Own Your Email Domain

Your email address is one of the most important aspects of your online experience. You use it to communicate with others, receive newsletters, and log in to various websites. However, you most likely don’t own the domain for your email address and I believe you should reconsider that and own your email domain.

What’s an email domain? #

Simple! It’s the part of your email address that comes after the @ symbol. For example, given the email address [email protected] the email domain is example.com.

Who owns my email domain? #

Your email provider owns your email domain. That is, unless you’ve configured your email provider to use your own email domain in which case you aren’t the target audience for this post.

Here’s a table of common email providers and their respective email domains.

Why should I own my email domain? #

You should own your email domain for disaster recovery purposes and, if you’re using an email for business, branding and marketing purposes. I know the average person doesn’t normally think about disaster recovery but let me remind you just how critical email is with a simple question.

What other accounts would you lose access to if you could no longer access your email?

Email is tightly integrated with authentication to various accounts. Financial accounts, social accounts, and other miscellaneous accounts all use your email address in the following ways.

• To reset your password when it’s forgotten.

• To send you a magic link to log in.

• To send you a verification code to log in.

• To sign you in via OAuth by redirecting you to a third-party account to log in with your email address. For the “well, actually” crowd that’s reading this, yes, good OAuth implementations should allow for email address changes but there are bad implementations out there that will create a separate account if you change your email address and then log in via OAuth.

Say you’re using Gmail or iCloud as your email provider. Will your email still work when Gmail or iCloud shuts down? I know it’s highly unlikely that Gmail or iCloud will ever shut down. Even if they did there are too many people using them for email that some entity will likely have to take over email functionality. Still, it’s a risk.

Let’s look at a more realistic example. Your Gmail and iCloud email is tied to your Google account or Apple ID respectively. That means violating the Google or Apple terms of service can lead to your account being banned or deactivated which means losing access to your email. It doesn’t even have to be a malicious action either. Perhaps you uploaded a video to YouTube that broke some arbitrary rule or tried to skirt around Apple’s tough App Store guidelines and received an automatic ban by some bot. In the best case you’re without email access for a few hours or days. In the worst case you no longer have access to that email address ever again.

If this happens you can’t even take your email address to another email provider since you don’t own the domain. Instead you’re forced to create another email account and reach out the accounts you lost access to and beg support to update the email address so you can log back in. Good luck with that! If you owned your email domain you could have taken that domain to another email provider and continued sending and receiving email.

If you’re using your email address for business this same risk still applies. Do you want to notify your customers that your email address changed because you no longer have access to the previous one? Owning your email domain means your business website domain can be the same as your business email domain. No more [email protected]. Instead you can have [email protected] or whatever name you desire. This builds trust with your customers and allows you to move email providers as your business scales without changing your email domain. Plus, if you can’t be bothered to spend money on your email domain for your business why should customers bother spending money with your business?

How do I own my email domain? #

Owning your email domain will cost you money via initial registration fees and annual renewal fees for the domain and monthly subscription fees for the email provider. This is the cost to owning your email domain and not having your data mined to use a “free” email provider.

Here’s the process to own your own email domain.

1. Register a domain (e.g., example.com) with a domain registrar (e.g., Porkbun). This usually costs an initial registration fee plus an annual renewal fee.

2. Choose an email provider that supports custom email domains (e.g., Google Workspace, Proton Mail) and sign up for their service. This usually costs a monthy subscription fee.

3. Configure the email provider to use your custom email domain. This is usually done by going to the DNS provider for your email domain, which is your domain registrar by default, and adding the DNS records that your email provider tells you to add. Usually, you’ll add the following types of DNS records.

   1. MX - Tells email clients which mail servers to use when sending email to your email domain.

   2. TXT - Used to verify that you own the email domain and provide advanced email features like SPF and DMARC.

   3. CNAME - Used to provide advanced email features like DKIM.

4. Log into your email provider and test sending and receiving email via your custom email domain.

For reference, here are the DNS records my email provider Proton Mail asked me to create in order to use matthewsanabria.dev as a custom email domain.

# MX records.
> dig +short -t MX matthewsanabria.dev
10 mail.protonmail.ch.
20 mailsec.protonmail.ch.

# TXT records for domain verification and SPF.
> dig +short -t TXT matthewsanabria.dev
"protonmail-verification=fa33422884d6fb9b9ca055b36c0331d776f7c81b"
"v=spf1 include:_spf.protonmail.ch ~all"

# TXT record for DMARC.
> dig +short -t TXT _dmarc.matthewsanabria.dev
"v=DMARC1; p=quarantine"

# CNAME records for DKIM.
> dig +short -t CNAME \
  protonmail._domainkey.matthewsanabria.dev \
  protonmail2._domainkey.matthewsanabria.dev \
  protonmail3._domainkey.matthewsanabria.dev
protonmail.domainkey.dr2r5cad2tpxcph27dvyoyxthh5mud6cdmi3yfvrtgltkvlj7vdwq.domains.proton.ch.
protonmail2.domainkey.dr2r5cad2tpxcph27dvyoyxthh5mud6cdmi3yfvrtgltkvlj7vdwq.domains.proton.ch.
protonmail3.domainkey.dr2r5cad2tpxcph27dvyoyxthh5mud6cdmi3yfvrtgltkvlj7vdwq.domains.proton.ch.

Conclusion #

There’s not much else to say. Go out there and own your email domain!