Your own domain = freedom to choose any email provider
Be that self host, proton, Fastmail, disroot, or just some forwarder or registrar hosted mail. Own the domain, own your provider
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
27 points (96.6% liked)
Privacy
35752 readers
352 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I have a domain and it points to SimpleLogin. I then have 400 aliases that all point to a proton email address which I give out to no one. If I don't like Proton or want to use Proton and Tuta, I can direct my mail to both at the same time. I can also respond as any of the aliases from either mailbox.
SimpleLogin gives me the ability to point all 400 aliases to a new mailbox in minutes. No more going around every website to use my new email address like I did in the past.
I own my own email domain and it's gotten EXPENSIVE (and I intentionally picked what was a low quality tld at the time). Domain costs just go insanely up for no reason other than the older a domain is the more invested in keeping it you probably are. Just something to consider.
Yes, it's worth it. I own mine for just the reason you give. You can take it to any other provider. And there's no danger of the email provider deciding to close your account or cutting you off unexpectedly. Imagine losing your email access. At least with your own domain, you can switch it that same day to someone else.
Unsure about whois lookup privacy. My registrar hides my details as an option. Anyone looking up the domain just sees them as the contact for the domain.
Keep in mind that in some tld's (like .nl) the whois data actually dictates who is the legal owner of the domain. If you get into an argument with your registrar, and the whois data shows their name, you can't take action to move it or reclaim it without their approval.
Also if you let it expire, for the cool off period, only the original owner can reactivate it, that means you can't reactivate it through another registrar. Maybe your current registrar allows it, bit that's a maybe.
Same for me. Although I accepted the apparent potential of it when I was asked to provide all my contact information, I'm happy to not find any of my information public.
i'm using mailbox.org with my own domain.
works like a charm.
I'd say it's worth it. Another bonus with your own domain is that you basically have an infinite amount of receiving email addresses you can use for no extra charge e.g. you can just keep making up new email addresses @ yourdomain whenever you need to register to a new website or whatever.
Drastically cuts down on the amount of spam you get at your main/personal address(es). Also helps whenever a website or whatever has a data breach, just means your random made up email address was leaked and it's easy enough to mark that as spam going forward.
Using your own domain is a great choice. You should however check whether your domain provider does auto extend the domain name for you, and if not, make sure your contact details are correct so you will get a reminder before the domain will expire after a year.
The other thing is that not all domain names are kind of equal. Some domain names have or had a bad name already when it comes to spam filters. For example IIRC the dot xyz domain names did have a bad name at some point, though maybe not anymore.
Also for serious emailing with companies for example my_name.lol may not be the best choice :-) Then there's the question where to host your email. For example mailbox.org and Tuta do support custom email domains.
It's not too hard to use your own domain and it is certainly worth it. It can even be cheaper price-wise if you go for providers that specialises in "bring-your-own-domain" mail providers. Used to use MXRoute, but I switched to NameCrane because their deal was even cheaper. It's still available, I think.
The only disadvantage I can think of is that you need to take care of your domain. If you let a spammer spam with your domain, you might ruin your domain reputation, in which case your domain might get blacklisted. Also, try to stick to well-known TLDs (.com, .net, etc). Domains ending in .xyz is usually filtered out because it's commonly used by spammers.
It cost 10$ to get a domain. It’s certainly worth it!
Absofuckinglutely, I bought ten years of a domain for £50GBP/~$67USD, unique enough that the price bottomed out and I used a country sub (.uk) which is basically half the price of a .com/.org
Yes, absolutely worth it. I started about running my own mail server about 20 years ago. Then migrated between several mail providers over the recent years. Using my own domain allowed me to preserve the same mail address. Meanwhile I settled at Proton and are a very happy customer.
I just did this a few months ago. Totally worth it.
Ensure that whoever you use for web hosting allows for the creation of multiple addresses, with one as a catchall. The real power you're paying for is beyond an alias that shows your real address, you can use an address like March2025@yourdomain.net to sign up for things you expect to be spammy or whatever, and delete the address in 4 weeks and just vanish from their records. Also helpful, if you do need that account back in a year or two, you can create it again in about 30 seconds.
is there a way of creating some "alias" even for the domain? I would not for example want to give my domain containing surname everywhere
Not really. You have the domain for it too be the domain. Just sign up for a Tuta account and have it auto-forward to you.
Also, don't get a domain that directly links to your name. Just an overall best practice.
yeah I thought it would look professional in cv or in portfolio, maybe I would buy two domains but I dont know what domain name for casual email should I get
Yes, do that! And note that on a number of email service providers you can add both domains to the same mailbox.
Just don't use a domain name containing your surname - register a different one.
The cheapest way would be to buy a domain from OVH and use their free offer of a 5gb single email address that is included with each domain.
I'm using infomaniak. Bought my domain via them and got a free mailbox with it + simple site hosting (kualdir.eu for example).
Just looked myself up on whois and no info about me can be found as of yet.
The only "issue" you may encounter is while moving mail provider you may need to take a more expensive option than the non-custom domain ones. At least, that I know of ofc.
Just to add to the pile, I have a domain with porkbun and my email with Tuta and they work really well together. But my domain is my name, so grain of salt, I guess...?
About the whois thing, German domains (.de) don't show personal information. You still have to provide that info but it's only visible to law enforcement and the like.
DENIC doesn't even report domain expiration in whois data, which is super annoying. I guess you pay per month technically, but was new to me for a project to monitor a whole bunch of domains for renewal.
The two downsides of a custom domain are:
-
Only as private as the least private use of the domain. No crowd to mix with.
-
Delivery through SPAM filters of other providers more troublesome. Delivery to AOL/Yahoo, and one of the AT&T managed mail domains has been the biggest issues for me. GMail delivery seems fine.
Do get a common mainstream suffix not the cheapest. Some filters may tend to filter some TLDs.
Edit: By the way, I have my own domain and the email for it is hosted at a hosting provider. I recommend it but the above are the downsides.
Most spam trap issues i've found are due to DMARC, which is easy to resolve with an spf in your ns records
I know owning my domain will give me freedom to move my email elsewhere if I would want but I dont know if its worth it.
If you can't answer neither can i.
whois lookup privacy?
Many tiers to chose from and no one will check if you live in Nowhere St 1337 anyway.
Proton and Tuta also offer custom domains.
how to deal with whois lookup privacy?
Any decent domain registrar provides WHOIS privacy for free (just note that that might not be available for .eu domain names). Additionally you can always use fake data on your account, but in this case you might lose your domain if they decide to check it.
other issues I may run into if I chose my own domain
When registering a domain, always look at the renewal price: often the first year costs relatively low, but after that there's a steep price increase.
As for an email hosting service, in addition to the ones you specified in your post, I suggest you to look at migadu.com.
I use DuckDuckGo's email proxy service, you can sign up for one custom email and generate any amount of temporary-use addresses for the ones you don't trust to stop spamming when you ask them to. The purpose of their system is to be the address you sign up with, and they do their best to strip trackers and garbage, and forward it onto an email of your choice. You can change the forwarding email at any point, so it can be incredibly useful for a transitioning period.
I use Mailcow dockerized for a home domain, it is actually a very acceptable price for me being able to:
- Control my own DNS rules (it was a nightmare trying to use DuckDNS for an mailserver because of the rules you need to set)
- Run through a reliable service because DuckDNS occasionally went down, making my domain unreachable and breaking external access of any server I run
- Have a personalised public home for myself, if I ever want to make blogs or provide public services or something
I used a very lovely and helpful YouTuber's guide for it, Opentaq (here)