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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Suggestion? Start now. I moved my primary email to a custom domain a bit over a year ago, and it takes a while to slowly migrate everything over. You don't want to be doing that while under pressure from whatever it is that forces you off.

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I ran my own mail for a couple decades, until it got too time consuming. Now I primarily use Fastmail and I prefer it to Gmail, but still sometimes there are issues of third parties not liking my TLD (rare but happens with certain TLD's), but the biggest issue is when people just assume Gmail even though I've given them and sent them mail from other addresses and done everything I can to have them not send to my Gmail. Some of these are business clients, also. It's not that I haven't mostly moved from Gmail or that I'm not trying, it's that it's difficult. And I may lose some business when it happens.

Yeah, I should note that choice of TLD is important for your primary email. In my experience so far, no one blocks .com/.org/.net. Other TLDs may be trickier.

Yep. Try to stick to 2/3 letter TLDs, some sites check that length is within that range. I have a "fun" tld (in the same vein as myfullna.me) but keep a .net handy that's aliased to it in case it gets rejected.

Indeed, and now that I've been using it for years and many people also use it to contact me, it will be as painful to change it as it would be to drop Gmail.

Would like to do the same myself.. sadly my domain regsitrar is Google, not too sure if I'll need to register another name (a .dev tld) or if there's an easy route of changing registrars.

If you have a .dev TLD domain, Google technically has a lot of control over it no matter what you do, because they own the TLD. If you want to be truly Google-free you'd need a new domain.

I switched to posteo a while ago. I don't need much so it is 1€/month for me.

https://posteo.de/en

Does that handle the huge torrent of ads well? Seemingly every website and brick and mortar I've shopped at ever sends me at least one email per day.

The unsubscribe buttons on those emails mostly work, by law. My life improved a lot when I started taking the ten seconds to unsubscribe from everything, vs. just deleting.

I often find myself constantly deleting/ignoring these emails instead of just hitting "unsubscribe". It's so weird how our human laziness works because I swear not many people unsubscribe from emails even though it is typically very easy. It is satisfying when I go in and unsubscribe to a bunch of junk.

> The unsubscribe buttons on those emails mostly work, by law

They won't for some arbitrary percentage of emails. And even then, they will keep coming from new places.

You can use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email. I have done this probably hundreds of times over the past 5 years and it has worked as expected with no undesirable side effects.

Spamassassin with a 7.5 threshold and other measures like DMARC checks has worked surprisingly well for me in recent years.

A mail client with its local bayesian filtering works fine for me, given you take a little time to flag spam and tune the filter. I use Thunderbird.

Use a unique email address for every service you have to sign up for. Optionally combined with sieve filter to sort them accordingly.

I'm looking to do that now, since Google will starts charging for (old grandfathered) custom domains. What service are you using for emails?

I'm using Fastmail, and I've loved it so far. The biggest thing that landed me there was the built-in snooze feature, which works just like Gmail's. Everything else has worked perfectly, too.

Any suggestions for good privacy-centric email providers?

Depends on your threat analysis. I'm a happy Fastmail user for several years, mainly due to privacy and quality of the product. Others available.

I use Fastmail and am very happy with it. I know others who are happy with Protonmail. Both place an emphasis on privacy.

The biggest thing is to get onto your own domain so that switching again if your host changes policies becomes much easier.

https://privacyguides.org/providers/email/

I use mailbox.org with no complaints.

If you want serious protection you should probably use one NOT based in the country you live in.

https://www.fsf.org/resources/webmail-systems

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