Email alias, should I use a custom domain?

Privacy
1

I’ve been looking to revamp my email aliasing strategy. I have a Protonmail account as well as SImpleLogin.

I plan to use some form of email alias for all communication types:

  • personal emails with family / friends (as needed)
  • important accounts (finances, healthcare, etc)
  • unimportant accounts (shopping, social media, etc)

My question is: does it make sense to use a custom domain with my aliases? My 2 thoughts:

  1. On the one hand, using a custom domain means that if SimpleLogin shuts down, I can simply point the domain to another service and continue without much interruption
  2. On the other hand, doesn’t a custom domain also mean that the domain can be linked to me? Or that all the various accounts using my custom domain (efg.abc) will be entirely unique to me , versus using the simplelogin.com address?

As far as my threat model, the things I’m most concerned with are:

  • data breaches leaking any personal information
  • mass surveillance and surveillance capitalism
  • some degree of anonymity outside of services that absolutely require my identity (banking, healthcare, etc)
2

I went with a custom domain for the following reasons:

  1. If something goes wrong with the provider it is easy to switch. I have done that and using a catch-all I was up and running on a new provider in a few minutes.
  2. No issues with my domain being rejected.
  3. I have full flexibility in the names, so I can have random letters for one, numbers and letters for another, or something that looks like a person’s name if required.

As for the concern about connecting accounts, I think that is not a real concern. Yes if someone went to the trouble they could connect the accounts, but if I have a .com domain, how do they know it is not a company where random employees have used their work account for personal use? Much more likely that they connect you through fingerprinting or tracking your browser, or for shopping sites, your name/address/card/phone number.

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3

These are good points. Thanks for your help!

4

Yep pro and cons. You weight them both and decide whats best for you.

Pro of using own domain name for email is total control and total portability. With custom domain, changing mail provider is just the matter of editing few dns records and waiting few minutes for it to propagate and it’ll be routed to new provider while keeping all existing address@ still valid and intact. Cons of it is technically less privacy if a dataminer could realize address1@ address2@ address3@ and so on is really just 1 person using @mydomain.com

Pro of using mail provider domain is more privacy since you’ll be hiding amongs thousands or millions other people sharing the same @domain.com. Cons of it is you’ll at the mercy of the mail provider, sudden tos change could mean you’ll lose all your digital life linked to the address@theirdomain.com overnight. Case in hand, Google is notorious for arbitrarily banning users out of nowhere without citing what tos being breaked. Also, Skiff ceased operation taking down their @skiff.com.

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