this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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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.com jane@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!!

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[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 16 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[–] rar 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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...

[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] rar 3 points 10 months ago

Makes sense. I'm happy with my current provider but purelymail is a strong candidate for if I'm out of options.