I’m pretty far into the degoogling process, and I’m thinking about purchasing a domain and using it for email. I realized I don’t want to be stuck with any one email service, so this is pretty much a necessity for me.

I wouldn’t self host though, because I understand that’s very hard to do.

For people who have already done this: are there any pitfalls or things I should take into consideration before I purchase a domain?

Also, does the tld matter? Are my emails more likely to be sent to spam with a custom domain vs an email provider’s?

    • ____ ( ____@infosec.pub ) 
      2·
      2 years ago

      I’m not sure I fully agree with your suggestion of CloudFlare, though your point is well-taken - ten year renewals with nine to fix billing issues is a best practice. Last thing I want is to lose my primary email because I missed a billing email after replacing a card six months ago.

      Catch-alls are definitely a win, especially for people who sometimes forget to write down every single ephermeral email address they’ve ever used to sign up for anything with… I like subdomains for email, but only when planned/executed in an intentional way. Has the potential to get out of hand quickly.

      I’ve elsewhere mentioned my preferred provider, but it seems to be fairly common that most email providers also offer DNS as part of the package, which makes the whole process much simpler.

        • ____ ( ____@infosec.pub ) 
          2·
          2 years ago

          I like that a great deal, and now I wish I had set things up that way from the start - anything to ‘family.domain.com’ should always audio alert, 100% of the time, regardless of hour of day or silent mode.

          The idea of going back and updating 20+ years of accounts and communications and other folks’ address books feels insurmountable, but that’s neither here nor there. No real reason I couldn’t start fresh with a nice, short, simple domain and subdomains for the purpose.

  • MajorHavoc ( MajorHavoc@programming.dev ) 
    9·
    2 years ago

    pitfalls or things I should take into consideration before I purchase a domain?

    Make sure your chosen email provider supports DMARC. Since I’m sure someone is wondering, yes, Proton mail does.

    Are my emails more likely to be sent to spam with a custom domain vs an email provider’s?

    Absolutely, but only if you choose not to setup DMARC and DKIM

    Every mail provider, that I have encountered, that supports custom domain names, provides a detailed step by step guide for which DNS records to add. Follow the guide, don’t skip any steps, and make sure to finish.

  • mub ( mub@lemmy.ml ) 
    5·
    2 years ago

    I did this years ago. I had read a bunch of scare stories about Google cutting people off from their Gmail accounts and having no path to appeal.

    I setup a domain name that is just my full name .com and used a mail service like proton or titan mail. I setup a few accounts (shopping@, work@, games@, myname@, me@) and gave them aliases, for example Shopping has paypal@ and Amazon@.

    It is extremely unlikely anyone will want my domain name, so if my mail provider closes down or kicks me out I can just find another and repoint my DNS records to the new one.

    I recently had issues with my DNS registrar primary servers going down, and titan mail was costing more than I liked when the renewal came up, so I’ve now moved to porkbun and mxroute and I’m very happy.

  • DarkSirrush ( DarkSirrush@lemmy.ca ) 
    3·
    2 years ago

    I have started using PurelyMail, and own my domain through cloudflare. If I ever have problems with PurelyMail I would just need to adjust some settings in cloudflare to move to a different provider.

  • ____ ( ____@infosec.pub ) 
    2·
    2 years ago

    Migadu is relatively private, dirt cheap, and dead easy to set up. Supports both web and desktop email clients of choice.

    IMHO, TLD matters and always will - the problem is that it matters to varying degrees depending on the destination host, the remainder of your setup, etc. If you’re fastidious about configuring all of the requisite DNS records, etc., it will be less of a problem.

    I mostly avoid the newer non-CC TLDs for that reason, and general personal preference. Deliverability is enough of a challenge without adding more work to it, which is why ‘actually’ hosting one’s own email is mostly a toy project, and not something generally done as a serious endeavor. Useful for learning and understanding, of course, but not particularly practical to literally host one’s own email server for ongoing usage in any critical use case.

    You’ll find certain providers easier to get your emails through to than others - Hotmail and variants are notoriously difficult, and tend to drop inbound mail at the gate without sending a bounce message, as if the inbound mail just disappeared.