alt Hacker News"own your domain" is technobabble to 99.999+% of email users. Most people understand emails addresses are <something> "@gmail.com" or "@yahoo.com" or "@<somebigcompany>.com". They don't understand the parts of an email address, nor how or why they are constructed that way.
I have been using a personal domain for my email address for decades and when I have to give it out verbally to someone, it is about a 50% chance that the conversation is:
"My email is <[email protected]>"
"uuhhh... at gmail.com?"
"No it's just <@myname.tld>"
"Yeah, but is it gmail or yahoo?"
Replies
This was the exact kind of trouble I used to have when I gave out @myname.com emails. It was super not worth it. It confused people all the time. I switched to a plain Gmail with nothing hard to spell, just a few letters and (sadly) numbers. (I waited like a decade before 'claiming' a Gmail address, so no decent versions of my name or anything professional remained without numbers.)
Also, Gmail actually blocks true spam, whereas nothing I tried on my shared-hosting server with SpamAssassin ever worked.
I don't have any love for Google, but I'll never go back to giving out a personal domain email for any reason.
Worse is the California DMV. All password reset emails going to my custom .com would be subject to multi-hour delays; the password resets were valid for only a few minutes. The only way into the account was to call the tech support phone line. I had them delete the old account and re-registered with a bland gmail email address.
I don't know of any technical reason to delay emails to minor domains. My domain has valid MX records, uses SPF, has valid DKIM TXT records, etc.
I would argue a US mailing address is at least as complicated a structure, but people managed to figure out the state abbreviations and ZIP Codes fine. We just need to teach it in elementary school just like we do addresses.
Speaking of that I do wish the post office had a mail service where they issued addresses to citizens or something.
Just curious: do you own your own domain? My experience is that many (most?) people who would be competent to own their own domain just don't.
That's why you don't sell it as if you were marketing it to techies:
They could handle the domain registration for the user, whether by being a registrar themselves, or partnering with another registrar behind the scenes. And yes, most people will still pick the free option. But that's ok.I've had my own domain for a good 20 years now, and while I've encountered some confusion when giving it out, it's never been as bad as you describe, and people get it without my having to go into a technical explanation. And regardless, the reason there is this problem is because easy, seamless personal-domain options don't really exist. If they did, this problem would go away. I don't really consider this to be an obstacle.