[calcifer]

Use your own domain to sign up for a paid email service, provided by a company that focuses on email. I use Fastmail, but there are many other options.

Set up forwarding in Gmail to your new address.

Then, whenever you log in to a website or app with your Gmail, take a moment to change it to your new address. In a few weeks, most of your important accounts will be covered. In a few months, almost everything you still actively use will be done.

I did this ~5 years ago and the only thing that still arrives at my Gmail is spam.

[caseysoftware]

Same here but ~8 years.

You can mitigate/speed the process using your password manager too.

I still use a filter in my email so that if something comes in under my Gmail, it gets a special tag that I can filter on and treat those as a todo list. Rarely happens beyond the occasional Google Meet connection.

[nextaccountic]

> Use your own domain to sign up for a paid email service, provided by a company that focuses on email.

Note you don't need to pay. just use zoho mail or any other free email that lets you bring your own domain. Switch email providers as needed without changing your domain

The trouble with paying is that if you forget to pay, you may lose email. (arguably this is also a problem with domains, generally you should pay some years in advance)

[mulmen]

I prefer to pay for the product so I do not become the product.

[hboon]

Zoho lets you pay a small monthly (yearly?) fee and link several domains to it.

[nextaccountic]

Yeah, I did think like that, until the day I couldn't afford and lost some important stuff. Forgetting to pay also happens

[fouc]

I'd love to be able to pay for 5+ years of email service in one go, like I do when buying domains.

[genxy]

Solid advice, but I want to double, watch out for things you only log into once a year.

Making a new local account on your machine is a good first step.

[hogwasher]

^this is the way.

You can buy a domain name for like $10 per year; I recommend getting it from porkbun.com.

Cloudflare.com is good too, EXCEPT if you buy your domain from them, you'll be required to use their nameservers until and unless you transfer your domain elsewhere (which you won't be able to do for a while). Though to be fair, their free DNS is good and lots of people use it anyway. It makes email setup slightly more complicated, but it's still doable.

Spaceship.com also has a pretty good reputation, but I think their customer service isn't as good, they're quite new, and they're owned by Namecheap (a bigger domain registrar with a much worse reputation).

Whatever you do, DO NOT buy from GoDaddy. Do not even search for the domain you're considering on GoDaddy. Literally any option is better than GoDaddy.

By far the most reliable TLD options are .com, .net, and .org. These will look relatively trustworthy for email, and the price stays very very stable from year to year. If you don't want to think about it, just get one of these. You can even still find single dictionary word domains for .org or .net relatively easily.

Do not buy any domain marked "premium". This means the owner of the TLD can change the price at renewal as dramatically as they want, for any reason (e.g. if you have a website hosted at that domain that becomes popular). Your $20 per year domain might suddenly become a $300 or $3000 per year domain for no reason but greed, and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

Non-premium nTLD's (.club, .horse, .rocks, .theater, etc) can increase quite dramatically in price, BUT the price is required to be set the same for all domains using that nTLD, so they can't target any individual person for having a successful website or whatever. Also, you can pre-buy up to 10 years, which locks in your price for those 10 years. I'd still not recommend them for a primary email, but it's better than buying a "premium" domain. Just be aware that the yearly price might unexpectedly increase in the future.

Some country code TLD's are also good, but for email, probably stay away from the ones that spammers like to use.

___

Anyway, what I actually originally meant to comment about is: if you set up forwarding from gmail and don't check that account regularly anymore, I recommend setting up a gmail filter rule that forwards all your gmail spam to you (their regular forwarding setting leaves it out and just sends it to the gmail spam folder). It's a little annoying to have to re-flag some of the spam as spam in your new email, but gmail has a habit of marking non-spam as spam for me, and if you're not regularly checking that spam folder you can easily miss important email.

[dwedge]

Porkbun have started demanding ID verification for registrations, which depending how you feel about current events might make you reconsider having them on your list

[hogwasher]

When I started using them, they did this by checking against Paypal, with whom (admittedly to my regret) I had already verified myself. I wasn't asked to provide a copy of my ID to them directly, at least, or to provide it anew to one of those random ID verification companies that are popping up out of the woodwork.

It also just bothers me less in this case than in most because, no matter who you buy from, if you ever need to verify ownership of your account/domains, you may eventually be asked to show ID/verify your identity anyway, and if you can't prove you're the person who bought the domain then you risk losing it (say, by not being able to regain control of it after it is stolen). And if it's a domain you've tied your email or business to, and you've pre-payed 10 years, that would suck majorly.

So I feel about it more or less how I feel about my bank needing ID, personally. But I definitely get why others may not agree/may have a different use case to begin with.

I think also there is a big problem with scammers using stolen credit cards to buy domains, which they use to send phishing email or operate malicious websites. Preventing this at least makes way more sense as a motive than "protect the children by identifying all of them".

If you buy from elsewhere, you can find a way to avoid the ID verification, but most places will only take digital payment, so they still probably end up with your card number and name.

I'm not a fan at all of age verification laws and websites requiring ID, but this one I tolerate, personally. But I won't blame anyone for not doing the same.

[ZeWaka]

They've been doing it for a few years. KYC laws. See: legally required for registrants from India

[Sophira]

> Your $20 per year domain might suddenly become a $300 or $3000 per year domain for no reason but greed, and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

Seconding this. Tthis is exactly what happened with the .sexy TLD: https://www.reddit.com/r/Domaining/comments/uia8pc/sexy_tlds...

[wafflemaker]

For quite some time (approx 8 years) I've used an email forwarding (Blur, but any works) to avoid spam.

This looks like perfect case for change of email, since lot of these accounts can be moved out from Gmail by changing the address that email is forwarded too.

Looks like all this hassle with generating a new email for each service pays for the second time (by ease of changing the main mail), in addition to spam and privacy protection.

[hellojesus]

I did this but don't forward. Instead, every new email in Gmail I got would prompt me to go update that service's contact info for me.

It probably doesn't matter, but it made me feel a little better because that way Google wouldn't have direct info on to which email/domain I transfered (ignoring other Gmail contacts that start emailing me at my new address(es) ).

[itake]

I switched to a password manager (bitwarden) about 7 years ago. I have over 200 accounts (not all of them use my @gmail). it would take me weeks to convert those accounts to a new domain, if the application could even support it.

I will admit, many of the accounts are not needed any more. but the process will still be emotionally boring to filter through that.

[fwn]

> ... it would take me weeks to convert those accounts to a new domain ...

I did the same with about the same amount of accounts and it took me the better part of a Saturday. Even if you were really slow and needed five minutes per account, 200 accounts would still only take about 17 hours.

I don't think that's a lot of effort. You could easily spend that time fixing something around the house or garden, which often might not have nearly as big of an impact on personal agency.

[victorbjorklund]

Just give access to clawdbot and let it change the emails for you /jk

[jllyhill]

Do you use single email address on your domain or multiple for different purposes? Or do you have one main address and throwaway aliases for the one-time registration purposes? I see that the Fastmail provides a single inbox that can handle multiple addresses and wonder how does it work.