Don't Use a gmail.com Address

I host my own email. I also have a gmail account, that I've had since the beta.

I cannot tell you how many times I have encountered a person that asks for my email and then looked at me confused when it didn't end in gmail, outlook, or something, and then ask me for another email, as if only that would be good enough.

Inferred context: It's the (unverified) email field of a blog comment submission form. gmail.com happens to be the domain that spammers pick most often for their fake email addresses for their spam comments.

I gave up on reporting spam. Almost all of the spam I get (and I get a lot of it!) comes from Google, Amazon and Microsoft. None of them care much, none of them make reporting easy, and it seems they don't follow up, because the flood of spam never ceases.

They are "too big to fail": few people can afford to just block Google. This is why I am very happy to see people starting to do just that.

Blog is getting too much spam, so they are restricting posts/comments from Gmail.com addresses.

That's ok, I understand the desire. I also recognize that it's a lazy "fix". I have my own domain and prefer that so I can track compromised sites.

In quasi-related conversation though, in the last year I have encountered 2 "necessary" websites (insurance, and medical form) that would only accept: Gmail, yahoo, outlook, etc addresses!

It's frustrating.

Given they accept any input that presumably matches a regex it doesn’t matter which one you choose.

But if you are looking for a new email provider and de-Google your life, I’m pretty with ProtonMail and their other offerings. Also moved my 2FA and Password manager to them, alongside their VPN.

I think the difference between Google's DMARC policy for gmail.com and google.com says it all:

  bcrl@home:~/electronics/vrm/lm5017/test-lm5017-isobuck$ host -t txt _dmarc.gmail.com
  _dmarc.gmail.com descriptive text "v=DMARC1; p=none; sp=quarantine; rua=mailto:[email protected]"

  bcrl@home:~/electronics/vrm/lm5017/test-lm5017-isobuck$ host -t txt _dmarc.google.com
  _dmarc.google.com descriptive text "v=DMARC1; p=reject; rua=mailto:[email protected]"

That ship has sailed. A far as most are concerned gmail is email. So that is now the reality. Google has successfully, without any resistance, assimilated email and the web.

I run my own mail and I faithfully avoid chrome as much as I can but the ship is long gone over the horizon.

Sad. But so it goes.

Why not just add extra verification for Gmail addresses?

"Blog flooded in spam" but it has less than 50 comments on all posts generally? Or is it assuming they are deleting or blocking the supposed flood of spam comments that is unbearable enough to block gmail?

Quoting a dead comment:

>I wish we didn't have to use email at all.

Email has big problems, but contemplate the kind of lovecraftian horror the great minds of silicon valley would replace it with today. Imagine the worst parts of Facebook, Electron, Discord, Windows 11, CloudFlare and TikTok. Secured by Denuvo and the CIA and brought to you by Dollar Shave Club and the Chinese Communist Party.

You'd wish you had email back.

Some tiny blog allows comments (which is incredibly weird in 2026). Spambots fill in the email box with fake addresses. Blog lazily just sets up a filter to auto-kill all gmail tagged addresses.

This has nothing to do with Google, Gmail, spam coming from gmail, or using gmail addresses, outside of leaving a comment on this tiny blog. Yet all the other comments seem to presume they do. Are people just upvoting this thinking it says something it doesn't? (That was rhetorical, because of course this nonsense front-paged because of lazy people just voting on a title).

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Can't be preaching to others about "privacy", or disliking Ads and then at the same time be using a gmail.com address.