Personal Email on a Custom Domain: Pros, Cons, and How-to

Introduction

Email has been around since 1975. While services like Gmail, iCloud, Outlook, and Yahoo have become synonymous with email, there are many other options that also allow you to take control of and separate your email address from an individual company while still being able to use their other services.

What does this mean?

Having an email address that is truly your own, e.g. me@mycustomdomainname.com, that can freely move between email providers.

Why would I want to do this?

Maybe this doesn’t sound interesting or appealing, and that’s fine - there is nothing wrong with personal email addresses provided by any of the previously mentioned or many other companies. This means, however, that since your address is on their domain and tied to other services, you will often find yourself forced to accept changes, sometimes good, other times disruptive or invasive, just to continue using email.

Email is a foundational and nearly-universally-available form of electronic communication that connects the world. Many personal email providers have, over the years, become bloated with additional services, agreements, and commitments. Email can just be email, if you want. You can create separation between your email address and a single company providing it with minimal cost and effort.

This post will cover the pros and cons of setting up personal email on a custom domain as well as some things to consider before doing so. Additionally, it will explain the basic steps to get started yourself.

Benefits

• Flexibility and Autonomy: Your domain and email address can move independently of the service powering them. This gives you the ability to relatively freely and easily switch providers when you want to without having to update your email address everywhere. Just be sure to back up your actual email and data prior to switching.
• Organization and Visibility: Many providers support a catch-all feature or distinct aliases that will forward to a main address you create. Beyond basic sorting and organization, these tools can also provide a means of identifying when your email address has been sold or otherwise shared for marketing purposes without your knowledge. For example, having an alias of mybank@mycustomdomainname.com that you use only for your online banking account. If you suddenly start seeing emails to that alias (by searching/filtering/creating rules) from someone other than your bank, you will know who your bank sells or shares your data with and when. Similarly, this can even be an early indicator of a data breach.
• Personal expression and Fun: A Top-level Domain (TLD) is the part at the end of a domain name, and you are likely familiar with a few common examples such as .com, .net, and .org. There are actually over 1,000. Some are reserved, like .gov or regional like .co.uk, but over the years, the list of those available to just about anyone has exploded.
• Building Skills, Gaining Knowledge: While there is a bit more involved to this vs. setting up a gmail address, beyond the cost (see below), the initial and ongoing hands-on effort is actually quite minimal. If you are comfortable being perhaps a bit outside your technical comfort zone and willing to simply read through and follow what is often extremely thorough documentation, you’ll be up-and-running in ~30 minutes and will have learned something interesting along the way.

Considerations

• Cost: this varies greatly depending on the TLD as it is a market that fluctuates. A .com domain will likely be somewhere between $8-15 (USD), per year. In contrast, domains at a TLD like .xyz, or .lol are often only a few dollars (or less than a dollar) per year. Lastly, you may find a domain listed, but for sale by someone who alread owns it - some vanity, short, or otherwise memorable domains are often bought and sold for anywhere from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more!)
• Maintenance and Tinkering, Responsibility: The other side of the building skills and gaining knowledge benefit is simply that this does require a bit of effort at the start and commitment over time - typically troubleshooting any minor issues that may arise by following the documentation provided by the registrar and/or email service provider you choose, then just renewing the domain and service each year.
• Long-term Planning: If you decide to stop using your email address on your custom domain, but still renew the domain each year, you can always choose to set it up again. If you decide you no longer want to pay for your domain, however, it is important to change your custom email address anywhere and everywhere that it has been used, prior to letting it expire. Shortly after expiring (many registrars have a grace period), it becomes available for anyone that searches for that specific word or phrase, at that TLD, just as you did at the start.

How-to

To start, you’ll need an account with a domain name registrar. This how-to will cover doing so in Namecheap and using their basic secure email service, but the steps should be very similar on other platforms.

1. Search for and register a domain
   • Registering a domain is effectively leasing the name from the registry that operates the TLD.
   • The domain you register is “yours” for as long as you maintain the registration.

1. Purchase email service for domain

1. Enable email service and configure DNS

1. Login and test

To keep things simple and cheap (in this case an additional ~$15 per year after the cost of the domain), the email service provided by the registrar was chosen.

Alternatively, as this is often limited in functionality, you may want to explore an email service beyond what your registrar offers. You can use your registrar simply for buying/renewing domains and another provider for your email.

Privacy-focussed services like Proton, StartMail, or mailbox.org offer email on a custom domain for typically around $6 per month per user.

For those that prefer a gmail or outlook experience, you could also sign up for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, both of which offer single-user licenses for around the same price, but come with some extra administrative tasks. While the administrative burden may be too much for some, the benefit in this case is generally also an ad-free experience and fine-grained control over all over your data and the other services offered that you want to use or block.

Wrapping Up

This is certainly not for everybody, but can be a worthwhile and rewarding experience if it is something you decide to move forward with. Admittedly, I am an email nerd - since Juno in the 90’s to eventually spending >10 years of my tech career focussed on it. That said, I am far from an expert. Do you have your own experience with email on a custom domain? Have you gone a step beyond this and hosted your own email server? Do you have questions I didn’t answer or want to call out something I may have missed? Let me know via email or on Bluesky, thanks for reading!