I have a unique name, think John Doe, and I’m hoping to create a unique and “professional” looking email account like johndoe@gmail.com or john@doe.com. Since my name is common, all reasonable permutations are taken. I was considering purchasing a domain with something unique, then making personal family email accounts for john@mydoe.comjane@mydoe.com etc.
Consider that I’m starting from scratch (I am). Is there a preferred domain registrar, are GoDaddy or NameCheap good enough? Are there prebuilt services I can just point my domain to or do I need to spin up a VPS and install my own services? Are there concerns tying my accounts to a service that might go under or are some “too big to fail”?
I can expand what hangs off the domain later, but for now I just need a way to make my own email addresses and use them with the relative ease of Gmail or others. Thanks in advance!!
I tried both hosting my own mail server and using a paid mail hosting with my own domain and I advise against the former.
The reason not to roll out your own mail server is that your email might go to spam at many many common mail services. Servers and domains that don’t usually send out big amount of email are considered suspicious by spam filters and the process of letting other mail servers know that they are there by sending out emails is called warming them up. It’s hard and it takes time… Also, why would you think you can do hosting better than a professional that is paid for that? Let someone else handle that.
With your own domain you are also not bound to one provider - you can change both domain registrar and your email hosting later without changing your email address.
Also, avoid using something too unusual. I went with firstname@lastname.email cause I thought it couldn’t be simpler than that. Bad idea… and I can’t count how many times people send mail to a wrong address because such tld is unfamiliar. I get told by web forms regularly that my email is not a valid address and even people that got my email written on a piece of paper have replaced the .email with .gmail.com cause “that couldn’t be right”…
You can avoid the warmup by using an SMTP relay, and you can just use the one from your DNS provider if you’re not planning to send hundreds of mails per day.
I get told by web forms regularly that my email is not a valid address and even people that got my email written on a piece of paper have replaced the .email with .gmail.com cause “that couldn’t be right”…
That’s the thing that holds me back from a non-standard TLD, as much as I’d love to get a vanity domain.
I’ve got a .org I’ve had for over 20 years now. My primary email address has been on that domain for almost as long. While I don’t have problems with web-based forms, telling people my email address is a chore at best since it’s not gmail, outlook, yahoo, etc…
I keep seeing people say this but I’ve yet to encounter it even once. I fully believe it happens with non-com/net/org TLDs but I’ve been using my .org as my daily driver for 2 decades and have never had it rejected or denied.
Use Cloudflare or PorkBun.com for cheap, no bullshit domains. As for the email host, self hosting not recommended. It’s a long battle to be not blocked by every other provider.
I recommend purelymail.com - no cost to add (even multiple!) custom domains, unlimited users, only pay for mail usage and storage. Go for advanced pricing until it starts costing you more than $10/yr. (Which it shouldn’t if it’s just you. Seriously this thing is cheap!) I just passed my one year anniversary with PurelyMail, and have spent $6 so far. This is my most expensive month, 85¢. And that’s only because I host a public Lemmy instance (small) and we had a few hundred spam signups which sends an email each time.
This will give you a total yearly price WAY under what Google or Microsoft will give you. Google is like, $7.20/user/month.
And if for some reason that service goes down one day, as long as you still have a mail client with your email stored in it you should be able to just switch providers and import your emails from your client. Make some backups.
For anybody interested in more choices for volume-based providers like PurelyMail (with tiers based on storage and emails sent/received but who otherwise allow unlimited domains/mailboxes/aliases) there’s also MXRoute (US) and Migadu (Swiss/EU).
These providers don’t usually make sense for a single mailbox (although some of them have a low entry tier for this purpose) but can be extremely cost-efficient if you need 2 or more mailboxes/domains.
I was very tempted to go for this one, but couldn’t find info on whether this was a one-man operation or if there are any disaster recovery plans. Sounds cruel, but if that one single guy my email depends on gets hit by a bus…
I don’t give my personal email address to literally anyone. Everyone gets an alias.
