Email woes

Please can anyone offer advice on how to obtain a personal internet domain name, I've had my fill of "hotmail"?

Thanks,

Rob

used gmail for a couple of years with no issues

I get mine through a firm called UK2 (there are others) and it's not very expensive. However, I suggest you stick to the better known domain names [is that the proper name for them?] such as .com, .co.uk and so on. There were loads of new names released a few years ago, and it has taken the rest of the internet years to catch up with them.

Before I retired I took one out which ended in .engineering and it made a nice elegant email address. However, I never knew if an email would get though to my customers because the corporate anti-spam systems would stop my emails and I never knew if they got through or not. Eventually I stopped using it and took one out ending in .com. End of problem.

George

You need to register a name through the domain registrar in your country (or elsewhere). Then you need to "park" that domain somewhere which will host it and make it "live" on the internet. I use EasyDNS but there are many others.

The host will usually handle the domain registration for you too if you want. The domain reg costs an annual fee. Some hosts will do basic other stuff for nothing.

The host will then let you create email addresses from your domain and forward them to wherever. They will also let you block some if you want.

For example if my domain is mydom.ca, I have it set up so that anything coming in to [email protected] gets forwarded to my local isp. If one particular address (say [email protected]) has fallen into the hands of a spammer, I can set the host to trash anything to that address without passing it on. I can also set other specific forms of the address to go elsewhere (family members etc).

Note that if you route something from your personal domain through Gmail (and, I suspect, others; more as time goes on) you will have to make sure its set up properly ... particularly DKIM, SPF, DMARC records ... at the host. (I don't really understand them either. I stumbled through mine with a lot of help from EasyDNS). They help to prevent the nefarious from spoofing your address.There is a big push on email spam detection/prevention these days).

Edited By Peter Greene 🇨🇦 on 21/06/2023 18:37:27

I have a hotmail account but very rarely use it. May I ask why you’ve had enough of it?

Thanks for the replies.................

Hello Vic,

I'm aware of the phrase................

"If you pay for a service then you are the customer, if you don't have to pay then you become the product"

I just can't seem to get the email spam filters to work effectively for me.

Nominet here is the official manager of .uk domains so you could register a .co.uk name with them for a small annual fee. It can then be accessed through gmail if you wish.

If possible use your actual name, or nickname that you are most known by. It is really annoying seeing something come in from say RT491 and have to remember that is you, and it is likely to get labelled as a spammer anyway. Also annoying to have to remember what you call yourself when trying to add you to a lost of people to copy a mail to.

Note there is a difference to registering a website and having associated emails on the same name structure and just arranging for an email on its own and some of the advice may be conflating the two.

I've used easyspace.com as my registrar for a number of .co.uk, .uk, .org and .com domains for a couple of decades. Completely satisfied with the service and the prices.

They will also handle the email for your domain for a small fee if you don't run your own mailserver.

Reading this, I just wondered if the question is "correct "- it seems from Robs initial post that he is fed up with Hotmail as his email provider, and is looking to get a new e-mail address (or have I got it wrong?).

There are many companies providing e-mail services, some better than others - Gmail is suggested in the thread. Personally I dislike the intrusiveness of Google - my email provider is Mail.com (LINK) , which have used for years - it allows you a lot of flexibility in selection of an e-mail address, is free, and I have had no problems with it.

Do you actually need a personal domain name ? Do you want a website associated with it ?

You could use [email protected] or something very similar. Then no annual fees or webhosting to mess with.

regards

Well, he did say " Please can anyone offer advice on how to obtain a personal internet domain name"

+1 for me. I have used Gmail for almost 20 years now and it is excellent in all regards. Zero spam in my inbox. Zero. No spam, no scams. And no legitimate emails wrongly dumped in the spam folder. Even the spam folder seems to get very little spam in it. Gmail seems to filter out spam before it even gets to users. Totally excellent.

