1mo ago

What do you use as your personal domain for email?

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.

27 comments

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 ^^

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 name@surname.tld for the professional stuff and and an alias for everything else.

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.

If privacy is your concern, then I'd use two different mail addresses / domains. One with your "professional" TLD (mail@johndoe.com) and one wirh your privacy focussed TLD (mail@anon.com).

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.
- This is exactly what I do too. I started half a year ago and have no regrets yet.

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.)

As others have hinted, there's a tension here. Confiscating big tech's access to your email is a major privacy win. But putting your actual name in your email address is... not so much. At the very least you won't even have the option to obscure your identity from a correspondent. If you have a website at that domain, it too will be chained to your email identity, thus telling your correspondent all about you.
These realizations led me, personally, to ditch my whole setup of own-domain email. If the domain is going to be a pseudonym, might as well save some money and just use a pseudonymous handle at the email provider's domain. That's what I now do - with one of the privacy-respecting email hosts, of course.
Then it's a hassle to change host later, you say? Yes, a little, but here arises another paradox: from the perspective of privacy, it's actually an advantage to changing one's email address from time to time.
- Assuming you aren't spending $$$ on a premium domain, I feel like $1/month on a domain is a pretty small price to pay for the freedom to move email providers as needed.
  
  Last time I looked there was nothing under 5 USD

I have two, one which is firstname@lastname.name and the second my internet handle which is jeena so hello@jeena.net

I think that having any kind of recognizable email is against the idea of privacy. So I would set up the following layering:
Mozilla Relay/TempMail (randomized email accounts)
for most of shops, job applications, etc. If it leaks you can easily disable the account and/or rotate it on periodic basis to limit the cross-database matching (the privacy part)
a few separate domains for things where you can't stop receiving mails or having an account is really worth it
one for banks
one for government
one for the few shops where the first layer is not enough
one for private exchange
the provider that can change

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.

Personally, my wife and I each have a version of firstname@fundomain.vanitytld, as well as a shared house@fundomain.vanitytld where all of our bills and shared expenses go to.
For some modicum of privacy, we also have a forwarding domain connected to SimpleLogin that allows us to do website.catchall@forwardingdomain.com for each website where we have little trust in the owner respecting our privacy.

This is a pretty good privacy-friendly domain provider Njalla

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.

first@last.com would be ideal, I use first@firstlast.com, but that wont be good for sharing. I would stick to a common TLD at least (.com, .net, .org, or a country) for deliverability.

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.

I have multiple emails. My email for everything which is pretty generic Gmail (I'm slowly moving away from that to a less generic domain) and first@firstlast.tld which is only for business, so I use it for LinkedIn, resume, professional stuff only. Use a place like Tuta and get their app that way you get a notification when you're business address gets emails. I have Gmail, Tuta, Proton, and Yahoo apps on my phone. All with different email addresses so notification give me an idea of what it is (like Yahoo is probably spam. Gmail is general life stuff.)

I use Websupport. Mainly because it is based in Slovakia and because they charge 10€/year for a .tech domain.

27 comments