Once someone gets your personal email address and leaks it, there is no way to stop spam. You cannot delete your personal address because it is your account identity.
Firefox Relay, AnonAddy, SimpleLogin, all great services.
I have a business email address that I’m just unfortunately stuck digging through spam.
Lots of people have said worthwhile things. Don’t selfhost email for example. While going with an email hoster has been recommended a couple times, which is good and easy, I want to offer an alternative: SimpleLogin (or comparable providers). Essentially a “email alias generator”, it forwards received emails to one or more mail addresses (Google, Hotmail, what have you). It also allows you to connect a domain and then create new inboxes on the fly by simply sending (or telling a service to send) an email to that non-existing inbox. Which is incredibly handy if you’re faced with a situation that demands an email, where you don’t want to give out an actual email.
So say you have the domain doe.com, and you’re in a physical shop at the register, faced with the question if you want to get 10% off by registering for their members club. You can simply give the cashier the email “coupon_walmart@doe.com” (which does not yet exist), the email will be sent, received bei SL, the inbox created and the coupon code forwarded to your Gmail account. Afterwards, you can disable or delete the inbox and never have to worry about newsletters or data breaches. Nifty!
Every one of these boxes also has its own “sent from” address visible in your actual mail account. Which means that you can simply respond to incoming emails, and the recipient will see the mail address they sent a message to.
This also means that you can set up filters in your mail account to move messages from certain sender addresses into specific labels, as if they were real separate email accounts.
I find there is less management overhead regarding inboxes with SL, compared to creating, managing and logging into multiple receiving addresses under a real mail server.
Sure, you can set one mail account on your domain and define it as catch all, but then won’t be able to send from these names.
Or you can create accounts you want, but then cannot quickly create new inboxes without opening your control dashboard.
Obviously, if you want to register with a service anonymously, you’d use one of the SL domains, which I do plenty too!
And at the end of the chain, all messages run into the same singular Google inbox, making it easier for me to manage all messages from all domains.
I’m sure paid email hosters will have their own advantages, but as I said at the beginning of my original comment, I want to show an alternative solution, not a better solution.
There are mail providers that let you use anything as a “from” address as long as it’s @yourdomain. I mean why shouldn’t they, it’s your domain; it’s a silly restriction in the first place. On Migadu it’s called “wildcard sender” and once you activate it for a mailbox its user can send as anything@that.domain (even if it doesn’t exist; they warn you to set up an alias or catch-all for it but let you shoot yourself in the foot).
Migadu also lets you define wildcard aliases (like shopping.at.*@your.domain) which are a good balance of both worlds: it’s not a full catch-all but also you can make them up on the fly without having to go into your settings every time.
Please keep in mind that the alias functionality offered by services like SimpleLogin should be included with any paid email service. So SimpleLogin only makes sense if you’re using a free email service (like Gmail) and using the free SL aliases based on their domains; bearing in mind those free tiers will usually be severely limited.
If you intend to get your own domain you might as well use a real mail provider.
I’ve been using it for around 1.5 years, and so far I’ve received every message I’ve wanted to receive. Though I am always sort of aware that they are yet another party I depend on with my mail delivery, so I don’t usually use them for crucial services.
So people must also acknowledge and agree that the solution can read their messages. I guess your use case is junk mail. If OP is looking for an external email for regular use, this might not be a good solution?
Email encryption, as far as I know, is to this day rarely implemented. So your host as well as any entity in between participants will be able to read your messages. SimpleLogin is also provided by Proton if that means anything to you.
Nice. Yeah, keeping in mind Google/Microsoft have their algorithm/ad stuff going through your messages, we usually just count on them not committing fraud directly against us :)
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/njal.la basically a bunch of people complain that thy cant access their domain names. This is possible because njalla owns the domain for you
We’re not actually a domain name registration service, we’re a customer to these. We sit in between the domain name registration service and you, acting as a privacy shield.
