Receiving is only half of the conversation though - eventually you end up in a situation where you need to reply from the same address.
Also, be prepared for the tech support questions, the "I never received an email from X that they swear they sent", the "My emails seem to take ages to come through", the "My emails are ending up in the recipients spam folder", etc...
In the newspaper industry, the 'Customer' refers to the advertisers who pay for the ads, advertorials, sponsored content, etc that actually make the publication a viable business model.
The individual who buys and reads the newspapaper is referred to as the 'Consumer'.
One of my university professors advised "multiply your best-case-scenario estimate by Pi". It's still absolutely plucking numbers out of the air, but I've found it to be pretty reasonable over the last decade or so...
For me, owning my own email domain is far more about control than privacy. I currently use some MX and SMTP trickery to forward all of my email to Gmail, effectively using Gmail as my 'email client' - but because the domain is mine, I can change that without too much headache, unlike if I were just using an @gmail.com address.
You don’t own a domain name you rent it. If you ever forget to renew it or you are unable to renew it for some reason then it becomes available for anyone else to register. At that point the new owner can receive all your email and potentially access any accounts which use that email as 2FA. I’m not saying you should never do this but it’s not a silver bullet.
Making sure that your domain registration is always current is not a difficult thing, though. You can register for fairly long periods of time, and set up multiple alerts to manually renew long before it expires.
My register doesn’t allow registrations longer than 1 year. Their reason: “ We've found that longer registration periods lead to a higher chance of customers losing or forgetting their account details or missing notifications and ultimately letting their domains expire due to outdated contact information or expired credit card details.”
I’m wondering whether that’s valid and if I should find a new registrar…
That is made up reason. Extension periods depend on TLD providers. I've just checked and e.g. OVH lets me renew .com domain until 2030. You max our renewal now, then setup some "domains housekeeping" day in your yearly calendar to puth the expiration date every year. Pity I can't do that with some proven and basic hosting to prepaid a few years ahead.
yep cos of Covid namecheap sold my domain to a squatter who now wants $10k for something i've renewed for years for $12.
That was so shitty coming back round to reality and everything broken. Still upset about it. To this day I have no idea why the card didn't pay as always.
I don't know about the relationship to Covid, but it sounds like the person's credit card wasn't charged, thus the domain wasn't renewed. After the missed renewal, a squatter bought the domain in hopes of selling back to the original owner (renter) at a premium.
I think the lesson here is prepay for a domain for several years ahead if you plan to keep the domain long-term.
I'm not sure if this was added after your comment, but in the second line of their post jamiek88 said
> To this day I have no idea why the card didn't pay as always.
One can infer that the credit card did not auto-pay, the domain expired, and Namecheap immediately resold the domain to a squatter rather than first reaching out to jamiek88 to confirm that the non-renewal was intentional.
> Namecheap immediately resold the domain to a squatter
No I don't see how their post allows one to infer that Namecheap "immediately" resold the domain. Their policy is a 30 day grace period, and within that 30 days the domain should become non functional, so if you're actively using it then you would know something is up.
Sounds like jamiek88 was squatting on a somewhat desirable domain and is just sad they couldn't follow some basic instructions.
I have no idea what the "because of COVID" thing is about.
Breaking the site guidelines like this is definitely not ok and will get your account banned, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Pay a bit more annually to a reputable DNS company. For example, I initially whet with GoDaddy, until about ten years ago when I read that they were shutting down people's domains simply upon a "we're investigating thisbperson, kill their domain" letter from the US Marshals (a Federal police force). Around the same time I heard about easyDNS in Canada, and discovered that they will only ever seize one of their customer's domains if they receive proper papers from a court---i.e. a search warrant. I like that they're committed to rule of law rather than politically motivated deplatforming.
How do your have your outgoing mail configured? Up until recently Gmail would let you send email from another domain, but they seem to have shut this down.
I have my domain hosted on a service that provides web hosting and email. I configured Gmail to pickup that email and merge with my gmail mails. I can choose to send as either my gmail address or my personal domain address. I just tried it now and it worked just fine.
To register a domain, you must provide an existing email address (not at that domain, of course). True story: I registered a domain with email from openmailbox.org. That email provider has closed, and my domain went puff with it.
Another very happy (paying) customer of ImprovMX here. I have a dozen or so domains for family and friends configured this way, using ImprovMX for both inbound MX and outbound SMTP (using Gmail as the 'front end' mailbox, but using the custom domain/addresses everywhere).
I too gave up self hosting this all a few years ago - especially when hosting domains for others (family) who aren't tech savvy, I got sick of having to troubleshoot why their emails weren't being delivered. Outsourcing the delivery component to ImprovMX and the mail storage and even inbound spam filtering to Gmail, made things so much easier, even if it does mean relying on a centralised party like ImprovMX.
Well I'm slowly seeing competitors a alternatives pop up, so if it falls apart, we might have places to go. Even Cloudflare now offers a similar service. Minus the SMTP part.
As an SAU member for almost 20 years, the site is a shadow of its former self. The technical areas tend to be very much a ghost town, with link-rot setting in pretty hard (broken images that were once hosted on imageshack or Photobucket for example really hurt the quality of many of the DIY guides etc). The social areas are mainly a handful of as you say the "old-school crew", but nothing like "back in the day". Other than a handful of motorsport/trackday events each year, the 'club events', especially the 'social' type like cruises and meetups, are almost non-existent. I'm not sure if that's because those events tend to now be organised over social media in smaller circles, or if they just don't happen.
In short, there's just not really much attracting new (or existing, evidently) users to the forum these days. I'd say it's a classic catch-22... people don't frequent the forums so the content (and experience) suffers, and then people don't want to frequent the forums because the content and experience aren't that great any more.
Just in case anyone reading this is considering purchasing the Astro Slide... be very wary. I backed the Indiegogo campaign over 2 years ago, still nothing. The wait isn't the issue here (COVOD and the related supply chain issues are real, I get that), but the major lack of transparency from PlanetCom is abysmal. A quick read of a few pages of the comments on the Indiegogo campaign page gives you a pretty clear picture of how many of the backers feel...
