Personal Email Service - Am I being too precious?

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@HobbyCollector - I honestly am undecided. So you think I want to go the non-custom domain route?

@beck I also love my custom domain. Its my surname.TLD Perhaps, its ok for me to carry on using my custom domain. Are you still using HEY and do you intend to move your domain to it… eventually when they support it

@zkarj I share the exact issue. I now have 3 domains which I have purchased over the years. However, the one I am leaning towards is surname.TLD which is also grandfathered into the GSuite Legacy (this is free).

Fortunately, I own:

Therefore, if I were to select this route, I would pick either Outlook or iCloud. Geez, why am so conflicted with something as simple as email :frowning:

My other main concern with using custom domain is the issue of delivery. It appears, email providers especially Outlook and Gmail have a way of not accepting emails from new domains or accepting them as SPAM. Even emails sent from my domain that is hosted with Gsuite Legacy to my banks and other business have been marked as spam or bounced back. Any thoughts on this?

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You don’t “own” these email accounts.

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Apologies, I do not understand. Please explain. When I say own, I mean, these are my accounts that I use and I have control over them. Perhaps, I am missing something.

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I have a custom domain and use g suite as the mail provider. I don’t feel like I have to do much to manage this domain.

I also have gmail, icloud, and hotmail addresses. Since my gmail address is the oldest, I just forward everything to my custom domain and use that primarily.

I don’t think you’re being too precious, I just like having my own domain and feel like it’s more personal.

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15

Sure, because the domain names for these email accounts are owned by Apple and Microsoft they control who has an email account with them.
If MS goes belly up or for what ever reason decides that your email account is no longer valid. You will no longer be able to send or receive email with that address.

While if you own the domain name you can always use it regardless where you host the email.

As long as you keep a local backup of your email you can move it to an other email server without loosing the actual email address.

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No, I left a couple months ago, augmented Mail a bit inspired by their Read Later and Set Aside views, and haven’t missed it at all, which surprises me since it was a fraught decision to leave. Sorta reminds me of the angst I had about leaving Facebook, which evaporated the moment I did.

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I use an iCloud.com email address. To this day, mac.com also still works, so I don’t see Apple shutting it down anytime soon. The same goes for Google and Microsoft.

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I have numerous registered domains, hosted at Dreamhost (just for example), and many of them have email addresses associated with them. Some for my business, some for personal use. Other than the 30 minutes or so it took to set all this up, and maybe a few minutes of maintenance now and then, it’s no work to have these. They are all IMAP accounts configured in Airmail on all my devices.

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It sounds like one of your main considerations is financial. I know none of this is expensive per se, but any money you don’t need to spend is exactly that - money you don’t need to spend. :slight_smile:

So some considerations…

If you have a domain already, and it’s both a useful extension and it’s tied to your name or something significant, I wouldn’t let the registration expire.

It’s also much better, professionally speaking, to have your own domain - but Gmail is a very close second. To me that makes the issue mostly about email address cost and hassle.

Other than the fact that I generally don’t prefer email forwarders, you could buy your domain at Hover and get a forwarder to your Gmail for $5 extra per year. Trivial extra cost, no extra hassle. Or a “small” mailbox (10 GB) for $20 a year. Cheaper than Fastmail, and a good option if your email needs aren’t extreme.

If you find more domains you want, you can grab as many as you want and forward ($5/year per address) to your “main” address. And you could even filter them into different inboxes if you wanted to get fancy. :slight_smile:

Personally, if I were you, I’d probably do the domain + “small” mailbox at Hover, and call it good.

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@quorm, I’m surprised that you setup the new email accounts across all your devices. Or does Airmail have a way to sync your devices? I’m just thinking for myself and if I were to get a new domain, then I would need to setup email on 4 different devices and that is just a little too much work for me. lol.

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@webwalrus when you reply from a forwarded email address, does the from address show your gmail or the domain email?

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It shows Gmail. You can set Gmail up for SMTP sending, but that (practically speaking) requires an email checked via POP3 rather than a forward. You can send/receive (I believe) up to 5 accounts via POP3 with Gmail, which is actually a viable solution to your “4 different devices” problem. :slight_smile:

Although I did know one relatively average non-technical lady who insisted that she absolutely needed all 8 of her email addresses…Gmail wouldn’t work for her.

Regarding sending though, I’ve found that at reply time, it doesn’t seem to matter as much to people what the original email address was they sent to - lots of businesses have Gmail forwards. The only time I give a side-eye is if it’s from an @aol.com address. :slight_smile:

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As others have said it seems like you’ve already decided but FWIW here’s my take on the issue.

I do have 2 gmail accounts, and I occasionally use them but my preference is always for custom domains. I have a lot of them registered and many are just parked. Th biggest advantage of custom domains for me is that I can easily set up as many different email addresses as I want in the domain and use that to filter mail appropriately. So I have addresses for financial dealings, personal e-mail, business email and more. I have mail rules to handle those effectively but I can always see everything I get. I can and have moved my email hosting from place to place easily.

