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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

I said "own your domain", not "self-host your email server".

"own your domain" is technobabble to 99.999+% of email users. Most people understand emails addresses are <something> "@gmail.com" or "@yahoo.com" or "@<somebigcompany>.com". They don't understand the parts of an email address, nor how or why they are constructed that way.

I have been using a personal domain for my email address for decades and when I have to give it out verbally to someone, it is about a 50% chance that the conversation is:

"My email is <name@myname.tld>"

"uuhhh... at gmail.com?"

"No it's just <@myname.tld>"

"Yeah, but is it gmail or yahoo?"

Worse is the California DMV. All password reset emails going to my custom .com would be subject to multi-hour delays; the password resets were valid for only a few minutes. The only way into the account was to call the tech support phone line. I had them delete the old account and re-registered with a bland gmail email address.

I don't know of any technical reason to delay emails to minor domains. My domain has valid MX records, uses SPF, has valid DKIM TXT records, etc.

> I don't know of any technical reason to delay emails to minor domains. My domain has valid MX records, uses SPF, has valid DKIM TXT records, etc.

I still run into that with my business address; after much mucking around with client's MS admin who did various pieces of magic on their online/azure/microsoft email platform until we finally got it down to around 2m for the delay.

The upside appears to be that now all clients who are using microsoft appear to have only a 2m delay when sending email to my business domain.

Strange. I have my own .org and I've never had a problem with the California DMV's reset emails... I just had to reset mine a month or so ago to start my license renewal, and the reset email showed up almost as fast as I could switch tabs to my webmail.

Thanks, I appreciate the additional data point. They do have a tech support method so I can use this to start a ticket. It could be the same situation as the other commenter, where the underlying service is delaying outbound emails.

This was the exact kind of trouble I used to have when I gave out @myname.com emails. It was super not worth it. It confused people all the time. I switched to a plain Gmail with nothing hard to spell, just a few letters and (sadly) numbers. (I waited like a decade before 'claiming' a Gmail address, so no decent versions of my name or anything professional remained without numbers.)

Also, Gmail actually blocks true spam, whereas nothing I tried on my shared-hosting server with SpamAssassin ever worked.

I don't have any love for Google, but I'll never go back to giving out a personal domain email for any reason.

Due to spam and deliverability issues, I'd personally never self-host an email server either. Plenty of good providers will allow you to bring your own domain and deal with the hard parts for you.

Well, I actually like to have my own domain for things where I have purchased something and have ownership, like my Amazon Kindle account. It is tied to my Gmail account and then Gmail decides I am sketchy for some reason I lose access. It’s probably a little easier to maintain my Domain, and there are legal mechanisms to restore it if it is taken away for any reason other than nonpayment.

I've had my own domain for ~20 years, first on Google Apps for Domains -> GSuite -> Google Workspaces (or whatever their naming changes have been), and moved over to Fastmail a few years ago.

Fastmail's spam filtering isn't as good as Googles, but has fewer false-positives, and the spam it does let through is trivially manageable. I did host my own mail server for a year or so prior to using Google, but I agree dealing with spam filter configuration and tuning was a headache, and I gave up. Nowadays I can only assume it's even harder to run your own email server, so I'd never recommend anyone do that when there are options for other people to do it for you.

I occasionally get a confused customer support person on the phone when I need to give them my email address, but they understand in about 7 seconds and it's no big deal.

> It was super not worth it. It confused people all the time.

Genuinely interested: was it in the US? Feels like people in the US are more used to having one big service that everybody uses.

I have never seen confusion about my personal email...

Yes, exactly. US. Every millennial has Gmail, idk what GenZ does, probably also Gmail. GenX and Boomers probably split between Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, and a few AOLs - and that covers probably 95% of Americans.

It was almost embarrassing for me, I have to admit — especially times when I’d been clever about it and set up, say, searsaccount@myname.com as a forwarder, and the cashier at Sears needed my email address. They once asked me oh, do you work for Sears?

I feel like the US have a culture of big chains like that. You want an email? GMail. You want mexican food? Chipotle. etc. I don't mean that as a criticism, but there seems to be a cultural thing.

In most parts of the world, you don't almost exclusively chains of restaurants, and people don't expect that. Just like it's normal to have someone suggest a restaurant you have never heard about, it's normal to have someone use an email provider you've never heard about.

Or maybe that's completely unrelated, I don't know :-).

I think the confusion was less about the part after the @ not being a major well known service, but not being something that sounds like a company or a service. I think their confusion is that it has my name in it, and people are used to a name going before the @. ...so when I say my name, they're expecting another @.

Just curious: do you own your own domain? My experience is that many (most?) people who would be competent to own their own domain just don't.

> I have been using a personal domain for my email address for decades

Yeah sorry, I answered to the wrong comment :-).

But still, I have this feeling that many people who would be competent to own their domain just don't do it. And they could give an email to their family, too. And help friends setup theirs.

I'm not completely sure that the issue is "it's too hard". To me, it's like password managers. Sure, it's too hard for some people. But most people just can't be arsed to use a password manager, though they would be totally competent.

"It's too hard" is, in my experience, often an excuse to be lazy.

For the average person, the benefits of having your own email domain are not very weighty compared to the risks, complexities, spent social capital, and inconvenience of having one.

For most people, if they want or need to switch email providers they will simply sign up for a new service, give people their new address, and move on with their life.

