Question for people who have emails at their own domain: what do you pick as your email address? Do you typically use first@firstlast.com? firstlast@firstlast.com? first@last.com? me@firstlast.com? Do you typically use multiple accounts?
It took me a while to figure this out but I've now settled with the following:
- mail@firstlast.tld for personal emails directed at me only and written by a human being, i.e. emails that warrant my personal response
- <SomeServiceIsignedUpfor>@firstlast.tld for automated emails from services like Amazon, Facebook, eBay, HN, …. These are usually computer-generated emails that don't warrant a response, so they are merely notifications.
The neat thing about this approach is that:
a) the list of email aliases contains all the services I've signed up for, ever
b) I can easily stop a service from sending me emails by simply deleting the alias. In particular, if an email address leaks to spammers, I simply delete it.
c) I can distinguish between personal and non-personal email and can prioritize accordingly. I look at my personal emails more often than at my non-personal ones.
Do you have a method for quickly creating new aliases on the fly?
My setup is nearly the same. I use two domains such as firstlast.tld and genericwords.tld.
Genericwords.tld has umbrella aliases for social, apps, subscriptions, orders, etc. I have rules setup up per umbrella alias to delete after 30 days, or always mark as read, or never mark as read.
I originally had service/site specific aliases in mind for easy deletion, but for my setup this creates a layer of friction that makes it quite cumbersome.
I considered umbrella+servicename aliases but those are not always guaranteed to be accepted.
Yes, umbrella+servicename sometimes causes issues as I had to learn the hard way, too.
As for me, I use PostfixAdmin (https://github.com/postfixadmin/postfixadmin) to add aliases. Certainly not the quickest method but fairly quick I'd say. Clearly, it'd be even nicer if my password manager created an email alias for new accounts automatically.
For a while I had first@last.email but I got tired of paying for the last.email domain, so I now use contact@firstlast.com where I also use firstlast.com for my website.
Also, I have a few other emails like accounts@firstlast.com (for signing up to websites), travel@firstlast.com, business@firstlass.com, etc.
The way I have it set up is a wildcard *@firstlast.com and filters to move username@firstlast.com to a folder called username. So I can come up with new email addresses on the spot for specific purposes. Like when I go to the doctor I might give them health@firstlast.com
It depends on the availability of your preferred domain.
Ideally I'd have used first@last.com. But since it wasn't available I use fl@firstlast.com (fl are the initials).
The reason I use my initials instead of "me@" is because some clients show that username as the sender, and it didn't look good to have the sender be "me".
My domain is something that I've had for a long time and it's my preferred nick online (rolisz). The email address I give out to humans is then first@domain_name
I have kind of a long last name and combined with the fact that many have said to only use .com for professional purposes (general public isn't so familiar with many other tlds), I do:
firstname@firstname[first character of my last name].com
Although... I do have firstname@sdan.io but unsure how "professional" that is, so I use it for other newsletters/subscriptions
I had a few email addresses for a while, and the one that I stuck with was created with the goal of being as short as possible (since back then, I had to type my email into sites on my phone a lot). I was lucky to get my initials as a domain, so I made it <z@zjm.me>. 8 characters – haven't seen a shorter one yet.
For my personal domain, I use me@chrismorgan.info. *@chrismorgan.info will reach me, and occasionally I give out addresses with a different localpart, either privately (for things that require an email address and I grudgingly agree to) or publicly (for a particular project, for convenient automatic categorisation).
