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Reasons to not use your own domain for email

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Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#51

Post by bad_user »

Fastmail supports "masked email", a feature for generating random email addresses. This has 1Password integration and can be set-up on your own domain:

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406536368911-Ma...

Even before this, Fastmail supported subdomain aliasing. Which you could have on any email host that has customizable forwarding. Including Google Suite (although with GS sending emails from such "aliases" will fail DKIM, not ideal):

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591053-Plu...

The effect is that you're not going to reuse the same email address. Granted, this may not help with anonymity when the address is reviewed by a human. But anonymity is getting harder anyway, e.g., Gmail requires activation via a phone call, so you have to trust Google to not share your profile.

Once upon a time, Twitter was not releasing back unused usernames. But now they've announced that they are. Also, Yahoo. Gmail is well behaved, but it's incredibly frustrating to create a new Gmail username. Sooner or later Google will at least think about reusing usernames, and you won't have any control over it.

On domains, I register my personal domain names for 10 years in advance. If I'd die now, my family would have about 9 years to take control, if it helps them in any way; and if not, then why would I care?

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#52

Post by _xivi »

> most websites using it as a way to reset your password

> Privacy... I am starting to use iCloud's Hide My Email to change my email address on accounts I have created

> domain name can be the weakest link to accessing your online accounts

Much of your stress points seem actually about using email for user accounts. I think the problem is more that we've abused emails, using them as a form of identification, partly thanks to data collection. This system has many flaws anyway, which is why moving forward, we'll (I hope) adapt other more suited systems for authentication.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#54

Post by alias_neo »

dazc wrote: post #32
alias_neo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Google Mail sure, but using Google's domain sure as heck does. I cringe every time I see a business card printed with a gmail.com or similar, or on the side of someone's van. If you can go through the effort of registering a business and having a professional looking logo plastered all over your vans, business card etc, you can almost certainly register a domain for your email.

Purely anecdotal from the UK, but it seems like the more professional the email address and website the more likely it is you're not dealing with a real trades person. Genuine tradespeople are often always fully booked months in advance and they don't want to be dealing with random emails all of the time, most of which will be time wasters. For regular businesses though, I agree, it looks bad.

I'm in the UK, and that's where I tend to see it most, on trade-person vans.

If they've gone through the effort to get some nice logo design vinyl on their van, why not get a matching email domain for their "company"?

For me, seeing a Gmail etc on the side of an otherwise nicely decorated van shows a lack of attention to detail, and that's not what I want in a trade-person, who typically I only hire for the tasks beyond my capability/skill level.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#55

Post by alias_neo »

mrweasel wrote: post #49
alias_neo wrote: post #9

One of my mail domain's can only be registered for a year at a time, which really bothers me, I feel like it leaves the risk of losing it higher than others which I can register for longer. I don't know if there's a way around it, but for the record, it's a .es domain, and I am not Spanish, nor do I live in Spain.

The Danish .dk domains have a nice feature, if you don't pay then they aren't freed right away, they are "quarantined" for a few months. In this period you're the only one who can renew it.

That's a useful feature; It's not impossible to be a little behind with renewal, particularly when it has to be done so often, a bit of a grace period for something so important should be a requirement.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#56

Post by sshine »

sschueller wrote: post #2

I strongly disagree. - Google has on multiple occasions terminated accounts for no reason with no recourse. You loose access you can't do anything. If you have your own domain you can at least set it up somewhere else. How many website would you need to update with your new email and how would you get thay extra factor mail? - If I die I don't care if someone else reads my mail, I'm dead. Also you can add a dead man'…

The day I worried "What if Google just shuts down my email account with no recourse?" is the day I started migrating my authentication to my own domain email address. Choosing a registrar with proper security in place, this is probably the safest while you are alive.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#57

Post by tamimio »

> if I were unable to renew my domain (e.g., in case of death),

While I agree about the “losing control” issue, however, when you own a domain you actually own it, not renting it, not lease it, It is yours, and unless you do something clearly illegal no one can just take it, an email in another provider however, they can delete your email with all its content anytime, and most of the times you can’t do anything about it because it’s written in a TOS that was revised a few months ago.

