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I've been using a custom domain (with G-Suite, or whatever they call it this week) for over 15 years and I couldn't be happier. If I ever want to move I can take all my accounts/emails/etc with me, I don't need to update any contacts with my new email. It's probably the best decision high-school-me made (buying a domain for my email).

One thing: Don't get cute. I considered buying "stran.ge" so I could have "josh@stran.ge" but thankfully sanity prevailed and I avoided years of saying "No not 'strange.com', 'stran.ge'". Make it easy to say over the phone to an underpaid call center employee.

> One thing: Don't get cute. I considered buying "stran.ge" so I could have "josh@stran.ge" but thankfully sanity prevailed

I did this, only out of necessity though – I have a common first name and common last name, which means there aren't any domains available. I use a subdomain rather than the TLD as the 'cute' bit, which lessens the confusion slightly.

I have a "cute" email address and don't regret it. I just spell out the entire email address letter by letter, although because I have an uncommon name I have to spell out my name every time anyway.

I have an email address with a personal domain, and my "legacy" Gmail account. I like having an email address with a custom domain, and I think that it's a (weak) signal about your technical aptitude/geekiness. If you want things to just work, Fastmail, protonmail and presumably other email providers will let you manage this without any hassles. I use protonmail and I haven't noticed any dropped emails.

The main pros & cons, apart from vanity, are IMO about security and robustness. With a custom domain you can change email providers, or you can recover from being locked out. (Just read any horror story about the day Google decided to freeze an email account). OTOH the custom domain name adds one more point of failure, either for delivery (if you have to handle SPF/DKIM yourself) or security - if someone gets into your registrar/NS account, they can re-route your emails. So you want to make double extra sure your accounts are locked down tightly.

I consider it essential for a couple of reasons. The most important one being that you can change email providers without having to change your email address.

I've used a custom domain for my email since forever. When I was running my own mail server, I had fairly strict requirements for senders to block the delluge of low effort spam; but I'd have to watch for bounces from important senders; IIRC my credit union liked to send some mails where the smtp helo hostname wasn't right, and I had to whitelist them, and sometimes they'd change to a new wrong hostname, etc.

But now, fastmail is my MX, and they do whatever they do, and it's fine or I don't hear about it? I try to avoid signing up for email delivery, because I'd rather get written correspondence by postal mail. But that's because email is a cesspool of junk, rather than because I'm worried about not getting things.

Just use fastmail and set the DNS to theirs, they should handle the rest. I also like that they have catchalls, i.e. I can post hackernews@mydomain.com or stepstone.com.engjobs@mydomain.com to figure out how people found out about the email address.

Pros: You can always change the provider in case you change your mind in the future. With gmail, you're locked in to their service (and if they lock you out for some reason, well, you're stuck).

I switched to my custom domain for email, it works great most of the time however I would recommend against any non-traditional TLDs (e.g. .com, .org, etc) or ccTLDs (.ca, .nz, etc).

I switched to one of the new fancy gTLDs and been having issues: 1) some companies don't accept it as a valid domain; or 2) on the phone they get confused and tried add something like gmail.com to it so you get email@gTLD@gmail.com

Are non-traditional TLDs (e.g. .io, .ai, .bio, etc.) more likely to be classified as spam?

I haven't experienced it after switching to my gTLD 3-4 years ago, so I can't sa either way. My main issues has been:

1) Software/website/business doesn't accept the gTLD domain 2) On phones, the agent gets confused and appends @gmail.com to the end

No

I've been using a custom domain for a long time - I have forwarding via improvmx.com that I'm very satisfied with.

I've had no problems. It's good knowing that if I do have any issue with the underlying mail host that I can just point it elsewhere with minimal fuss.

I don't think it adds a lot of value beyond that. Perhaps an iota of geek cred?

I know that improvmx was reading my emails. Reason? I get an email from them saying: We've detected activity on your domain that violate our Terms of Service, particularly the "Prohibited Activities and Responsible Usage" section.

Yea, no thank you. What's been working really well is CloudFlare's email forwarding service, plus it's free unlike improvmx.

Given that they specifically say they don't do that, what concrete evidence do you have? I don't see anything in their prohibited activities list that would require them to do so (e.g. recipient complaints would suffice)

https://improvmx.com/terms-of-service/

https://improvmx.com/our-pledge-to-you/

I have used a custom domain for longer than a decade. I've so rarely had an issue with deliverability that I can't recall a specific instance of it right now. Just set up all the required dark magick like SPF and DMARC and use a quality backend provider.

I've used multiple backend providers for it. FastMail for the majority of the time, though I switched off about 2 years ago. It worked great and I recommend it.

Before that I used Google Apps (or whatever they call it now). I would not recommend using a custom domain with Google Apps. They routinely block you from using things that regular Gmail accounts can use, and I don't trust Google not to discontinue any given service.

I briefly tried running it myself, and it wasn't worth the pain.

Sure, it's great! You don't have to self-host, you just need to set a few DNS entries depending on your provider. And you can always change providers without losing access to your e-mails, which is invaluable. Also, if you set up wildcard forwarding you can create a new e-mail for every service you use (also possible with mail providers but often less convenient / flexible), which is handy in case someone leaks your address and you start receiving SPAM (just disable that one address then, regular spammers won't figure out they can send e-mail to any prefix in your domain).

Sometime 5-10 years ago I degoogled my personal life. It took a while, and was inconvenient for many reasons. One additional reason I didn't consider was that when I was giving out my email address for one reason or another, trying to provide it clearly always felt like a point of failure, whereas EVERYONE will correctly receive my gmail address when I tell them. Since most of my friends and family use google, they still had all of my email once I switched, from their side, so I just went back to Google for gmail. For messaging I use Signal/iMessage/Whatsapp though.

I considered it, and while not perfect decided to stay with Google. All the justification for having a custom domain has strong counter arguments, for example: Self hosting a server- I am too lazy for that and there are too many points of failure in the process and maintenance.

Vendor lock- yes, you can move your address but your emails are still being held by the previous provider. It is possible to backup and restore to a new vendor, but it is cumbersome and again a big point of failure

"it looks good"- yes it does, but I couldn't care less

Yay! I use the free version of iRedMail [0] under OpenBSD since 2017 and every email I send gets through with any issues (except the first days when I screwed up my SPF/DKIM configuration).

[0] https://iredmail.org/

I do it for a couple reasons:

1. Freedom - by using a custom domain, I'm not locked into my email provider

2. Unlimited addresses - a@, foo@, john@; with a custom domain, they're all mine and enable me to make useful aliases and filter rules

how does 2) work? do you have a catch-all service? say I want to give my custom address to a John I've just met, can I tell them to write to john@horsellama.xyz without actually creating that address?

Yes!

I use Fastmail which gives you a wildcard catchall alias, *@example.com , but you can do this even self-hosting with postfix, and I'd bet most decent email providers who let you use a custom domain also have a catchall email feature.

How Brake password bank money transfer system

I have a personal domain and use it for my email. I don’t have any problems with it.

On a side note your post read like a conversation with yourself. I almost just bailed on this tread without reading it. I am raising a child with ADHD who frequently communicates in this form, talking at you as a conversation with themself, and are confused why nobody listened and nobody cares.

Instead I recommend bottom line up front. 2 sentences and be done.

Hi! OP here. Thank you for pointing this out! Indeed, I do tend to "think out loud" and give a lot of context. Your comment makes me think how I can communicate more directly and to the point, I mean it.

On a side note I see you being downvoted, so I wanted to let you know that I actually appreciate the candor.

Ask HN: Custom domain for personal email – yay or nay?