This whole conversation is a lot to do about something that the average joe just doesn't give a shit about. It isn't laziness. It really isn't that important of a life task for most. It's an appropriate prioritization of tasks under a lifestyle different than yours.

I agree that most people don't care, and probably don't have the energy and time to care, and that's mostly fine. That is, until Google decides to arbitrarily close their account, with no recourse. Sure, over the number of people who use GMail, only a tiny percentage experience this, but it still sucks. And in that case people are usually more upset that they've lost their photos, docs, etc. than their email.

I don't really see an actual problem here, unlike some others commenting, but it is a general shame to me that more people don't have their own email domain. It would make the world more... colorful... somehow, even if in just a small way.

Agreed, of the things people keep in their Google account, the email address is probably the least valuable to them.

> For the average person, the benefits of having your own email domain are not very weighty compared to the risks, complexities, spent social capital, and inconvenience of having one.

I honestly think that most people don't know why it matters. 20 years ago I was happy (and proud) to have gmail, and didn't see a point in having my domain. Until I chose to move away from gmail, and then it all made sense.

I have an example: many (most?) universities give you an alumni email when you graduate. Some offer actual hosting, but others just ask you to redirect. It is free, and for many universities, graduates would trust their university more than gmail, right? And it wouldn't lock them into gmail. Still, none of my friends from university use it. Most use gmail instead.

Now tell them: "Look, if you use gmail, then Google can read all your emails. You didn't give a shit 4 months ago ("I have nothing to hide"), but now you've heard of random Canadians and Europeans getting deported or declined entry in the US for random reasons, including one who wrote stuff against Trump. How do you feel about the US reading you emails and deciding whether they should deport you or not based on that? If you controlled a domain, you could move away from gmail. Now you can't. Also know that if they can read your emails, it means that they know the flights/hotels/trips you booked, whatever you bought online, and they can just access all your accounts everywhere."

What will they think? "If I was to do it again, I would still use gmail" or "Would actually be nicer if I had been using my alumnus email all along"?

> now you've heard of random Canadians and Europeans getting deported or declined entry in the US for random reasons, including one who wrote stuff against Trump

This doesn't happen because people are using gmail. It happens when people post things on social media or get searched at border crossings.

It happens for random, unjustified reasons. Wouldn't you want to protect your data from a country that behaves like that? I sure would.

Not using gmail doesn't solve that. If you cross a border you can have your device searched and denied entry if you don't cooperate. If you post on social media, the data is in plaintext for the world to see.

Are you trying to say that you don't need privacy because what you say publicly is public?

I'm not following.

If you say things publicly you have already chosen not to have privacy with regard to those statements.

Sure. And if you say things privately you have chosen to have privacy. Which is very limited if you say your private things on a US service and don't feel like having the US randomly read them and deport you.

That was my point, I'm happy to see that we agree :-).

You are misinformed as to the circumstances of the above stories you cited, because that isn't what happened in those situations.

I would argue a US mailing address is at least as complicated a structure, but people managed to figure out the state abbreviations and ZIP Codes fine. We just need to teach it in elementary school just like we do addresses.

Speaking of that I do wish the post office had a mail service where they issued addresses to citizens or something.

Yeah, I think digital literacy courses cover things like that, and they should.

But mailing addresses are actually extremely complicated and most people probably don't understand the full scope even of US mailing addresses. The spec is 226 pages.[0]

[0]: https://pe.usps.com/cpim/ftp/pubs/Pub28/pub28.pdf

If you've ever had an address with any complexities beyond what is taught in elementary school (number, street, city, state, zip), you'll probably experience issues with getting others to correctly address your mail. The biggest reason this isn't a problem is because the postal service takes significant effort to deliver misaddressed mail.

whoa, I just imagined a world where USPS, Deutche Post, etc - offer domains, servers, cloud services - as a natural extension of treir previous roles..

Some countries have digital mail services that are actually better than email because they include identify verification features

e.g. https://www.digipost.no/

That used to be the case before the privatization in the 90s. What do you think the Deutsche Telekom is?

That's why you don't sell it as if you were marketing it to techies:

    (*) Choose a personalized email address, like john@smith.com, for $9.99/year.
    ( ) Choose a GMail address, like john.smith@gmail.com, for free.

They could handle the domain registration for the user, whether by being a registrar themselves, or partnering with another registrar behind the scenes. And yes, most people will still pick the free option. But that's ok.

I've had my own domain for a good 20 years now, and while I've encountered some confusion when giving it out, it's never been as bad as you describe, and people get it without my having to go into a technical explanation. And regardless, the reason there is this problem is because easy, seamless personal-domain options don't really exist. If they did, this problem would go away. I don't really consider this to be an obstacle.

> I've had my own domain for a good 20 years now, and while I've encountered some confusion when giving it out, it's never been as bad as you describe

Similar here, though I haven't encountered any confusion at all. I got remarks like "How do you get your name as the email? That's fancy!"

I am the same, self-hosting for many years and while I have the occasional question about it, it's easily corrected. I now have a short .com domain I use because my .fyi one was even more confusing to people, and simply didn't work with some systems I needed to use.

A bigger problem in my opinion is just how heavily people have associated "Google" with "the internet" and "Gmail" with all email in existence. They don't even think about outlook.com or even hotmail anymore. All email is Gmail to many people.

Well, gmail does that already. It's $7/mo.

https://workspace.google.com/solutions/business-email/

That's actually a really good point: businesses typically have addresses of the form employee@company.com.

That makes it very weird to me that someone would ever be confused by an email that is not @gmail.com...

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