> Another concern is privacy. Using a unique domain name for email stands out,

True, but you can use a masked email with your own domain too, several services provide that, masked email -> your domain email, so you can have iCloud masked email sent to your domain one.

Having your own domain as an email provides a lot of advantages, The top one is you are provider agnostic, if you don’t like X provider, just change your MX, SPF, etc. DNS and you are good to go in a few minutes, now imagine if that would be something@gmail and you wanted to change to another@gmail, You have to go to all the services you are using and signed up for (assuming you have a list of them say in a password vault), change each, verify each, and then update your password vault so the new email is used, good luck with a whole week work.

Another big advantage of using your own domain is the concept of separation of concerns, If that site is breached, not only you will know faster than the site admin, but that email is only valid for that account, and useless elsewhere. Additionally, anyone who is using OSINT against you, will not be able to pull out all the services you are using/used with that email, that also works if you have masked emails.

Just keep in mind, if you use your own domain try as much as possible to have a .com one, I noticed some providers (MS Exchange/Outlook) mark some domains that are not .com as spam.

Lastly, emails are NOT secure, the protocol was not designed with security in mind, no matter if the provider is promising top notch security, it is not, the only time it is secure if PGP is used by both parties.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#58

Post by tamimio »

luguenth wrote: post #14
sschueller wrote: post #2

I strongly disagree. - Google has on multiple occasions terminated accounts for no reason with no recourse. You loose access you can't do anything. If you have your own domain you can at least set it up somewhere else. How many website would you need to update with your new email and how would you get thay extra factor mail? - If I die I don't care if someone else reads my mail, I'm dead. Also you can add a dead man'…

About not being worried, that someone could read your mail in the case you're dead: Always bear in mind you're not writing mails to yourself. The other party writing mails with you, might not be that happy with third parties reading their mails. Privacy is not only about you

You can always have your password in a password manager with emergency access, if you (not you god forbidden) die, someone close can access all these domains/emails.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#59

Post by dale_glass »

theshrike79 wrote: post #17
luguenth wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About not being worried, that someone could read your mail in the case you're dead: Always bear in mind you're not writing mails to yourself. The other party writing mails with you, might not be that happy with third parties reading their mails. Privacy is not only about you

I'm still sad because PGP/GPG couldn't make the UX work for signing and encrypting emails 20 years ago. It's still a huge pain to do, even if you're a hobbyist like me. Encryption/decryption should've been a standard thing everyone does transparently when sending emails with one recipient. Multi-recipient mails should always be signed, automatically. Maybe some day.

IMO, GPG for email was mostly a mistake, because email can't be secured enough.

GPG leaves all the headers exposed, and reveals who's talking to whom. That, right there, is a huge security problem. Turns out metadata is often plenty. And it can't even encrypt the subject, which is a footgun of enormous proportions.

Picture a high stakes situation like say, a resistance member in the Russian occupied parts of Ukraine. Yeah, the Russians can't see what you're emailing about, but they can see that 3 people of a given village are sending encrypted messages to each other, and then there's some outside contacts. Gee, what might they be talking about? What conclusions should we make if somebody else also sends mail to this outside contact.

Yeah, the encryption might be strong, but it won't do much to protect those people against the $5 wrench.

GPG for email only works in extremely narrow scenarios, and that makes it a bad tool.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#60

Post by tamimio »

mrweasel wrote: post #47
EspressoGPT wrote: post #30

I agree. Using a custom email sounds cool first, but sucks in real life when you have to give someone your mail address and they don't understand how to write it, what it means, how it works, and when it is rejected by the system they're typing it into. That's the reason I'm migrating back to a normal mail address.

The older I get the more I kinda regret getting a custom domain for my email. I do like that I can take my email with me if I want to change service provider, or I can do the hosting myself, if I really wanted to. It's nice to be in control, but sometimes, sometimes it would be nice to just have a stupid generic email account and not having to bother with hosting companies. There is a certain silly charm of being pre…

> but sometimes, sometimes it would be nice to just have a stupid generic email account

Ok.. then have one then, you can have both you know, one generic and other with custom domain at the same time, use the generic one in the services as if you never owned a domain, and the other as if you don’t have generic, I don’t see the issue here.

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