alt Hacker NewsYou can look through my history how many times I’ve brought this up to people and they just don’t seem to care. A defence is that they’ll buy the domain for a century and not care once they’re dead which is fair but the situation in this article is a valid one. I will always stick with Big Email for accounts.
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Your response seems to imply those people are irrational, but it's really just different priorities. Yeah, you need to make sure you don't lose the domain. With Google/etc, you need to make sure you don't break any of their usage policies across their suite of apps, etc. Neither are super likely to happen. Neither are impossible, either.
(Update: as it happens… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49548452)
Personally I like having a custom domain as I like the idea of being able to move between providers. So far, over the past decade, I've hosted my email with Google, Fastmail, Hey.com and then Fastmail again. I like being able to move it around if I find one provider better than another. Others won't care, that's fine too.
I moved to a third-level .name domain in 2005 precisely because one of the Big Email providers (Google) locked me out of my account with no recourse; presumably because I had a very common email address that was getting a large number of login attempts from other people which had triggered some abuse automation.
At the time - before the explosion of new gLTDs - third-level .name domains were advertised as the 'correct' domain to register for individuals wanting personal email addresses.