Most people don’t own their email address
An email address is personal info, but most people don’t own theirs. Learn how to take ownership.
Just like your phone number or your home address, your email address is personal information. Whether you like to share it publicly or keep it private for your friends and family, you should always own it. And I mean, really own it.
Why this matters
If you never thought about this, chances are your email address ends in @gmail.com, @icloud.com or perhaps even @hotmail.com or a more modern @outlook.com. The truth is that all those companies—Google, Apple and Microsoft—offer somewhat generous tiers for free accounts, so it’s understandable why most people start there.
Even if you use any other service that doesn’t have a major tech company behind it, you’re still not owning your email address. I’ll explain why down below.
You see, companies—especially Google—are well known for ruthlessly kill off products without asking their users if they’re okay with it.
Remember Inbox by Gmail? That’s just one example of a product Google killed that was used by millions and actually offered a different approach to email than what the majority was offering at the time.
Of course companies like Google thrive on data. So it’s unlikely they will kill their free tier email service any time soon. But it could happen. Nothing is stopping them. If they do, what happens to your @gmail.com email address? You would suddenly loose access to all your email history, you wouldn’t be able to get new emails, the websites you have accounts linked to your Gmail account wouldn’t be able to confirm your identity… Saying it would be chaotic isn’t too far fetched, I believe.
Besides, according to their terms and conditions, a company could just decide that you violated some specific rule and block you from using their service without prior notice. You would end up in the same situation.
Address vs Service
To understand how you can prevent this from happening to you, you need to learn the different between email address and email service.
An email address, like [email protected] is just the address you’re sending the email to. Like when you send a postcard—a physical one—to a physical address. That’s the address you write down on the back of the postcard.
But an address without a house doesn’t get mail.
In other words, an address without a service doesn’t get emails.
For the sake of this article we’re completely ignoring the fact that email servers also play a crucial role in email delivering, just like your mailman does.
Tech companies usually make it easy for you by providing you an address of your choice coupled with a service they already provide for paid accounts. For instance, Apple lets you pick an email address ending in @icloud.com, just like Google does with @gmail.com. But you’re forced to use their email service with it.
And yes, you can still use their email service without using that free email address.
Although that’s usually a paid feature, that’s exactly what you should do!
Owning your email address
To own your email address you must first get a domain name. Like johnwick.com. You may or may not provide a website for people accessing this URL. That’s another service hosted in this address we’re not going to touch on right now.
By having access to your own domain name, you’re in control of your email address. This means that while today you’re using Apple’s email service, tomorrow you can switch to another service while maintaining the address. The point of contact doesn’t change. Your contacts can keep sending emails to the same address. All websites you’re signed up to can still send you emails and you will get them—as long as you have a service.
You can even have multiple email addresses coupled with a single domain name! Let’s say the domain name is wick.com, and there would be [email protected] as well as [email protected].
And you will quickly realize you could have multiple email addresses for different purposes too. Say [email protected] for classic cars forums? Or [email protected] for communication with hotels? Even [email protected] for any e-commerce website you sign up to? The possibilities are endless.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, but having your own domain name implies recurring costs. I’m not going to mention any domain registar as that’s something you can easily find online and I’m not affiliated with any of them, but you can get a .com domain name, for instance, for about 15€ per year.
That’s not a lot, if you ask me!
Privacy matters too
Besides multiple custom email addresses, email services can also provide either random/private email addresses or a catch-all feature. This is relevant because with those, you can effectively have endless email addresses that you can use with strangers, services, websites or whatever without revealing your real email address that you can keep just for your family and close friends.
For instance, instead of [email protected]—yes, I like John Wick—John might give out a private email address for a new service he’s subscribing such as [email protected]. This email address is unique and specific for that service. And the emails sent to it will land on John’s personal inbox—no need to manage multiple inboxes.
And since this is a unique email address used only for this service, it makes it super easy to completely stop getting emails from them by removing this alias from your inbox. That’s it. Now that’s an invalid address, and you won’t get any emails sent to it anymore.
See the power of separating your email address from your email service?
Alternative email services
Of course there’s nothing wrong with using Google or Apple’s email services with your own domain name. For instance Apple provides a privacy feature just like the one I mentioned above called Hide my Email. And Google has a neat trick that not everyone is aware of. Two actually.
For instance, if your email is [email protected], if someone sends emails to [email protected] or [email protected] you will still get them! Makes it very easy to create multiple addresses, but they’re not exactly private emails since you can easily guess the real address behind these.
Although, if you’re looking for alternatives, I would suggest Proton—not affiliated to me in any way.
It’s not only an email service but also a password manager, VPN, calendar, file storage and doc editing… and all that with a privacy-first approach. I don’t personally use it, but I’ve seen very good reviews of it, and I would switch to it if I was looking for a new service.
But if you would like to go the next mile in privacy, then you would need something that’s self-hosted like Mailpile. A free and open source email service software that you can install and manage on your own. This means you won’t have another subscription, you won’t get spied on by big tech companies and you’ll have full control over your data. The downside? You have to do it yourself.
Email clients matter too
You may remember that we talked about email addresses and email services above. But we left one important thing behind. That’s email clients—your actual mailbox, if you will. That’s the “thing” you go to when you want to check your new mail.
I used plenty of them in the past. And the only I can currently recommend is Mailmate. It’s developed by a single guy in Denmark named Benny—a really nice guy!
Mailmate is a power user mail client for macOS. Yes, it’s only for macOS. No iOS or iPad OS. Not even Windows or Linux. But if you use macOS and are comfortable with keyboard shortcuts I highly recommend giving it a try. I spent more time configuring it than what I’d like to—and that already tells you a lot about it—but now I have full control over my inbox.
I get only the important stuff in my inbox. Everything else is neatly organized into folders I can look at at a later point, when I have the time.
Takeaways
- Get your own domain name;
- Create your own email address;
- Subscribe to a privacy focused email service; or
- Install an email webserver and host it yourself;
- Don’t give away your real email address to everyone;
- Use a powerful email client;
With this setup, if at some point in the future you need to change services you can rest assure that nothing will be user-facing. Meaning, all your friends can continue using the same email address to send you event invites, and you will still be able to access them.
