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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

#61

Post by tamimio »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #16

The main reasons for me that I stopped using my own domain: - some sites will just silently refuse to accept addresses on unknown domains and signing up becomes impossible - worse, some sites accept it for sign up, but later on refuse to send a password reset - every time you have you write down or say out our your email address to a non-technical person, you are then obligated to host a mini Q&A on domain names and…

This is like saying because their services suck, then I should downgrade my workflow accordingly.. even though I have never came across a service that will deny unknown domain, but if they do, I will just walk away, it gives you an idea what service is that anyway.

For the QA part, deal with it as if it’s a company email, definitely it won’t be at gmail or yahoo.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#62

Post by theshrike79 »

dale_glass wrote: post #59
theshrike79 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Which communication methods leak no metadata?

If two people are communicating, the message always needs to know where it's going and in most cases where it's coming from.

Not encrypting the email subject is an implementation detail really.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#63

Post by kkfx »

Reasons stated taken, now reasons to have a personal domain:

- not being bound to a specific third party :: even if you do not host your mails with your domain you can transfer it to another vendor, without changing addresses, aliases etc so transparently for your correspondent;

- mails and website, a single domain :: easy to reach you since typically mails are meant to communicate not to be secret tools for a selected cohort of friends;

- since the domain is like a postal address, something a Citizen should have to be, well a Netizen need it as well, and it's the basic brick to form own digital life in a connected society, domain, mail, personal website, perhaps homeserver are the tools of the trade like a home, a car, dresses and so on are for the physical world.

When I'll be dead those who eventually snoop my mails (that are certainly already snooped by gazzilion of third party at least in automatic ways for generic data mining, antivirus scan and so on) I'm pretty sure I'll not care... If I'll have heirs they'll be already instructed on what to do as for anything else.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#64

Post by nicolaslem »

EspressoGPT wrote: post #27
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #16

The main reasons for me that I stopped using my own domain: - some sites will just silently refuse to accept addresses on unknown domains and signing up becomes impossible - worse, some sites accept it for sign up, but later on refuse to send a password reset - every time you have you write down or say out our your email address to a non-technical person, you are then obligated to host a mini Q&A on domain names and…

I'm just in the process of migrating from my own domain email to a "normal" mail address because of your last bullet point.

This is very surprising as even my aging non-technical mother uses a custom domain and never complained once that she had her email address refused somewhere.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#65

Post by EspressoGPT »

15457345234 wrote: post #48
EspressoGPT wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a rather geeky perspective. No non-technical person ever cares.

They'll care after they accidentally email their entire company's accounts to some random gmail account after receiving a phishing 'hi, I'm your new accountant at audit_firm_you're_using' email. If you don't use a corporate domain for your company's correspondence your customers have _no way_ to tell who's a legitimate employee of your firm and who's spoofing when they get an email.

Yeah, that's true for companies that have several employees with customer contact. But many individual companies/self-employed workers don't have that.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#66

Post by EspressoGPT »

nicolaslem wrote: post #64
EspressoGPT wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just in the process of migrating from my own domain email to a "normal" mail address because of your last bullet point.

This is very surprising as even my aging non-technical mother uses a custom domain and never complained once that she had her email address refused somewhere.

I recently gave my .io mail to a bank and it was rejected by their system.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#67

Post by ghusto »

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'…

> Also you can add a dead man's switch

This is something I've struggled to find a solution for. Do you have any suggestions? The best I've come up with is a safe with enough information to provide access to my password manager, but obviously this makes me pretty uncomfortable. I could hand it over to a lawyer as part of my will, maybe?

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#68

Post by ghusto »

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

> 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

People mailing me after I'm dead because they don't know I'm dead, probably aren't very close to me. If a marketer decides to send me deep felt confessions he needs to get off his chest, meh.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#69

Post by ncruces »

foresterre wrote: post #50
gmail_temp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citing from Google‘s recent email on account inactivity: ”After a Google Account is deleted, the Gmail address for the deleted account cannot be used again when creating a new Google Account“

For Fastmail, I could not quickly find their policy. However, I do occasionally receive some emails on my fastmail user address which are not my own, which may indicate that Fastmail user addresses become available after unsubscribing. The emails are from Steam, with 2FA login codes; I assume they only send those with prior email verification. With only the email address it is apparently not possible to contact Steam…

I regularly receive emails sent to a person that enjoys using my email to subscribe to spam. I've also received stuff from another that used it for school and even their bank account.

And if you think verification does it, someone used their phone number and my email to register to Uber. I'd receive all their invoices and stuff. I couldn't log in because that needed phone verification. And it took quite a few rounds of Uber tech support to get them to remove my email.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#70

Post by dizhn »

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.

I believe all mainstream TLDs have this feature. In the past it used to be a nonissue when you renewed the domain in the grace period. Nowadays you just pay more but it still works.

Don't do it with a very desirable domain name though. The registrar might decide to grab it for themselves.

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