When you purchase a domain name through Njalla, we own it for you. However, the agreement between us grants you full usage rights to the domain. Whenever you want to, you can transfer the ownership to yourself or some other party.
I don’t want to stop anyone from using it just keep this in mind.
I’m aware how Njalla works, actually that’s the reason I use them. I don’t want my name, my payment information or anything connected to my domain. With Njalla, I don’t have to give up any data and I can pay anonymously with crypto. I’ve used it for all my domains for years and I never had any issues. They seem very trustworthy to me.
Self-hosting email is not at all easy, and I’d recommend paying for hosted email from a service that lets you use a custom domain. Most will let you have multiple inboxes, although this may cost extra.
Then, just buy a domain (NameCheap is fine) and point your MX records at the email provider.
Idk, that looks strikingly like a no-brand Freedom box, except there are no specs to judge by. Just some super iffy, nondescript sales pitch. “That’s it, yes indeed”!
If you ever decide to host your own, via VPS or sth consider checking docker-mailserver and watchtower. First takes care of the mail stuff and the second updates your containers frequently so you will not have to manually update to new versions of the container (for security patches etc.).
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I tried both hosting my own mail server and using a paid mail hosting with my own domain and I advise against the former.
The reason not to roll out your own mail server is that your email might go to spam at many many common mail services. Servers and domains that don’t usually send out big amount of email are considered suspicious by spam filters and the process of letting other mail servers know that they are there by sending out emails is called warming them up. It’s hard and it takes time… Also, why would you think you can do hosting better than a professional that is paid for that? Let someone else handle that.
With your own domain you are also not bound to one provider - you can change both domain registrar and your email hosting later without changing your email address.
Also, avoid using something too unusual. I went with firstname@lastname.email cause I thought it couldn’t be simpler than that. Bad idea… and I can’t count how many times people send mail to a wrong address because such tld is unfamiliar. I get told by web forms regularly that my email is not a valid address and even people that got my email written on a piece of paper have replaced the .email with .gmail.com cause “that couldn’t be right”…
Yeah, I use firstname@thelastnames.co
And EVERY DAMN PERSON corrects .co to .com
Unfortunately the .com.and .net are both used.
You can avoid the warmup by using an SMTP relay, and you can just use the one from your DNS provider if you’re not planning to send hundreds of mails per day.
That’s the thing that holds me back from a non-standard TLD, as much as I’d love to get a vanity domain.
I’ve got a .org I’ve had for over 20 years now. My primary email address has been on that domain for almost as long. While I don’t have problems with web-based forms, telling people my email address is a chore at best since it’s not gmail, outlook, yahoo, etc…
More and more services are REQUIRING a gmail/outlook/etc. account simply because bots/scammers bombard their services. It’s their cheap captcha.
I’m seeing it more and more and it infuriates me to no end.
You mean those websites that instead of email input fields there are multiple horizontal stripes saying “Login with Google” and such?
I hate them, too… but I suppose it’s for the mobile crowd that don’t make distinctions between sms, fb/whatsapp messages, and email altogether.
I wonder if all those gmail accounts will be seen like yahoo addresses one day.
As if a scammer can’t get a Gmail address. 😄 What does that even prove?
I think the point is that a scammer may have one or two. But not millions of Gmail addresses.
I keep seeing people say this but I’ve yet to encounter it even once. I fully believe it happens with non-com/net/org TLDs but I’ve been using my .org as my daily driver for 2 decades and have never had it rejected or denied.
The last one I encountered was one of the AI tools. I can’t remember which one. They are popping up like fucking Starbucks now.
They required using your Gmail, Outlook, or Discord credentials.
Use Cloudflare or PorkBun.com for cheap, no bullshit domains. As for the email host, self hosting not recommended. It’s a long battle to be not blocked by every other provider.
