung up on Google Photos so we're migrating most things there trying to preserve as much as possible. We're doing Google One family. As much as Google has annoyed me with the change, the other options weren't any better (O365, iCloud+, random non-FAANG services)

I'm documenting everything here if you're interested:

https://github.com/marwatk/gsuite-to-gmail/#google-voice

I switched to Apple's (paid) iCloud+(?) and it was entirely smooth, even though it was still in beta at the time (or alpha: the signup notification I got still had editorial comments in it).

Zoho has a free tier that allows a domain.

whoa! thanks for the heads up :/

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