Trying every email provider

1st September 2023

Having a custom email address is kinda cool, but there are many problems associated with them. I also wanted to limit my Google dependence. Here was my multi-year journey.

Gmail

I started with a basic Gmail account. It's free, but it wasn't custom, and most short domains are already taken since it's so popular.

Fastmail

I was bouncing between either Proton Mail, Fastmail, and Tutanota. I ended up with Fastmail as it had a nice short domain, sent.com. Just like with picking a domain for your startup, picking a .com email is very important. Here is an essay by Paul Graham on the topic.

Proton Mail

Although I had a cool short email, it still wasn't my own domain. And so I bought my own domain. I ignored my own advice and used a .xyz TLD. Google used it with their website abc.xyz, surely it can't be that bad? I was so wrong. While testing, outbound emails were being marked as spam, and many inbound emails were being rejected. Right then was when I decided that what matters most was 100% reliability. Having emails marked as spam, and not receiving emails is completely unacceptable.

Apple Mail

And so I have gone almost full circle and am using Apple Mail, a Big Tech™ provider. If my emails are getting marked as spam, from an icloud.com domain, then so would 850,000,000 other email addresses. It would then probably get fixed very quickly, making it not my problem.

My conclusion

Just use a popular email service, like iCloud or Gmail, and make sure it's secure and reliable. If anyone has access to your email, they can access every service you've ever signed up with using password resets.