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I think that the article confuses privacy with anonymity. A gmail.com address does not stand out as much, but it is much less private than a self-hosted account on a domain and servers that I own and control.

In my view, privacy is not about being inrecognizable, it's about having control over what aspects of my identity are revealed to the public. A custom domain (unless you're using your last name or something similar) reveals very little about you except maybe your pseudonym and the fact you probably run your own email.

If you're looking for anonymity, email is a very bad place to start. That being said, I still use my gmail occasionally, mainly for things that need 100% uptime and can't ever get filtered by the recipient's spam filter. My doctor's appointments, electronic ID, for example, still have my Gmail set as a backup address, mainly to prevent me losing basic services in case of some catastrophic failure of my servers.

Overall, running email yourself is fairly complicated, and probably one of the last things you ever want to do self-hosting-wise.




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