I’m looking to buy a domain (or multiple) to use for email aliasing.
I’m trying to figure out what’s the cheapest I can reasonably pay while still having a TLD that isn’t considered spammy and going to get blocked somehow. I really don’t care what the domain name or TLD are. I just don’t want to have any technical difficulties using these emails.
Obviously .com .net .org are solid but they look to renew for about $15/year, at least on Namecheap. I get the impression from this thread that I should avoid ccTLDs, so that takes out .io and .me, etc. Are there any other TLDs that tend to be reliable? Or other tips about saving money on a domain? Like I said, I don’t care what it is as long as it works, and I’m also okay with paying several years up front.
Proton uses proton.me. Honestly I’m not sure blocking emails based purely on the TLD is really a thing anymore. I’d go with the cheapest reasonable option that you actually like.
TLD blocking is still kind of a thing, but it’s few and far between these days. Most servers have moved on to SMTP level rejection based on authentication rather than just looking at the TLD. I mean even a standard .com can get rejected just like me back in high school if it doesn’t have valid DMARC, SPF, and DKIM records set up.
Plus, there are some AI tools being used now to help filter things out. Just an example off the top of my head, TLDs owned by Google are treated with much higher trust out of the gate than a generic one, like .xyz, for example.
For the most part, the only thing that should be a consideration is if domains for a TLD are super inexpensive. I’m not saying this is the case though.
~$15 for a domain renewal is pretty common. I would highly recommend not using the super cheap ones for sending email, it’s not worth the hassle. I would look around at different email providers and compare cost as well.
I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that most of my emails end up in people’s spam in large part because of the TLD, and it’s not one of the cheap ones. I keep on waiting hoping that I just need to use it more to improve the reputation of it, it’s hard to use it though when people might not see my emails.
Fwiw, you can get slightly lower renewal prices from Porkbun or Spaceship. The latter currently (I just checked on another tab) have .com and .org renewals for under $10/yr, with .net at $11.20/yr. Obviously this might change by the time you renew, but that applies to all registrars.
As for the type of TLD, I cannot comment. I played it safe and got a .net for myself. From what I understand, certain TLDs like .lol, .club or .vip can have problems with certain e-commerce checkout systems. Country associated TLDs (.me is actually Montenegro, fyi) shouldn’t pose such issues.