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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

#141

Post by piaste »

utrack wrote: post #134
piaste wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's little need to nationalize, since emails don't have a last-mile or natural monopoly issue. I think, however, that modern countries should provide all citizens with an official, public, mail address. Restrict them to only send/receive emails to/from a whitelist of publicly registered service providers with very strict personal data governance requirements (government, banks, utilities, medical services, higher…

Good idea which will work for most people, however it'll be an issue for dissidents or people moving countries. Those can use some other provider, while everyone else (99%?) can be covered by this solution. I guess there should be a provision against gov services making it mandatory for people to use the gov provided email.

A government that would punish dissidents by locking them out of bank accounts etc. can already do so by extrajudicially freezing their bank accounts in the first place (looking at you, Canada).

In my view those email address should be strictly national and reserved for national-level services, so whenever you move to another country you should get a new email address at the same time as you get a tax ID number.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#142

Post by celeritascelery »

HeckFeck wrote: post #114
Gareth321 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve read so many accounts of users and whole companies being permanently shut out of their Google accounts that I couldn’t justify the risk any longer. Google genuinely does not care. The number of critical services which rely on our email address is really difficult to grasp until one goes through the exercise of converting to their own domain. Banks. Trading platforms. Phones and computers. Windows. Game consoles.…

For corporate use, only choose an email provider that has real people at a manned help desk. Google's abysmally opaque support is much too risky for serious business operations. It is a right blighter if you lose your personal YouTube account with all its carefully curated meme playlists, but at least you aren't missing out on vital business communications.

I used to use YouTube Red and had a playlist of BGM that i would work to on YouTube. Then one day about 20% of the video’s disappeared due to DMCA takedowns. That was the day canceled my subscription and switched to getting everything I care about with yt-dlp.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#143

Post by bad_user »

jsjohnst wrote: post #131
bad_user wrote: post #51

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…

> Including Google Suite (although with GS sending emails from such "aliases" will fail DKIM, not ideal) Not if you properly configure DKIM records for it… https://support.google.com/a/answer/177063

I'm referring to a limitation I bumped into…

Let's say that I'm setting up a subdomain, like masked.mydomain.com, and then set a wildcard forwarding rule such that I get all email for *@masked.mydomain.com. Let's say that I subscribe to some service with a username like: blue.velvet9573@masked.mydomain.com

Receiving email on that subdomain is perfectly OK, the problem happens when you want to reply / send with such email addresses in “From”.

For it to work, “blue.velvet9573” should be an alias defined in the Google Workplace admin. Otherwise, even though Gmail is perfectly happy to accept any aliases, the issue is that emails won't get DKIM-signed unless that alias is an alias defined in Google Workplace. And you can only have 30 aliases per user.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#144

Post by HeckFeck »

celeritascelery wrote: post #142
HeckFeck wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For corporate use, only choose an email provider that has real people at a manned help desk. Google's abysmally opaque support is much too risky for serious business operations. It is a right blighter if you lose your personal YouTube account with all its carefully curated meme playlists, but at least you aren't missing out on vital business communications.

I used to use YouTube Red and had a playlist of BGM that i would work to on YouTube. Then one day about 20% of the video’s disappeared due to DMCA takedowns. That was the day canceled my subscription and switched to getting everything I care about with yt-dlp.

That's hateful when that happens. I'd do the same but I'd always forget, we need an automated way to sync and download all your channel's playlists.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#145

Post by c-linkage »

bbor wrote: post #116
tjpnz wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As evidenced here the impact of account terminations can have a profound impact on a persons life. Email providers like Google should be treated as utilities and regulated as such, they should be legally obligated to communicate with their users, ideally working towards a resolution. Until then you really should be treating said accounts in the same way you would a hotel rental phone.

Would you be open to the nationalization of email services? Curious if your very HN-friendly sentiment also implies agreement with this very HN-unfriendly extension.

Given: 1) How critical email is; and 2) Existing mandate of government postal services to guarantee delivery of physical mail to all citizens; that

Government postal services should run a national email service free to all citizens.

In the USA, email would be minimally covered by the same protective laws as physical mail (I don't know if the same protections are available in other countries).

IMAP and POP or a more appropriate mailbox protocol should be supported to allow retrieval of email, and online email size would be relatively small (say 100MB) but you could pay for larger storage like you would a post office box.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#146

Post by anon373839 »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #107

The best reason against it is the fact many website, because of stupid policies or incompetent engineers, will reject the address as invalid. Happens to me regularly and makes my life difficult. I still like better than the alternative though. I got locked out of google accounts twice in my life and had one other email provider close entirely.

Really? There are millions of @companyname.com and @randomschool.edu domains. They can’t all have been whitelisted.

Where are you running into this issue?

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#147

Post by newscracker »

I somewhat agree with this. I do believe that a larger provider is less likely to lose their domains than an individual is (there are always exceptions).

Domains expiring is one reason why I always have my domains paid for 10 years in the future and renew every year to extend it by a year. I’d like to see service providers who work on a prepaid credit model (not a monthly or annual charge model, where the cards or payment methods may have been closed or canceled) and renew the domain automatically every year as long as there’s a balance in the account.

Last I checked, even Cloudflare doesn’t allow prepaid credit balances to be used for domain renewals and insists on charging the payment method on file. And it’s not even the case that people haven’t asked for it. Cloudflare’s billing policies are weird. This is one of the reasons why I’ve avoided transferring domains to it.

I wish ICANN would allow paying for domains (at least the most common TLDs) for a longer period though. If my domains aren’t renewed in 10 years after I’m gone and someone is dependent on those, there’s nothing much that can be done.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#148

Post by _cenw »

camtarn wrote: post #121
Borg3 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The constant parade on HN of Google Cloud Platform paid users who got their accounts shut down for no reason and with no recourse would suggest otherwise.

To be fair, usually those people are on credit card billing and at a usage level where they really shouldn't be.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#149

Post by [deleted] »

sshine wrote: post #56
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.

[deleted]

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#150

Post by lolc »

alias_neo wrote: post #54
dazc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bey…

I get the feeling, but unless their business is something web-related, their attention to detail is better spent elsewhere.
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