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Poll: What domain do you use for email?

30 points by maguay ↗ HN
What domain do you use for email? Your personal blog or site domain, a business domain (your own company or one you work for, or perhaps a school domain), or just a standard email service like Gmail?

And, if you're using your own domain, what do you use to host your email? Google Apps for your domain, Exchange, your own hacked email server, carrier pigeons? If you're using a standard email service like Gmail, why? Should have a lot of interesting responses!

57 comments

[ 1323 ms ] story [ 417 ms ] thread
geoffw8
@companyname.com over the top of Google apps. Its the first thing I do after registering a new domain (that I plan to use)
cubicle67
I've 4 addresses I use regularly, switching between them as needed: work, one of my domains, gmail and an ancient yahoo one
acconrad
@gmail for personal and business domain for work (provided by work).
duck
Based on my Hacker Newsletter, 59% percent of the subscribers have a Gmail account.
count
I have 4 of them, for various things. I use my own personal domain for virtually all of my email though...
daleharvey
I get all my email forwarded to the google apps account on my personal domain, which can receive and send from my personal email or my work email
notmyname
I use my own domain running my own mail server (postfix, etc). I figured there is no better way to learn about running a mail server than actually doing it. My favorite thing is having a catch all email address that lets me give a unique email to everyone (business, website, etc) who asks. For example, I know that anything that goes to hackernews@ will come from here. Anything to bestbuy@ comes from there. And I've had one case where I started getting tons of spam to one specific address. Blacklist that address, and the spam problem stopped.
laskito
You can use email+bestbuy@gmail.com and email+hackernews@gmail.com for the same purpose.

In case of spam you can add a filter and delete all emails to a given address.

gst
If I were a spammer the first thing I'd do to my database is removing the "+something" part in each gmail address.
metageek
So far they don't, though--presumably because it's rare enough that they don't care.
troels
Yeah, but you're assuming that spammers knows what the heck they're doing.
jm4
You think spammers don't know what they're doing? They have all sorts of methods for harvesting addresses, ranging from scraping to data theft. They have figured out how to send a virtual shit ton of messages a day at almost no cost to themselves by developing and running botnets. They are on the cutting edge, and arguably, a major driver behind computer vision which they use for breaking captchas. They are a thorn in the side of every ISP, email provider and sys admin in the world. Years and too many man hours to count have been spent trying to stop spam, with a combination of technology and law. Still, the spammers manage to keep their enterprises humming along.

I think they have figured out how to sanitize email addresses.

brk
SPAM has become a HUGE business. I'd guess they do have a pretty good idea about what they're doing.
AdmiralBeotch
OP: I did the same thing... running a server for anything is the best way to get started in Linux..

I did a little write up on my "crazy ass email setup" here: http://julian.tosh.us/2010/01/my-crazyass-email-setup/

It's evolved a bit since then and addresses gst's point... I've recently added regular expressions to my postfix maps so an email must match a certain pattern to get through... so it's more like a moderated catchall domain.

duck
For the newsletter I run I see almost 10% of subscribers doing just that and another 6% using custom emails.
maguay
Or add a period in the middle of your email, e.g. em.ail@gmail.com. I usually do that when signing up for accounts online, then have all mail coming to a tweaked address autosorted into a folder...
streeter
Some sites don't allow the '+' operator in email addresses. I used to do this but now run a catchall on my personal domain name.
bambax
Yes, but there are many sites (even reputable ones that should know better) that don't allow email addresses with a + in it. It's infuriating... but it's real...
avree
Some signups still don't allow '+' signs.

His method is better, albeit harder to set up.

gsivil
@myuniversity.edu for everything related with my research activities and @gmail for everything else (personal contacts and login to services and content that I am interested in). I ab-use @hotmail for sites that demand logging in but I do not care to receive their newsletters or further contact
toddh
gmail and business domain, but mostly gmail now. The reason is to prevent DDOS attacks. If you have a DDOS attack on a provider that can't handle it they'll turn off your email, which is unpleasant. I figure Google can handle it. Even though google apps serves the business domain I'm not sure what their response would be to a sustained DDOS attack.
maguay
Ah, good point there! Gmail is much less likely to go offline than your own domain, though they did have a somewhat shaky start...
maguay
To answer my own question, I have a number of emails (business, college, and personal domains). Currently I forward them all to my @live.com email address, but I'm planning on switching to my own domain as my primary address soon. The good thing is, with forwarding you never really have to get rid of email accounts.

I previously used my college email address, but after transferring to a new school I decided it'd be better to stick with something I'm sure I can keep, whether its an email service or on my own domain! So college email just forwards to my main account now.

For email on my own domains, I'm using Google Apps free. Works great :). My personal main email right now is a Hotmail account (@live.com), which is tolerably and actually quite nice on iOS now with ActiveSync, but it's still way inferior to Gmail and Google Apps.

