Why everyone needs their own email domain

Photo credit: Horia Varlan

This post is part of what will ultimately be a series that includes a complete step by step guide to setting up your email from scratch.  Before I dive into that, though, I thought it might be a good idea to spell out why I think everyone should have their own email domain, just in case it isn't self-evident.

An Address for Life
Email providers come and go, and yours will likely change multiple times during your life, but there's no good reason why your email address should have to.  I've just done a quick analysis of the email addresses of my couple of hundred Facebook contacts to see what kind of email addresses they're using.  Now my friends may be somewhat more weighted towards tech-savvy folks than most, but there are still plenty of what I'd consider everyday users amongst them.  Breaking the list down into four broad categories, the results are:

• Employer's domain: 28%
• ISP's domain: 16%
• Web mail provider's domain: 46% (Of those: 59% GMail, 19% Hotmail, 15% Yahoo, 3% webmail.co.za)
• Personal domains: 10%

Let's tackle the first two classes of addresses.  If you're in that 44% of my friends, are you expecting to work for the same employer for the rest of your life and never retire, or to use the same ISP for the rest of your life?  I hope not!  That means you're inevitably going to have to change your address at some point in the future, and not just for Facebook but for typically tens to hundreds of sites and organisations that you interact with.  There's just no getting away from it and, in fact, I'd suggest you change your address as soon as possible, but only do it once.

I was actually quite impressed to see how many people rely on free web email providers, and particularly how many of those use GMail.  That's definitely a step in the right direction, but I think they could do better.  Don't get me wrong - I don't think there's anything wrong with GMail - I use and recommend it myself, but I don't ever give out my GMail address directly because I can't guarantee I'll always want to use them.  GMail suits me right now, but let's say Google decided to start charging for GMail, or they reduced the mail storage space they give away for free.  I know it's highly unlikely, but it's possible, and if that scenario or any other that prompted me to want to change email providers arose then I'd hate to be stuck in the same situation as all those people using employers or ISP's domains.

Those final 10% of my friends have done it right - they're using personal email domains that they (or members of their family) own and control.  They, like me, might be using GMail now, but if they want to use another provider, or host their own mail, they can do just that without having to update the email addresses they've given to Facebook, or their bank, or anyone else.

So, the permanence of a personal email domain is the most obvious and important reason to have your own domain, but there are couple of others that spring to mind too:

Spam Control
Spam is here to stay and though everyone's estimates vary widely, I'm inclined to believe those that say that spam accounts for over 90% of all email flowing between mail servers that's certainly true of mine.  Having your own domain isn't going to magically render your inbox free of spam, but coupled with using unique email addresses for each organisation you deal with you can eliminate a good proportion of the worst kind of spam - that which makes it through even really good spam filters like GMail.  GMail is great at killing the typical pharmaceutical spam, and even most of the online banking phishing mails, but when someone sells your address to some small-time South African business who thinks it's OK to buy an email address list and spam them, their volume of spam is generally too low to get caught by GMail, but still high enough to annoy me.  It's also the best defence against phishing, but it's actually worthy of its own post, so I'll save that for later.

Reputation
Your mates won't care, but if you're using email for business purposes then the email address you choose to use can say a lot about you.  If I was dealing with John Smith, I'd treat mail from johnnyboy@mycrappyisp.co.za and mail from john.smith@jsconsultants.com somewhat differently.  Of course if everyone has their own domain then it becomes harder to recognise the dogs, but your choice of address still says something about you.  If you're conflicted about picking john@mysurname.somedomain or john@afancysounding.company then don't sweat it - register both and use each in the appropriate circumstances.

Web Presence
More and more we're all generating content all over the web, whether on Facebook or Flickr or Twitter or blogs or all of the above.  Even if the content remains distributed across multiple sites, using a simple web site with your personal domain to aggregate all the content you want to be associated with is a smart idea.

It's Easier (and Cheaper) than You Thought!
Most people don't even consider registering their own domains because they think it's difficult, or expensive, or just for geeks.  I hope I've made a case for why everyone needs their own domain.  If you disagree (or even agree), let me know through the comments.  In future posts I hope to show that it's a simple enough and cheap (or free) enough for anyone to set up for themselves.

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