Now that we’re in the digital age, our email accounts have become increasingly more important. They act as keys to the many account we have. It’d sure be a shame if you ever lost access to that email account (Insert Mobster gif here). You might completely lose access to some accounts attached to that email or it’s a huge time investment to recover those accounts.
Most people rely on the big boy email platforms like Google or Microsoft. You’re at the mercy of these companies and while it’s not likely, things could go wrong. Your account could be banned in error or due to a hacker’s activities should your account get compromised (I have a guide on account security too) and good luck interacting with their customer service to get it back. I personally don’t trust these corporations to operate in good faith and I would rather be in control of my email accounts.
You will need to follow three main steps if you’d like to take control over your email account. We’ll go over steps 1 and 2 in this guide and the hosting service will get you the rest of the way there.
- Buy a domain
- Choose an email hosting service and make an account
- Link your domain to your email hosting account. Your chosen email hosting service will have dedicated guides for this step.
Benefits
I’ve switched to this system this year and here are the benefits I’ve noticed so far:
Simple email addresses Since you aren’t fighting for a unique username, you can have a simple email address like (first name)@(domain name).com
Additional Security If you use Gmail, your Gmail address is used to access you Google account and most other accounts attached to that email. So, for example, if the Starbucks servers are hacked and account data is leaked, bad actors already have half the info they need to try to access your inbox.
If you have a Proton Mail account, there will be a dedicated (username)@proton.com email address to login to your inbox while you’ll be using the (name)@(domain name).com address to make accounts for other services.
Aliases You can use aliases to organize your emails, like generalmail@(domain name).com, shopping@(domain name).com, 69dragonpron@(domain name).com, gaming@(domain name).com and so on. This can be helpful for seeding various email addresses across all your accounts, and minimizing the potential damage of a data breach. Bad actors won’t know the email address to all your other accounts, just a select few.
No Ads You can adblock ads out of your inbox but it’s much more difficult if you use a mobile app. If you pay for your email service, then they won’t need to serve you ads.
Platform Agnostic If a company pisses you off, like if they start serving ads on a paid service, or they do something else that’s not consumer friendly then you can give them the middle finger and move to another email service provider. You also don’t need to worry about the threat of account termination because you can simply pair your domain to another service.
Buying a Domain
Having complete control over your email does cost some money and takes a little setup but it can be incredibly cheap and it’s well worth the cost. The first thing you need to do is buy a domain. I like Namecheap because of its price but you can also buy domains through Cloudflare or many other services. The average cost of a domain is about $14 a year but this depends entirely on the domain name you choose for yourself.
Once you’ve bought a domain, you’ve officially become platform agnostic. This means that you can attach that domain to any email service you want. If that email service goes out of business or bans your account for some reason, you can easily attach your domain to a new service provider.
Email Service Providers
Proton Mail
Proton Mail is my first choice. They have a reputation as the security and privacy platform, so data breaches are less likely and it’d directly hurt their business if they started selling our data to data brokers. I found the domain pairing process to be very well documented, so you don’t have to be a programmer to figure it out, though, I’ve seen how tech illiterate some people are and Jesus Christ. This may be too complicated for some people, especially on the older end of the spectrum but I think it’s within most peoples’ grasp. Especially, if you’re younger.
Though, if you want to use your domain on their service, you have to pay for a premium subscription. It’s 4 a month if you pay yearly.
Zoho Mail
Zoho Mail has a forever free option, so if you don’t want to pay, you can use them. I don’t have a ton of information on them or how they function as a company. If you’re concerned about privacy or security, then you may want to do some research.
Google Workspace
You’ve sucked so hard on Daddy Google’s teet for so long that you can’t stand to see anything but that Gmail logo at the top of your inbox. If you want to pay more money, don’t care about privacy and want AI services shoved down your throat, go Google Workspace. At least you can leave the service now if they do something you don’t like.
Outro
That pretty much covers everything you need to know about taking control of your inbox. It can offer additional account security, privacy and frees you from the pains of being locked onto a single platform. If you’re interested in taking your account security a step further check out my other guide.