Comment by Toutouxc
3 years ago
First of all, bring your own domain. That way you can just point the same address elsewhere if you need to switch again without having to deal with forwarding.
edit: As mentioned by a sibling comment, my email is currently on Fastmail, zero problems.
HN thread discussing Fastmail experiences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31989061
Fastmail user here with custom .org domain. Works great; Fastmail app and web. Very satisfied.
I don't need a custom domain anymore and I find it trivial to change email addresses. I can use 1password to locate accounts, easily migrate, apply a tag, and work through the change over a few hours. I typically change email every 2-3 years and it serves as a good way to review security settings/change passwords. Modern email providers have mailbox porting tools, and they work fine. I use to like having a domain, but dunno, for a privacy nut, seems more secure to not use one.
I don't think the hard thing is switching emails. The difficult thing is telling everyone about the fact that you switched.
> I use to like having a domain, but dunno, for a privacy nut, seems more secure to not use one.
Care to explain which are those concerns about privacy that you may find when owning a custom email address? Thanks in advance.
I was being a bit pedantic but ... a domain registrar could be an attack vector, its not as anonymous as something like proton/tutanota, not beholden to ICANN, if you use an alias related to your domain it could be tied to you. If I give up the domain in the future, it could be used against me in a social engineering way.
Sounds reasonable. Any gotchas there? I already read that vanity TLDs are bad, obscure countries' TLDs are bad, and even .eu may be unstable. Which are good services that can sell me an .org or .de domain for a fair price?
Speaking from personal experience, if you have to spell your domain for people, you will regret it!
Also - have separate email stacks for communications and operations. Like it or not, your email is a low-friction way to get access to many of your other accounts, and maybe even a good way to LOSE access to some of your accounts. Your operational email domain should never be published, only used to register accounts and maybe do alerting, etc. You would whitelist senders. You would never use it to say anything, or associate with anyone, that someone might one day find offensive or controversial.
I have heard people say "vanity TLDs are bad" but never experienced it myself.
I have email addresses at .co.uk, .digital and .social never had deliverability issues with sending or receiving.
When I worked at a large (100m emails/wk) email service provider the key thing was sending IP reputation followed by things like DKIM and SPF DNS records on the sending domain.
IP reputation would be an issue if you self hosted your email, but using a reputable provider such as tutanota and fastmail should pose no issue.
It's a single data point but a friend of mine had an outage with ".online" in switzerland.
We resolved it by pointing clients to use google dns.
Never had similar problems with .com
> and even .eu may be unstable
Do you mean you can lose your domain if your country leaves the EU, or are you talking about other issues?
Yes, that's what I had in mind, I may be wrong though. Did any Brits have issues with eu domains after Brexit?
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I wouldn't go for the cheapest price, I'd go to some established place in your jurisdiction with a wider product range and size, that targets small businesses. You have a chance to get some useful hotline, and things can be 'integrated' and are more likely to work, i.e. host your website - book the domain example.com - book a managed nextcloud and have it be at cloud.example.com etc.
Their email service is likely to have some credibility from the global anti-spam force. They probably have the budget for best practices and reasonable security. As you mention .de domains: The online legal text generators for Impressum/Datenschutzerklärung are likely to have the correct text fragments to use for larger vendors. Overall they just have to uphold some level of reputation I hope.
Example: ionos.de
Obscure country TLDs are fine. I've been using https://doubly.so for a decade and never had trouble with emails.
inwx + mailbox.org
The only hesitation I have with switching now is Fastmail being based in Australia.
Why? They aren't offering an end-to-end encrypted service, so as far as I know Australia's laws aren't much worse than, say, the US' laws in this regard.