I’m looking into getting my own domain to use for email for both my partner and I. I was initially considering using both or first initials followed by our last name (example: ajsmith.tld for Ann and John Smith) but then got to thinking about it and realized that might not be best for privacy. It looks great in a professional setting (like job applications, bills, taxes, etc.), though. So I’m unsure. I’m curios what other privacy concerned people are doing. The main goal is to not have to worry about changing account emails when we change email providers.
Edit: thanks everyone! Lots more replies than I expected and lots of good advice. I ended up going with lastname.tld domain and will combine that with aliases for privacy where needed. I might buy a fun domain later as well but for now this works.
I’m sure you’re a great couple but if your concern is future-proofness consider separate domains.
Not bad advice, but much bigger things of our lives are already tied together. If it comes to that then I think or email domain will be the least of our concerns.
lmao that’s crazy cynical. manifesting a divorce
It happens more often than you think ^^
yeah it will with that attitude
It’s nothing personal, just statistics.
As suggested, I would also encourage you to use separate emails for each of you, no matter how close you are— and that’s coming from an almost 30 years (and counting) lasting couple.
To be clear, we both have full access to the other accounts (email, health, everything, including financials) so keeping our own little ‘secret’ is not what’s at stake for us (not mentioning that we simply respect the other’s privacy). We just want to remove useless noise from our inboxes, and to be honest I really don’t care much about reading her emails like she doesn’t care about reading mine much either ;)
So, we own both our own domain name (name/surname). I also own other ones, including the one I’m using to log in here and to blog. I also heavily rely on email aliases/relays to subscribe to whatever I want to, so I know can always easily delete a spam-contaminated alias the moment I notice it starts sending me too much spam, without compromising my main email.
I use two domains.
One is my name for people that actually know me.
The other is something random (it has meaning to me but nobody else would think that). I use that for all my “private” emails, creating aliases that forward to me.
The most important thing is to pick something easy to understand so its easy to convey. My domain is actually quite long, which normally is a bad thing but its distinct words so people understand it when I give it to them verbally.
I’m very much a privacy amateur but am interested in comments on my set up, I’m sure it’s not ideal.
I use firstname@lastname.tld for personal email. Anything @lastname.tld forwards to my main email so for the rare occasion I need to access Facebook my account is facebook@lastname.tld and so on for any other untrustworthy sites.
I can easily block emails from a leak or just if unsubscribing is made difficult.
I would say it’s important not to conflate privacy with secrecy. If you have a domain with your name on it (e.g. my mspencer.net) but create email aliases for every situation, sites won’t be automatically correlating your addresses with each other. How do they know which addresses are yours and which aren’t? More importantly, if you self host, emails are encrypted in flight and live on your own hardware at rest, so nobody external to any conversation will be snooping on message contents.
I’m sure legally it has no effect, but I have postfix configured to refuse emails with “updated terms” and “updated our terms” in the body. If I still haven’t been notified that a site’s terms have been updated to allow some new horribleness, they can’t claim they made me aware, huh? I guess they’ll just have to send me paper mail if it’s so important to them.
(You could do that too, if you self host postfix / dovecot / roundcube / opendkim and use greylist and RBLs for anti-spam. It’s been effortless for me, after an admittedly grueling initial setup process taking several days to learn and fail with.)
This is a pretty good privacy-friendly domain provider Njalla
I used to use name/pseudo@greekname.fr but i got bored to have to spell it every time i needed to give it, so i took a 2nd domain name : contact@myname.eu, i host it with Yunohost on a dedicated server.
I have two, one which is firstname@lastname.name and the second my internet handle which is jeena so hello@jeena.net
For maximum privacy, pay for https://addy.io/, and use a unique address on their shared domain name for every account you create. Don’t bother with a custom domain name - you can just change the recipient of your anonymous addy.io to a new domain whenever you like.
I use Websupport. Mainly because it is based in Slovakia and because they charge 10€/year for a .tech domain.
Choose a standard domain to get best delivery. Either org. com, or net. I went for short and speakble and spellable, Then sort but not quessable names to prevent spam. For my main names I chose ones that someone that knows my name would recognice but not the other way around. This was not about privacy in my case.
If I wanted more privacy I would choose one or more random other domains for that using fairly random names. Or better yet I would choose a common mail proviider and use one of their popular domains.
Also consider how your going to host. Deciding on domain is only part of the problem.
