@webwalrus when you reply from a forwarded email address, does the from address show your gmail or the domain email?
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 â4 different devicesâ problem. 
Although I did know one relatively average non-technical lady who insisted that she absolutely needed all 8 of her email addressesâŚGmail wouldnât work for her.
Regarding sending though, Iâve found that at reply time, it doesnât 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 itâs from an @aol.com address.
As others have said it seems like youâve already decided but FWIW hereâs 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. Iâve had my emails from my .gmail account bounced back as spam from even OTHER .gmail addresses! itâs not necessarily the domain name that causes that but often overzealous filtering by the recipientâs server or mail rules.
Iâve 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 donât trust it at all to actually get all my mail to me. And this is AFTER Iâve tried to remove spam filtering at all on my .gmail accounts.
1 Like
The risk with Gmail is not about Gmail shutting down, itâs also Google shutting you out.
Several years ago I went to login to my gmail account and couldnât. I knew I had my correct password in 1Password, but it wasnât working for some reason.
I finally got to some page (I donât remember what specifically) that said âYour account has been suspended.â
Looking up what I could do under those circumstances, the answer was âIf 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.â
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 wasnât even a person who decided to suspend my account, it was some kind of Google bot.
If you arenât 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 wonât let you recover a password if you donât have access to the email account on file. Can you change your email address on all of your services if you donât access to the old email address?
Now, imagine thisâŚ
Pick a domain. Pick an email address âyou@somewhatever.whateverâ. Use that email address for everything. You donât 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 âyou@somewhatever.whateverâ to the new provider. If you donât have backups of your old email, you might lose access to those messages, but youâre never locked out of any of your accounts because those accounts are connected to âyou@somewhatever.whateverâ not âsomeone@gmailâ
âWell, Iâve never heard of that happening to anyone elseâŚâ
Sure, Iâm guessing 99% of Gmail users will never have to deal with that scenario I described, but when you find yourself in that 1%, itâs 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 donât use it for anything crucial. Itâs my generic choice for âThis site requires an email addressâ especially if I donât 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.
7 Likes
Yup. Gmailâs servers semi-regularly get blacklisted, and Google uses those blacklists, so⌠
Itâs 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 arenât worth going into here.
Kind of like having a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. Youâll (hopefully!) never need it. But if you do need it, it doesnât help to be staring at a blazing stove and self-reflectively note, âwell this is highly improbable.â
Out of curiosity, what do you use for those backups?
4 Likes
This is not all at once â accounts come and go over a long period of time.
Yes, typing âmyaddress@myaccount.comâ as the user name, then âmail.dreamhost.comâ 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. 
Or, use Airmailâs âsync settingsâ feature.
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 âMâ sounds like âN.â
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 thatâs the email address Iâm still using today. And Iâm still using Google Apps, though itâs now called G Suite. It has been very little hassle over the past 10 years.
These days, I donât think itâs unprofessional to have a gmail.com account, or an account with some other consumer provider. At least not in my line of work.
1 Like
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 youâd have standard mailbox files which could be backed up through whatever means.
Iâve long used Thunderbird as a go-between when migrating email from one place to another.
Another option is to Right Click on your Archive folder in mail.app and select Export Mailbox. This creates a standard Mbox file that can be imported back into mail.app, Thunderbird, and other email clients. Even EagleFiler will import it and automatically create a searchable email archive.
Apple Mail puts the Mbox file in a folder named, in this case, Archive.mbox along with a table_of_contents file. Only the actual mbox file is needed by other apps.
1 Like
A better solution is to quit using your email as a filing system. Better to save the emails as a pdf into whatever filing system you use. In many years of doing this I have never needed an email in the original form.
5 Likes
Email is intended as a filing system. Thatâs why it has folders. It also (through IMAP and similar) has the ability to sync across multiple devices.
Converting to PDF just changes the presentation layer and de-formalises the information within it as all just âcontentâ versus the native email header fields that infer structure in an email client.
Do whatever works for you, but giving up on the very nature of email seems like it creates as many problems as it solves.
3 Likes
Iâve seen too many people lose valuable work when an email store got corrupted. In some cases they were able to get it back but it took some time. They were often dealing with large attachments and the databases got too big.
I use folders all the time but just for work in progress. I have rules to sort my incoming mail into subject oriented folders. Just bought a new house last fall and all the email in the process went into a folder for it. When all,the dust had settled and we were somewhat moved in, I filed all the âneed to keepâ emails into my filing system and deleted the mailbox. All this is synced via iCloud so itâs accessible from my Mac, iPad, or iPhone.
Ever tried to restore emails from a backup? I can restore my PDFs easily. Depending on the email system used it can be a monumental task.
1 Like
Fair points, and email attachments are a weakness. Thatâs why a lot of businesses try to push the likes of SharePoint â put the content somewhere central and put a link in the email. But that has its issues, too.
I own my domain (firstnamelastname.com) for ages. So, I am in control if I move from to another provider/service.
- I have the same email address forever.
- I can add aliases and accounts
Right now, I am running my own email server, but I can easily move to any service if I ever want to change it.
5 Likes
Point with that is that you have to backup the MBOX files, as if that corrupts, you could lose the entire file. Obviously, Time Machine will help out there. I use Postbox and that saves the files - I archive to a folder on the server and then after three years, copy it to my local folder. Once itâs on my local folder, it also get copied to my NAS in a backup folder. So Iâll have a âliveâ copy in the Postbox folder, a backup via Time Machine and a backup on the NAS.
One thing I quickly learned about this is Hover has a secret junk mail folder that they donât give you access too on the $5 forward option. I was signing up for another discourse forum, but hover wouldnât forward the confirmation email as it was detected to be spam, and I only learned of this by contacting them. Iâve been using Hoverâs small mailbox for my business and itâs ok. I wish it had a few more simple features (like aliases).
For me, I donât like Gmailâs special IMAP handling. I donât like using webmail, and it never feels quite native using other clients. Itâs not so much privacy that I want to leave Gmail, more so for control of the transaction. The lesser apart of the big machine the better, I feel.
While I have a vanity domain (firstnamelastname.com) for my business, I also want one for my family, so my kids donât get every free email address like I have. But unfortunately, most of the easy TLDs with just my last name are taken. I could do lastnamefamily.com but Iâm undecided on that at the moment.
Yes, you have to have gotten in early for most names. When I decided to get one nearly 20 years ago âalmy.comâ was taken, and legitimately by a company. I settled on âalmy.usâ thinking âusâ was good for family membersâ emails. Makes a decent website name as well. Wasnât long before another person grabbed â.orgâ and those were the only three available TLDs at the time. Helps to have a fairly rare last name. Some people try to get firstnameLastname.com for their newborn children, thinking of the future!
Anyway, with a four letter last name and a two letter TLD, it makes for having really short email addresses!
3 Likes
True, but why would it corrupt? (And why wouldnât you back it up as with any other content?)
Itâs probably useful to bring up here the difference between backup and archive. If I was of the view that I needed to protect my email this way, I would create an mbox of one (completed) calendar month and store it locally and offline somewhere (probably Backblaze B2) and never write to that file again. I have backups of my photos on Time Machine and Backblaze. I have archives of my photos on B2. If I accidentally delete the last three months photos from 2010 (true story) then my Time Machine and Backblaze backups will soon enough expunge them, too. But my B2 archive will have them.