My old Hotmail account on the other hand is complete rubbish. Completely flooded with spam and scams to the point I have it set so only emails from those on my contact list go into my inbox. I still use this old account where things on the net insist I provide an email address but I don't really want to. That is about all it is good for.

Get a Gmail account. You won;t be sorry.

And all those people who post on here about the latest scam emails they have received would do well to get one too.

Edited By Hopper on 22/06/2023 06:52:28

Hopper - Interesting to hear about your positive experience with Gmail - my experience was entirely the opposite. It never seemed to learn what spam was, and I got sick of having to recover non-spam emails it had blocked. I finally disabled the spam interception. I also (sometimes) experience long delays in mail delivery - people phone me to ask 'have you seen my mail'?, which hasn't arrived, then may turn up as late as 2 or 3 days later. And complaining to Google is a total waste of time.

I am also fairly conscientious about erasing 'dead' e-mails that I no longer need, so never really have a lot of stuff in my inbox - maybe only 20 or 30 mails. However, one day I was searching through Gmails settings for something, and came across what seemed to be a "History' page - it contained literally every single email I had sent or received over a 15 year period, even though I believed I had been deleting them. (hence my comment earlier about Google intrusiveness). It took me quite a long time to erase them all, and nowadays, although I still have the Google Account, I rarely use it, precisely because they seem to retain everything.

Added: it regularly used to dump private ME mails as scam.

Before you ask, I have no idea how I got to the page I mention, although I have since looked for it several times.

It would seem that what is sauce for the goose is poisonous to the gander.

I moved on the Mail.Com as a result.

Edited By An Other on 22/06/2023 08:00:33

Surprised to hear that An Other. Not my experience at all. Maybe it is my internet service provider who filters out most of the spam then? I would not have thought that possible, but I am not a tech head, just a user.

What you found sounds like the "Sent Mail" folder. Most email software has it. Any email you send sits in there forever. Very handy for recovering stuff you have deleted from the inbox if it was part of a back and forth conversation. On Gmail l there is a list of folders down the left of the page with a button to click on to see "More" and the Sent Mail folder lurks in there, along with the Bin and Spam and Drafts folders. If you want to empty it in one click there is usually a small square button at the top of the list of emails in the folder. You click on that and it highlights all emails and then you hit the delete button and they are all gone. Yes could take a while to get 15 years worth gone!

Edited By Hopper on 22/06/2023 08:08:27

Edited By Hopper on 22/06/2023 08:10:36

Hopper, Thanks for your reply - but it was none of the possibilities you mention, which is why I was concerned. It was definitely not the "Sent' folder, and it contained both sent and received emails - absolutely everything. I not only used to empty the inbox, but all the folders you mention. As an aside to this, I recently had to help a friend who had no idea that all his deleted mails, etc, actually still existed, and had just been moved out of sight, until one day his mail began to act erratically because it was full. Deleting the contents of the bin, and other folders, solved the problem.

In view of Googles well-known propensity fro data-scraping, I keep as far away from any of their products as possible. There are better alternatives, fortunately. One has to wonder why they have an interest in personal emails.

Rob - sorry this has deviated from your original query - I'll shut up now!

Must say I have used Gmail for more years than I want to remember with no problems. No spam etc etc.

regards

UK2 for me as well.

I`ve also used one of the email addresses I have as a sort of throw away one. Anything I think I might get spammed from uses that address and trusted sites get a different one.

For many years I have used what is now Ionos but was 1and1. Have to pay but we get at least 5 email addresses, my own domain and website if I want it, spam filtering, access from regular email clients such as Thunderbird or Outlook, and webmail from any browser. My wife uses it from the Apple email client on her Macbook and the Gmail client on her phone.

**LINK**

Added: they take care of all the domain registration stuff so you only need to deal with Ionos.

Edited By John Haine on 22/06/2023 09:52:41

...and on the rare occasions where I've had a problem I couldn't sort myself their phone hotline answered quickly and was very helpful.

Edited By John Haine on 22/06/2023 09:54:35