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Comment by _xerces_ | Hacker News Reader

I see Proton Mail addresses and think the owner is paranoid, hiding something or odd in some way. Similarly, if I see aol or yahoo addresses I think old or not tech savvy. It is not necessarily fair, but they are my first instincts and I am sure it is true of others.

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Do you lock the door on your house? Do you close the curtains on your bedroom window with a neighbor 20 feet away?

Why? Are you paranoid and odd?

I'm definitely odd that I read the stories of unlucky people's entire lives F'd over because they happily used all the standard convenient google services and then google killed them, in error, and with no human customer service to correct it, and I decide that maybe we shouldn't all just cooperate with a bad thing, and try to get myself some other service providers.

Hmm, only Gmail addresses appear trustworthy then? What else is so prevalent... Outlook?

Just make your own personal email address/domain.

I already have my domain firstlastname.com with Google domains. I can setup email forwarding for free. All goes to my gmail address.

As far as normal people their reaction was "That's cool you have your own email like that"

It's fun and educational. I nabbed first@last.me. Unfortunately my last name isn't quite so easy to spell so it isn't quite the easiest but it's me.

What’s annoying is the number of web forms that assume all email addresses must end in .com, .edu, or maybe .net/.org if you’re lucky. And refuses to let you use your nice custom email domain because it’s “invalid”.

So I have a .family address for my “primary” account and a gmail account for fallback purposes.

I had myname.com for 15 years. I let it go when I had email hosting issues, the Covid hit & I scrutinized my cost:benefit of inflating registrar and hosting fees over the years.

firstlast@firstlast.com always seemed a little redundant to as an email address; and me@firstlast.com also sounds ... weird

I use mail@firstlast.com

I also sometimes use first@firstlast.com because some services don't allow emails starting with keywords, Facebook for example doesn't, or didn't at the time I tried, allow mail / info / admin etc.

Having dealt with the privacy officer inbox for a large company in the past I have the same reaction - the most vexatious complaints we received and struggled to resolve all came from people with protonmail addresses.

Yahoo has a decent email service, imo. I mean .. it's just email. And I got my first gmail almost twenty years ago; hard to say it's not old.

I treat it the same and when we have an unwieldy number of applications (always), I just skip over those.

Good to know that is a factor, thanks. You and the parent posters' disclosure is appreciated.

Maybe you don't want to have to work with people like that anyway.

I don't disagree, but it seems better to respond with appreciation for their candidness.

I also don't disagree with your point. But I am also intentionally informing them how their actions may be percieved by a bystander, or their own potential resource pool.

While they are pre-judging others for not using gmail because they see that as weird, I am a valuable capable potential producer judging them for their failings of both academic integrity (as in you just shouldn't do that simply because it's not right) AND also seperately for their failing of pure intelligence and their own self interest, because in fact some of the smartest most capable people are the ones willingly and knowingly taking on the burden of not using gmail for either practical or principled reasons, and they are filtering those people out, which I judge to be stupid. Those are probably exactly the most valuable people to their own interests.

While from the other side, I don't necessarily consider it to be stupidly filtering out potential employers, because I am not desperate for any scrap of employment.

I haven't noticed any special problem with my own PM address, but I have never tried to cold call anyone from it. So I would possibly agree that filtering out 90% is too much even if I'm not desperate, but I haven't encountered that problem because I'm not trying to contact a large number of new strangers.

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