Irrelevant. I’ve had my emails from my .gmail account bounced back as spam from even OTHER .gmail addresses! it’s not necessarily the domain name that causes that but often overzealous filtering by the recipient’s server or mail rules.

I’ve had hundreds of good messages from unknown domains sent to my .gmail accounts that are identified as spam by the gmail spam blockers and hidden from me. So many that I don’t trust it at all to actually get all my mail to me. And this is AFTER I’ve tried to remove spam filtering at all on my .gmail accounts.

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24

The risk with Gmail is not about Gmail shutting down, it’s also Google shutting you out.

Several years ago I went to login to my gmail account and couldn’t. I knew I had my correct password in 1Password, but it wasn’t working for some reason.

I finally got to some page (I don’t remember what specifically) that said “Your account has been suspended.”

Looking up what I could do under those circumstances, the answer was “If your account has been suspended, the decision is final. There is no appeal process. We are not obligated to tell you why your account has been suspended.”

I knew that I had not done anything that warranted having my account suspended (I was barely using it except for some mailing lists, etc).

It took a week, but I finally got my account re-enabled by jumping through 4,732 different hoops and responding to emails from nameless/faceless Google employees who seemed loathe to help.

No clue was ever given as to why my account was suspended. It was suggested that the process was somehow automated, so it wasn’t even a person who decided to suspend my account, it was some kind of Google bot.

If you aren’t a paying customer, if there is no customer relationship and no one to contact if something goes wrong, you are risking losing access to your email account. Not just with Gmail, but with any of these free providers.

Now, think about what goes to your email. Think about trying to access your accounts and services without being able to access your old email accounts. Think about how many of them won’t let you recover a password if you don’t have access to the email account on file. Can you change your email address on all of your services if you don’t access to the old email address?

Now, imagine this…

Pick a domain. Pick an email address “you@somewhatever.whatever”. Use that email address for everything. You don’t even need to manage anything, you can even just forward it to a Gmail account if you want.

Then one day you realized that Google has shut off your Gmail account.

That same day, you can either setup a new Gmail account or use a different provider and start forwarding “you@somewhatever.whatever” to the new provider. If you don’t have backups of your old email, you might lose access to those messages, but you’re never locked out of any of your accounts because those accounts are connected to “you@somewhatever.whatever” not “someone@gmail”

“Well, I’ve never heard of that happening to anyone else…”

Sure, I’m guessing 99% of Gmail users will never have to deal with that scenario I described, but when you find yourself in that 1%, it’s little comfort to know few other people end up there.

I still have an use a Gmail account,I have daily backups of it, and I don’t use it for anything crucial. It’s my generic choice for “This site requires an email address” especially if I don’t care about that site. But for accounts that I care about, especially things like PayPal, banks, etc., I would never use an email address where I did not own the domain.

FWIW.

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Yup. Gmail’s servers semi-regularly get blacklisted, and Google uses those blacklists, so… :slight_smile:

It’s a problem for every provider. The only way around that is to get, quite literally, your own IP address for sending email - and that has its own whole set of problems that aren’t worth going into here.

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Kind of like having a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. You’ll (hopefully!) never need it. But if you do need it, it doesn’t help to be staring at a blazing stove and self-reflectively note, “well this is highly improbable.”

:slight_smile:

Out of curiosity, what do you use for those backups?

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This is not all at once – accounts come and go over a long period of time.

Yes, typing “myaddress@myaccount.com” as the user name, then “mail.dreamhost.com” as the SMTP and IMAP servers, and finally the password is, I agree very very tiring and stressful. I usually require a week or two recovery in quiet rooms without electronic intrusion after setting up each device. :laughing:

Or, use Airmail’s “sync settings” feature.

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I bounced around between several email addresses about 20 years ago, and dutifully asked my friends and business associates to change their email for me each time. Like @zkarj, I was looking for the perfect email address.

In 2007, I started a Google Apps account, and created the wagmail.com domain. It was a terrible domain. When I gave people my email address, I had to spell it out and they STILL sometimes got it wrong, because “M” sounds like “N.”

In 2010, during one of my several periods freelancing, I connected that Google Apps account with mitch@mitchwagner.com, which is nice and professional.

And that’s the email address I’m still using today. And I’m still using Google Apps, though it’s now called G Suite. It has been very little hassle over the past 10 years.

These days, I don’t think it’s unprofessional to have a gmail.com account, or an account with some other consumer provider. At least not in my line of work.

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Horcrux IMAP email backup for Mac OS X.

Saves messages to individual .eml files.

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It occurs to me one could simply install Thunderbird and set it up with the Gmail credentials. It would need opening periodically (or left open in the background all the time). Then you’d have standard mailbox files which could be backed up through whatever means.

I’ve long used Thunderbird as a go-between when migrating email from one place to another.