I recommend purelymail.com - no cost to add (even multiple!) custom domains, unlimited users, only pay for mail usage and storage. Go for advanced pricing until it starts costing you more than $10/yr. (Which it shouldn’t if it’s just you. Seriously this thing is cheap!) I just passed my one year anniversary with PurelyMail, and have spent $6 so far. This is my most expensive month, 85¢. And that’s only because I host a public Lemmy instance (small) and we had a few hundred spam signups which sends an email each time.
This will give you a total yearly price WAY under what Google or Microsoft will give you. Google is like, $7.20/user/month.
And if for some reason that service goes down one day, as long as you still have a mail client with your email stored in it you should be able to just switch providers and import your emails from your client. Make some backups.
For anybody interested in more choices for volume-based providers like PurelyMail (with tiers based on storage and emails sent/received but who otherwise allow unlimited domains/mailboxes/aliases) there’s also MXRoute (US) and Migadu (Swiss/EU).
These providers don’t usually make sense for a single mailbox (although some of them have a low entry tier for this purpose) but can be extremely cost-efficient if you need 2 or more mailboxes/domains.
I was very tempted to go for this one, but couldn’t find info on whether this was a one-man operation or if there are any disaster recovery plans. Sounds cruel, but if that one single guy my email depends on gets hit by a bus…
It is. But as said, for personal email what’s the huge risk? You find a new provider, transfer your DNS records, and upload your old emails.
Make some backups of your emails, you should be anyway.
But they have a specific FAQ for this: https://purelymail.com/docs/companyPolicy#bus
Makes sense. I’m happy with my current provider but purelymail is a strong candidate for if I’m out of options.
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I don’t give my personal email address to literally anyone. Everyone gets an alias.
Once someone gets your personal email address and leaks it, there is no way to stop spam. You cannot delete your personal address because it is your account identity.
Firefox Relay, AnonAddy, SimpleLogin, all great services.
I have a business email address that I’m just unfortunately stuck digging through spam.
Lots of people have said worthwhile things. Don’t selfhost email for example. While going with an email hoster has been recommended a couple times, which is good and easy, I want to offer an alternative: SimpleLogin (or comparable providers). Essentially a “email alias generator”, it forwards received emails to one or more mail addresses (Google, Hotmail, what have you). It also allows you to connect a domain and then create new inboxes on the fly by simply sending (or telling a service to send) an email to that non-existing inbox. Which is incredibly handy if you’re faced with a situation that demands an email, where you don’t want to give out an actual email.
So say you have the domain doe.com, and you’re in a physical shop at the register, faced with the question if you want to get 10% off by registering for their members club. You can simply give the cashier the email “coupon_walmart@doe.com” (which does not yet exist), the email will be sent, received bei SL, the inbox created and the coupon code forwarded to your Gmail account. Afterwards, you can disable or delete the inbox and never have to worry about newsletters or data breaches. Nifty!
Every one of these boxes also has its own “sent from” address visible in your actual mail account. Which means that you can simply respond to incoming emails, and the recipient will see the mail address they sent a message to. This also means that you can set up filters in your mail account to move messages from certain sender addresses into specific labels, as if they were real separate email accounts.
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I find there is less management overhead regarding inboxes with SL, compared to creating, managing and logging into multiple receiving addresses under a real mail server.
Sure, you can set one mail account on your domain and define it as catch all, but then won’t be able to send from these names.
Or you can create accounts you want, but then cannot quickly create new inboxes without opening your control dashboard.
Obviously, if you want to register with a service anonymously, you’d use one of the SL domains, which I do plenty too!
And at the end of the chain, all messages run into the same singular Google inbox, making it easier for me to manage all messages from all domains.
I’m sure paid email hosters will have their own advantages, but as I said at the beginning of my original comment, I want to show an alternative solution, not a better solution.
