Comment by Mistletoe
Comment by Mistletoe 2 days ago
The average person is not intelligent enough to have their own domain.
Comment by Mistletoe 2 days ago
The average person is not intelligent enough to have their own domain.
> The average person is not intelligent enough to have their own domain.
You think that that skill (maintaining own domain for email) is an indicator of intelligence?
My interpretation was that they didn't mean to talk about "intelligence", just meant that the average person is not "competent enough" to have their own domain. Which in all fairness is not wrong.
My question is always: of those who are competent, why is the vast majority not having their own domain?
It is an indicator of knowledge, not necessarily intelligence.
I said "own your domain", not "self-host your email server".
"own your domain" is technobabble to 99.999+% of email users. Most people understand emails addresses are <something> "@gmail.com" or "@yahoo.com" or "@<somebigcompany>.com". They don't understand the parts of an email address, nor how or why they are constructed that way.
I have been using a personal domain for my email address for decades and when I have to give it out verbally to someone, it is about a 50% chance that the conversation is:
"My email is <name@myname.tld>"
"uuhhh... at gmail.com?"
"No it's just <@myname.tld>"
"Yeah, but is it gmail or yahoo?"
That's why you don't sell it as if you were marketing it to techies:
(*) Choose a personalized email address, like john@smith.com, for $9.99/year.
( ) Choose a GMail address, like john.smith@gmail.com, for free.
I've had my own domain for a good 20 years now, and while I've encountered some confusion when giving it out, it's never been as bad as you describe, and people get it without my having to go into a technical explanation. And regardless, the reason there is this problem is because easy, seamless personal-domain options don't really exist. If they did, this problem would go away. I don't really consider this to be an obstacle.
I am the same, self-hosting for many years and while I have the occasional question about it, it's easily corrected. I now have a short .com domain I use because my .fyi one was even more confusing to people, and simply didn't work with some systems I needed to use.
A bigger problem in my opinion is just how heavily people have associated "Google" with "the internet" and "Gmail" with all email in existence. They don't even think about outlook.com or even hotmail anymore. All email is Gmail to many people.
> I've had my own domain for a good 20 years now, and while I've encountered some confusion when giving it out, it's never been as bad as you describe
Similar here, though I haven't encountered any confusion at all. I got remarks like "How do you get your name as the email? That's fancy!"
Well, gmail does that already. It's $7/mo.
This was the exact kind of trouble I used to have when I gave out @myname.com emails. It was super not worth it. It confused people all the time. I switched to a plain Gmail with nothing hard to spell, just a few letters and (sadly) numbers. (I waited like a decade before 'claiming' a Gmail address, so no decent versions of my name or anything professional remained without numbers.)
Also, Gmail actually blocks true spam, whereas nothing I tried on my shared-hosting server with SpamAssassin ever worked.
I don't have any love for Google, but I'll never go back to giving out a personal domain email for any reason.
I've had my own domain for ~20 years, first on Google Apps for Domains -> GSuite -> Google Workspaces (or whatever their naming changes have been), and moved over to Fastmail a few years ago.
Fastmail's spam filtering isn't as good as Googles, but has fewer false-positives, and the spam it does let through is trivially manageable. I did host my own mail server for a year or so prior to using Google, but I agree dealing with spam filter configuration and tuning was a headache, and I gave up. Nowadays I can only assume it's even harder to run your own email server, so I'd never recommend anyone do that when there are options for other people to do it for you.
I occasionally get a confused customer support person on the phone when I need to give them my email address, but they understand in about 7 seconds and it's no big deal.
Well, I actually like to have my own domain for things where I have purchased something and have ownership, like my Amazon Kindle account. It is tied to my Gmail account and then Gmail decides I am sketchy for some reason I lose access. It’s probably a little easier to maintain my Domain, and there are legal mechanisms to restore it if it is taken away for any reason other than nonpayment.
Due to spam and deliverability issues, I'd personally never self-host an email server either. Plenty of good providers will allow you to bring your own domain and deal with the hard parts for you.
I would argue a US mailing address is at least as complicated a structure, but people managed to figure out the state abbreviations and ZIP Codes fine. We just need to teach it in elementary school just like we do addresses.
Speaking of that I do wish the post office had a mail service where they issued addresses to citizens or something.
Yeah, I think digital literacy courses cover things like that, and they should.
But mailing addresses are actually extremely complicated and most people probably don't understand the full scope even of US mailing addresses. The spec is 226 pages.[0]
[0]: https://pe.usps.com/cpim/ftp/pubs/Pub28/pub28.pdf
If you've ever had an address with any complexities beyond what is taught in elementary school (number, street, city, state, zip), you'll probably experience issues with getting others to correctly address your mail. The biggest reason this isn't a problem is because the postal service takes significant effort to deliver misaddressed mail.
Some countries have digital mail services that are actually better than email because they include identify verification features
Worse is the California DMV. All password reset emails going to my custom .com would be subject to multi-hour delays; the password resets were valid for only a few minutes. The only way into the account was to call the tech support phone line. I had them delete the old account and re-registered with a bland gmail email address.
I don't know of any technical reason to delay emails to minor domains. My domain has valid MX records, uses SPF, has valid DKIM TXT records, etc.
> I don't know of any technical reason to delay emails to minor domains. My domain has valid MX records, uses SPF, has valid DKIM TXT records, etc.
I still run into that with my business address; after much mucking around with client's MS admin who did various pieces of magic on their online/azure/microsoft email platform until we finally got it down to around 2m for the delay.
The upside appears to be that now all clients who are using microsoft appear to have only a 2m delay when sending email to my business domain.
Thanks, I appreciate the additional data point. They do have a tech support method so I can use this to start a ticket. It could be the same situation as the other commenter, where the underlying service is delaying outbound emails.
Just curious: do you own your own domain? My experience is that many (most?) people who would be competent to own their own domain just don't.
> I have been using a personal domain for my email address for decades
Or they have better things to do vs fighting Route53 MX records errors.
Records, shmekords.
The practical experience of having your own domain for your email is that you delegate your domain to Google / Fastmail / Proton / whatever, and it takes care of everything else. Some webmail providers will also let you buy a domain on their own website as a part of registration flow.
It really is not hard. Harder than not having a domain of your own, but not as hard as you make it sound.
Okay, do you think if we just picked some random person they would have any idea what we're talking about?
It's just not something normal people do, but I don't like the snarkiness of implying that's an indicator of intelligence. Otherwise we go down the no true Scotsman rabbit hole, what do you mean you're using Proton. You didn't set up your own mail server ?
What do you mean you're using AWS, your not using a solar powered raspberry pi?
It's not an indicator of intelligence, but mail providers (including Google) could offer this if they want to, with a simple "Choose a personalized email address, like john@smith.com, for $9.99 per year" radio button on signup. They don't do this because:
1. Most people will choose the free option, so it wouldn't be much of a useful revenue stream.
2. People having @gmail.com email addresses is a little bit of zero-cost marketing for them.
You're both wrong (-:
Currently it's too hard for normal users, but it would be possible for e.g. Proton to add a feature where you can either import your domain name, or create a new one.
Getting a domain is no more difficult than selecting some "easy web hosting and email" bundle on a site and paying for it with bank transfer, credit card or whatever. There's an entire industry around this. I've met plenty of people who are largely clueless about PCs, doctors, lawyers, artists, etc who have their own domain. It's actually extremely common, because conducting business from a Gmail account is a bit unprofessional and sketchy, particularly here in Germany.