Quote:
Originally Posted by minimalist
It is kind of sad to say goodbye to fastmail, especially with a small investment ending up with a thousand dollar headache of changing email addresses.
But there is a good ending: finally doing the right thing and getting a personal domain. And doing that is much easier today than in 2001, and I also know that I don't want mylastname.com which is what I would have purchased then. So instead of mylastname@fastmail.fm, I will get the preferable shortasiwant@mychoiceofdomain.mychoiceoftld.
After getting a personal domain, you need to be able to get email. As far as I know there are (at least) three options:
1) Run your own mail server. This is another thousand dollar headache, no thanks for a user that only needs basic email services and expects no privacy in email communication. Using one of the free big providers as a backend is fine for me.
2) Use an email provider that allows personal domains. There are a few that will do this for free(currently at least Zoho and Yandex), and probably always will be. You might have to change providers from time to time to keep free(beyond domain purchase) service. This also requires a little bit of playing with your domain records.
3) Have email forwarded automatically to another email address. This is easy to do when purchasing a domain from Google Domains for example. Any free backend for another email address to forward to will be fine here, and there will always be plenty of those.
A .com, .net, .biz, .org, or .info domain costs $12/year with free private registration and email forwarding for 100 users to any email address. So with 3 friends the new cost will be $3/year with a (hopefully more chance this time) lifetime email address. |
Yep, should have done this ages ago. Thought it would be difficult, but it was incredibly easy.
First, found a low cost domain seller in
namesilo - outstanding prices, free WHOIS privacy, two factor authentication, templates to change DNS records to work with common sites and services, ALL of the parking revenue goes to the domain owner, and much more.
There are a couple of traps. Some of the registrars of the new TLDs designate anything interesting as "premium," and not only charge a lot for it (from 5000 USD to over 20000 USD for some name that I looked at), they won't commit to renewal prices, so at some point in the future, they could just say "gee, your web site traffic has gone up a lot over the last year. Your new renewal fee is 1000 USD per year." So I only considered domains I could register right now for ten years, and eventually settled on a relatively short .work domain for just over 60 USD for ten years.
For the actual e-mail hosting,
Migadu is perfect for me. I need to receive a lot of notifications ("your order has shipped," "your statement is ready," "practice has been canceled"), but I probably send less than one e-mail a week (I actually don't like e-mail very much), so the sending limits on the free account won't affect me at all.
Anyway, I managed to set up the whole thing in about ten minutes, and all that remains now is the arduous task of logging into all of my accounts that I use my fastmail address for (well over a hundred), and updating them to the new domain.