I’m pretty far into the degoogling process, and I’m thinking about purchasing a domain and using it for email. I realized I don’t want to be stuck with any one email service, so this is pretty much a necessity for me.
I wouldn’t self host though, because I understand that’s very hard to do.
For people who have already done this: are there any pitfalls or things I should take into consideration before I purchase a domain?
Also, does the tld matter? Are my emails more likely to be sent to spam with a custom domain vs an email provider’s?
I did this years ago. I had read a bunch of scare stories about Google cutting people off from their Gmail accounts and having no path to appeal.
I setup a domain name that is just my full name .com and used a mail service like proton or titan mail. I setup a few accounts (shopping@, work@, games@, myname@, me@) and gave them aliases, for example Shopping has paypal@ and Amazon@.
It is extremely unlikely anyone will want my domain name, so if my mail provider closes down or kicks me out I can just find another and repoint my DNS records to the new one.
I recently had issues with my DNS registrar primary servers going down, and titan mail was costing more than I liked when the renewal came up, so I’ve now moved to porkbun and mxroute and I’m very happy.