NathanKP
I use my university email address for everything. The university email is powered by Gmail, so I have all the advantages of google mail with a better looking email domain. Also using the university email address on a regular basis means that I actually get those university emails that I always used to miss.
0x0
Self-hosting my domain on a Sheevaplug, with unique email addresses for everything. Virtually no spam gets through, as I blacklist immediately when spam starts coming through (with a custom SMTP bounce message notifying humans where to reach me)
gxti
I use my own MX rubber-banded together with Postfix, SpamAssassin, and dovecot IMAP. I also have bucket.mydomain pointed to mailinator.com so I can use addresses under that domain as throwaways without the site I'm signing up for knowing about it, although I also use Postfix aliases for long-term throwaways.

My coworker runs his own MX, but bounces all his mail through Google just for the spam filtering.

bodyfour
I'm in the same boat as your coworker. I used to run large-scale mail servers for a living, but these days I just can't bear to deal with the spam problem.

I still have hundreds of aliases I've set up when I needed to give my address to some website (more than can be easily/cheaply set up using Google Apps last I checked) so I still run my own postfix server. It does nothing but forward these days.

Thankfully, gmail's spam filters are apparently smart enough to not overly penalize my IP address even though 95% of what it sends them is forwarded spam.

kellysutton
I've got a few domains I use, but all of them rely on Google Accounts (and thereby GMail) for what they do.
roadnottaken
I have two gmail accounts: one good one and one for junk-mail (signing up for trials/whatever on the internet). I also use the one provided by my university (my employer) but it's a horrible Exchange 2007 server with no IMAP access, so I have to have gmail check check that account via POP3.

In order to get gmail to check my POP3 account regularly, I use cron to send a dummy email to that account every 10 minutes. The dummy e-mail immediately gets deleted, but google's algorithms check POP3 with a frequency dictated by how frequently you recieve e-mails. Without this set-up it sometimes goes 1 hour before it checks the POP3 account. Using this set-up it checks every ~3-5 minutes which is sufficiently fast. I sure wish my university would just give me IMAP access, though.

maguay
That's why I was so glad when my college decided to "Go Google". Most college email systems setup for students that I've experienced are slow and awful...
peterpaul
I wish more colleges do it that way, I know Northeastern University switched over last year some time.
dchest
FYI, there is "Refresh POP accounts" in Labs. It works manually, though.
gst
I use my personal domain with a mailserver running on a small fanless server (with full harddisk encryption) located in my basement. Software on the server is pretty much standard: Debian as distribution, Postfix for SMTP, Dovecot for IMAP, SpamAssassin as spam filter, Prosody for XMPP, Tarsnap for offsite backups, Mutt as MUA, Maildir Utils to search through my mails.

I had my mailbox "outsourced" to Google Apps for some years (using the same domain name), but while Gmail has really nice features, as someone working in the security area I feel somewhat uneasy about the huge centralization (everyone uses GMail nowadays). Why surrender your data to someone else when you have the capabilities to host your own server (Time and cost are not really reasons, as I also use the server for other tasks and need to operate it anyway)?

dedward
I used to run my own mailservers, but due to lack of time and the wonderfulness of Google Apps, and let google handle my email.

So I use my domain, but I use Google on the technical side.

jdp23
I use all three: my own domain for activism and friends, my business domain for stuff related to my job, hotmail for a spam-catcher account when sites make me sign up, and gmail to manage notifications from various social network sites etc.
dangrossman
I use a personal domain for personal mail, and a business domain for business mail.

Both are hosted by Rackspace Mail. POP/IMAP mail hosting is just $1/mailbox/month with configurable spam filtering and the other essentials you'd expect from a mail host.

deno
It's actually $2/month per mailbox and you need to order for at least 10$/month (that is 5+ mailboxes) or buy Exchange service. Still a decent service, though.
dangrossman
Thanks for correcting me. I started hosting my mail there when it was still called MailTrust and the price was (and still is for me) $1/mailbox.
mcdowall
Gmail for personal and we use Google Apps for Mail at work, though I have found both getting gradually slower over the last year, frustratingly so in the last month.
stewiecat
I've seen similar things with my gmail being fast while my lower-volume hosted gmail accounts are slow. The converse also happens at random times.
mise
For those of you using a custom domain for your personal emails, what kind of domain name do you use? Your surname, for example?
jedsmith
Mine is my first and last name. The feeling of redundancy between the username and the domain name went away after a while, and I prefer it over a surname domain (they just seem cheesy).

Big win with a personal domain is if someone already knows how to spell your name, they know how to spell your e-mail, too. This is really handy for giving your e-mail over the telephone, and a great alternative to some cryptic username that has to be spelled out.

maguay
I'm in the process of switching to using my tech blog domain, techinch.com. My personal site's domain wouldn't be any easier as it doesn't use my name.
gst
firstname@lastname.name
woid
I use my personal domain and forward it to gmail.com.

I want to have ultimate control. That is why I'm not using my work email.

pmichaud
I have maybe a dozen e-mails at different domains, and they are all powered by one central gmail account.
pornel
My e-mail is firstname@lastname.name, which makes my business card minimalistic :)
markchristian
If your first name has an 'a' in it, try setting up a vanity email address like mine: M@rkChristian.ca. I'm a big fan of it. :)