I’m pretty far into the degoogling process, and I’m thinking about purchasing a domain and using it for email. I realized I don’t want to be stuck with any one email service, so this is pretty much a necessity for me.

I wouldn’t self host though, because I understand that’s very hard to do.

For people who have already done this: are there any pitfalls or things I should take into consideration before I purchase a domain?

Also, does the tld matter? Are my emails more likely to be sent to spam with a custom domain vs an email provider’s?

  • ____@infosec.pub
    3·
    4 months ago

    I’m not sure I fully agree with your suggestion of CloudFlare, though your point is well-taken - ten year renewals with nine to fix billing issues is a best practice. Last thing I want is to lose my primary email because I missed a billing email after replacing a card six months ago.

    Catch-alls are definitely a win, especially for people who sometimes forget to write down every single ephermeral email address they’ve ever used to sign up for anything with… I like subdomains for email, but only when planned/executed in an intentional way. Has the potential to get out of hand quickly.

    I’ve elsewhere mentioned my preferred provider, but it seems to be fairly common that most email providers also offer DNS as part of the package, which makes the whole process much simpler.

    • jetAEnglish
      3·
      4 months ago

      One bonus to using subdomains for different email categorization, is it makes alerting much easier.

      Important.domain.com, could always make a audio alarm, or get flagged in your inbox. And that could be for domain renewals, insurance, that sort of stuff

      Fluff.domain.com could be used for things that don’t really matter just nice to have, Netflix, GeForce now etc

      • ____@infosec.pub
        3·
        4 months ago

        I like that a great deal, and now I wish I had set things up that way from the start - anything to ‘family.domain.com’ should always audio alert, 100% of the time, regardless of hour of day or silent mode.

        The idea of going back and updating 20+ years of accounts and communications and other folks’ address books feels insurmountable, but that’s neither here nor there. No real reason I couldn’t start fresh with a nice, short, simple domain and subdomains for the purpose.