Personalized email address: pros and cons

Personal email domain: introduction

Many years ago, I set up a personalized email domain. It was an alternative to my long-used address in the format of [email protected]. I remember at least two factors that motivated me to seek a Gmail alternative. Frankly, I don’t care about them that much today, but here they are 😉

• At my university, I received a piece of feedback that my @gmail.com address doesn’t look serious in an academic paper I co-authored. I was pushed to use something else, at least a company’s email 🙂
• I have always been interested in security and privacy issues. I saw Google as “too good” at profiling and collecting data (which could theoretically leak at some point). So, I preferred to take more control.

Long story short, I decided to switch from Gmail to a service called Fastmail. It’s a top-tier quality alternative to Gmail. Fastmail is just so good in every aspect. It has a clean UI on all platforms, performance, SPAM filtering, a better calendar, and great support for custom domains.

Side note: see Fastmail features overview here. If you want to join, it’s 10% off with my link which I can share as a paying client.

Personalized email address: the bad sides

Some time ago, I shared my experiences about the downsides of using domain aliasing on Reddit. I refined that list for this post. So, I observe the following downsides:

• Using email aliases for each service, e.g., using [email protected] to log in to Facebook specifically, leads to occasional issues:
  • Sometimes, people asked, “What email did you use to register for this event?” to confirm I was an attendee. I sometimes have no idea what email I used. I received a few distrustful looks from security guards at the gates of meetups 😉
  • Very rarely, when contacting companies, they require communication from the address they have in their databases. That leads to back-and-forth email exchanges to ensure you send the message from the right email address.
  • You might create an address like [email protected] and find out later that it became a Google account that can also be used to sign in to Gmail, etc. Then, using such an address to sign in to little-related services is sometimes confusing.
• Failing to renew your domain puts you in a very difficult situation. If someone else buys the domain, they will receive your future emails. Then, they can do almost everything they want (e.g., generate password reset links and sign in to your accounts).
  • Also, whoever purchases your domain gains access to all your accounts upon your death. This might be a privacy concern for you (to the degree you care) and the people around you (who might have shared personal messages or files with you).
• You need to pay for it (both domain and the email provider)

Personalized email address: the good sides

What was out of scope of the Reddit thread were the benefits:

• There are several theoretical and practical benefits of email aliasing (using different email addresses for different services):
  • You know exactly how someone found your address. If I receive a job offer, I immediately see if it came to github@mydomain.com, someConference2024@mydomain.com, etc.).
  • You can use this information to create highly accurate automated rules. I have over 100 rules to help me never see emails about bank regulation updates. Or spam sent to an address used to register for a free IT conference three years ago. 😎
  • It’s an additional protection in case of password leaks. No one will be able to re-use your credentials if both the password and email differ 😉
• When I switched from a free email service to a paid service, I appreciated the business model. I expect my data will no longer be collected and sold.
• Last but not least, having our own email has different esthetics than a generic one. You can make it creative, fun, and clever—in other words, 100% personalized. If that’s something you want, give it a try!

Summary

A personalized email address requires some setup and maintenance, which costs money every year. If you want to try it, be cautious. When you stop paying for the domain, someone else might take over your email, so it’s a bigger commitment than it might seem at first.

If your main motivation is to find an alternative to Gmail for privacy or a more modern app experience, I recommend Fastmail (10% off with this referral link). I’ve been a paid user for a few years, and I’m sure you’d love it, too.

And if you want to share your own experience, please do so in the comment section! Thanks for reading 🙂