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Comment by dotancohen

3 months ago

  > Yes this is the time to buy a domain and own an address for the rest of your life

As someone who does use their own domain to receive mail, I am acutely aware of how diligent I must be to never lose that domain. The chances of someone acquiring access to my Gmail account are far lower than me losing the dotancohen.com domain, especially with the cyber attacks against Israeli assets that have been ongoing incessantly since 2023. One's email is often the gateway to every other online service, via reset password features - losing access is problematic and an attacker getting access is nigh unrecoverable.

Anything can be taken from you at any time. Google can also just delete your account for no obvious reason. I guess that a domain can also be taken away but maybe not that easy. At least you can switch mail providers easily without having to change all your accounts that are based on your mail address.

  • Google can just block your account for no obvious reason and ask for KYC, which could easily leave you without access to your email for a week.

    Hope that's not your case, but seeing how irresponsible Google is in its actions, I couldn't tolerate such risks.

  • Yes, but the likelihood of them giving your email address to another person is low. Not so if somebody gets my domain out from under me.

I use a .nl domain for my country, luckily it is governed by a trustworthy party and there are strict rules and convenient systems to move domainnames between providers. Agreed that some tlds may indeed be less ideal in that respect.