There are mail providers that let you use anything as a “from” address as long as it’s
@yourdomain. I mean why shouldn’t they, it’s your domain; it’s a silly restriction in the first place. On Migadu it’s called “wildcard sender” and once you activate it for a mailbox its user can send asanything@that.domain(even if it doesn’t exist; they warn you to set up an alias or catch-all for it but let you shoot yourself in the foot).Migadu also lets you define wildcard aliases (like
shopping.at.*@your.domain) which are a good balance of both worlds: it’s not a full catch-all but also you can make them up on the fly without having to go into your settings every time.Very interesting. How long have you used this? Has it been reliable the whole time?
Please keep in mind that the alias functionality offered by services like SimpleLogin should be included with any paid email service. So SimpleLogin only makes sense if you’re using a free email service (like Gmail) and using the free SL aliases based on their domains; bearing in mind those free tiers will usually be severely limited.
If you intend to get your own domain you might as well use a real mail provider.
Yep, I use Fastmail and it has this well integrated within the service as “Masked Emails”
I’ve been using it for around 1.5 years, and so far I’ve received every message I’ve wanted to receive. Though I am always sort of aware that they are yet another party I depend on with my mail delivery, so I don’t usually use them for crucial services.
So people must also acknowledge and agree that the solution can read their messages. I guess your use case is junk mail. If OP is looking for an external email for regular use, this might not be a good solution?
Email encryption, as far as I know, is to this day rarely implemented. So your host as well as any entity in between participants will be able to read your messages. SimpleLogin is also provided by Proton if that means anything to you.
Nice. Yeah, keeping in mind Google/Microsoft have their algorithm/ad stuff going through your messages, we usually just count on them not committing fraud directly against us :)
Domain+Zoho Mail Lite subscription (less than 1€/month, ATM).
Get a domain from Njalla, set it up with Proton Mail. That’s the best solution in my opinion. I don’t think there’s anything better for privacy.
Njalla had some big controversy regarding their reliability and trustworthiness. I’d stay away from their services.
Source?
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/njal.la basically a bunch of people complain that thy cant access their domain names. This is possible because njalla owns the domain for you
I don’t want to stop anyone from using it just keep this in mind.
I’m aware how Njalla works, actually that’s the reason I use them. I don’t want my name, my payment information or anything connected to my domain. With Njalla, I don’t have to give up any data and I can pay anonymously with crypto. I’ve used it for all my domains for years and I never had any issues. They seem very trustworthy to me.
Well then keep doing what you are doing.
As far as I know Gmail and others also offer using your own Domain with them. Maybe that’s easier for you.
Self-hosting email is not at all easy, and I’d recommend paying for hosted email from a service that lets you use a custom domain. Most will let you have multiple inboxes, although this may cost extra.
Then, just buy a domain (NameCheap is fine) and point your MX records at the email provider.
Yes you need a domain for sure. But you don’t need a server for it, in fact I don’t recommend trying to self-host mail server.
You can use Tuta, Proton Mail, Gmail or iCloud Mail services. You just need to add some DNS records to the domain to redirect mail provider.
Cloudflare + protonmail is my setup. Works great and if you buy like 2 years it’s pretty cheap.
Yeah I’m also using Proton but I will switch to Tuta because it has more features I think.
I just wanted mail and privacy directed.
Self Dost is the perfect solution for you!
“Self” … “Dost”?
Idk, that looks strikingly like a no-brand Freedom box, except there are no specs to judge by. Just some super iffy, nondescript sales pitch. “That’s it, yes indeed”!
Thank you! :) I offer it. I assure you it is the best product that is theoretically possible!
Freedom box has inferior software. It is way heavier compared to our setup.
If you ever decide to host your own, via VPS or sth consider checking docker-mailserver and watchtower. First takes care of the mail stuff and the second updates your containers frequently so you will not have to manually update to new versions of the container (for security patches etc.).
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #416 for this sub, first seen 9th Jan 2024, 12:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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