Email is good.

A conversation came up in a Discord I’m in the other day about using your name as part of your email address as part of the domain.

So let’s say you have a personal site, as I do, which is your whole name. Mine is chriscoyier.net. If I wanted to use that for me email too (I don’t, right now), what would I use:

chris@chriscoyier.net - weird duplicate
chriscoyier@chriscoyier.net - what is this mastodon?
hi@chriscoyier.net - too tone-setting?
email@chriscoyier.net - boring
incoming@chriscoyier.net - I give up

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an example I love in this situation.

But this opens up a few other cans of worms as well.

For one, weirdly, I’ve always thought trust factors into it in unusual ways. For some, an email like diane@localbakery.com is more trustworthy than diane-the-baker@gmail.com because the business name is in the domain. Like it’s more serious or committed or something. But I’ve always felt the opposite. I know how hard, annyoing, and riddled with possible errors setting up and dealing with domains is. You have to buy the domain, you have to keep paying for the domain, you have to secure the domain, and crucially, you have to get all the DNS right on the domain, which is hard enough for websites but I’d say a smidge more difficult for email. So I have less trust because I feel like the chances of something going wrong there and my email not getting through to you is higher with your custom domain email than with a big provider email. I’m just one dude though of course, so don’t read too much into that.

So the full-name-as-domain-name for email is pretty awkward, but that could be fixed if you had just your last name, for example. I wanted to try this, so I decided to buy coyier.org and now I’m the proud owner of the email address chris@coyier.org. I’m not really “using it” at the moment. I’m not sure if I ever willy really commit to it or not. But I have it! and I might!

The other can of worms this opened for me is that I’ve really rarely ever used non-big-provider email. Back in college I’m sure I had some POP-based college email I barely used, but maybe that’s it? As soon as Gmail was on the scene, and then started offering for-your-domain email services, I just used that.

But I was reading someone’s “What I use” style of blog post and they mentioned the used Pobox as their provider and really liked it. There is a couple of things I really like about it:

1. They want you to “own your own email address for life” — which I think is great.
2. You are directly the customer. They make all their money from you, nothing else.

So incentives are pretty aligned there.

But the person that recommended Pobox also said that it’s now owned by Fastmail, which is essentially the same thing except a bit more polished, and if that was true when they signed up they probably would have just gone with Fastmail. So… I used Fastmail!

I think I was correct in assuming it’s a smidge complicated. I didn’t have any trouble with it, but that’s because I have several decades of tech experience to draw from.

1. I had to buy the domain name, making sure I wasn’t setting myself for weird costs or extreme future costs.
2. I had to update the DNS of the domain name to what Fastmail requires. There is no automation for this. I went with changing the nameservers on the domain to point directly to Fastmail. Not my favorite option, because not Fastmail handles all the DNS for this domain, which is not what I would want if I was running a website there as well. I don’t want my email provider being necessary for my website.
3. Setting up a third-party email client (I used Apple’s Mail.app) required creating a App-Specific Password and then a variety of other settings. I ended up downloading a macOS settings configuration file that I had to dig into settings to approve, and honestly don’t fully understand everything it did to make it work.

These are, likely, just set-it-and-forget-it steps. I probably won’t have to mess with it again for a long while. But you never know. You accidently lapse the domain, you got problems. You get a new computer and set it up from scratch, you got work to do. The email account itself lapses payment, who knows what happens. This is substatially more work than a free big-provider email.