Comment by decimalenough

15 hours ago

I've had a .name domain forever and I had no idea first.last.name was even a thing, meaning that it was possible to register this without owning last.name.

That said, my domain is simply unusual.name, and everybody in my family has email addresses in the form first@unusual.name. So this is a no-op for me, and I gather www.unusual.name will also continue to work, since I own the 2nd level outright.

I'm sure Verisign would be thrilled to have a bidding war between the legitimate owners of fraser.name and a bunch of third parties they suddenly enabled.

This is silly question, but is your family managing trust in you as lone guy - cousin, father, brother - having potentially access to all their emails?

I feel that I more trust some corpo (Google, etc) that one particular person.

I don't imagine setup where you can effictevely guarantee them full privacy.

  • I don't store their emails, I use forwardemail.net and they have a pretty reasonable privacy policy: https://forwardemail.net/en/privacy

    Some people in my family use it as their main address, others don't, it's entirely their call.

    But yes, ultimately I control the domain and could be nefarious if I wanted to. But there's a certain baseline level of trust as a family, I'm reasonably certain my wife won't poison the milk in the fridge and she's reasonably certain I'm not going to read her emails.

  • > This is silly question, but is your family managing trust in you as lone guy - cousin, father, brother - having potentially access to all their emails?

    I believe this is a very common setup: the "computer wizard" kid of the family manages the computers for the whole family. Not just emails, they have access to the whole computer (and have to fix when it breaks).

  • I manage the email accounts for the others in my household because it's free for them and I'm happy to do it. Plus, they trust me more than they trust a random tech company. Maybe that is not a universal thing among all families or parts of the world.

It was deemphasized pretty early because people didn't understand it.

It made sense to us because our starting point was an email service letting people share lastname.sometld, but we never got close to as many registrants on .name as we had users on the webmail service (we had a couple of million accounts on that when it was sold to one of Marc Cubans companies for a relative pittance in the aftmath of the dot com bubble bursting)