Ask HN: Is it a bad idea to make an email domain with an uncommon TLD? I want to make a lifelong email domain, but don't want to pay an enormous amount for a .com. If I do a ".party" or something, will that ruin my life? Will web forms still reject it and will people always be adding ".com" whenever I tell it to them? |
I would never use my .fun or .pictures domains for email; I imagine there are lots of places still using ancient regexes for domain checking.
Ended up setting up Google Voice to immediately go to voicemail for all non-contacts and used a generic "this phone number is not in service" message with that ascending tone. No idea if that actually had an effect but the number of spam calls plummeted after about a month of that and is basically back to normal now.
I'm still steering clear of .us after that experience...
You should be fine- of course doing business with a silly domain name ymmv:
Shypooper.party or valiumlover.me might give employers & recruiters pause to think.
The only drawback I can think of is some sites not recognizing the TLD like you already suggested.
What cost do you consider enormous?
Yes, they're not the cheapest, but they're still cheaper than many other types.
Not necessarily. Say you apply to a job advert and use an email address from your personal email domain as your contact. Say email exchanges between you and your potential future employer are silently dropped because their email provider deems your domain non-kosher. Your application is ultimately dropped as a result. Does this classify as "ruin my life"?
Before this scenario is brushed off as hypothetical, this happened to me on a couple of occasions albeit by using a not-so-popular email provider (i.e., not Gmail).
It ends up being overly confusing when communicating it.
it depends on the kind of people you you are networking with, I suppose.
Also, check the renewal price - some of those newer TLDs have much higher fees for renewal than initial registration.
Biggest issue is trust, everybody will assume you’re a spam domain. Never mind the numerous number of forms that won’t allow it.
What's the "worth" part mean here?
Combination of spam classification and form fill regex issues
But, here is a fun lil screenshot from the exchange online antispam policies: https://i.imgur.com/fuUWke4.png
The one I’m using is far more expensive than com though so that may have helped
One of the biggest regrets I have is buying a .us domain
It is forbidden by law to obfuscate the domain holder on the Whois record, like you can with any other domain.
A decade after it expired, I finally stopped getting calls from web developers on the other side of the world trying to build me a site.
So as well as the issues with trying to explain a TLD to people and bad validation, you're also going to find that your emails are more likely to get flagged as spam out outright blocked.
use anything you want
your work will speak for itself
It’s uncommon, and causes confusion if I have to dictate it out over the phone. You have to optimize for the non-technical people scheduling appointments that don’t realize there are options other than .com
I’ve started the process of migrating over to a .com with my middle initial added, and it’s so much easier knowing that everyone will understand the TLD. I imagine .net would be similar.
I don't really have the problem you're describing.
Depending on the recipient, I do sometimes reitterate the .net TLD, but that's it.
I would say a more significant issue would be having a custom domain name that's too long, as this increases the liklyhood that it will be misspelled.
.dev is absolutely a problem for non-technical people
There is confusion maybe 10% of the time - it's fine. Most of the confused people think I mean "me.com", but it hasn't been a real issue.
Honestly the more confusing thing for most people is that my initials are "nlh" and they are used to the National Hockey League (nhl) and that often ends up getting confused.
But again, all of these are minor. I love my .me domain and email address and am very happy to keep it for life.
(PS / side story: The .com I wanted for many years was "noah.com" because that was my tongue-in-cheek nickname among friends since I was an early internet adopter tech nerd. The domain was owned by a guy who had a 1990s-style single page homepage with no content other than a single link to a photo album -- that lived in stasis for years - easily throgh the mid/late 2010s. I would ping him every few years and ask if he was ready to sell it yet and he always demurred. Then recently I checked and it appears to have been sold to a fintech company. I guess they made him an offer he couldn't refuse!)
Even with an .com domain you might face some problems from time to time. I've had a few sites outright ban any address that doesn't end with popular providers (gmail.com, live.com, etc). I have a burner gmail address just for these cases.
But for personal mail it feels like waste of money instead of just using one of big providers domain directly.
Very few forms have rejected it because their regex accepts only 2 or 3 characters.
And one e-commerce company called my phone after passing an order because I broke their billing system even though everything worked fine on the customer side.
I'm using Proton with a catch all inbox, and have less spam than on my Gmail !
I also have an email on a .email domain, I have seen it occasionally get rejected by web forms. .party would likely have similar issues.
Together with a catch all email user part, it's a fun way to find out which companies offer employee discount. "My email is foo@my-domain", "oh, are you a Foo employee?"
I don't use it for outbound email very often, though. It's set up properly with DKIM/DMARC/SPF, but when I have used it for outbound email, it has failed to get through a couple of times.
That said, I do use a number of silly domains for web projects, and have never had an issue with any of them. I've heard it can be a negative signal for search inclusion on the major search engines, but honestly I couldn't possibly care less about that.
Unless you desperately want COMMONNAME.TLD, I’d go with the .COM for the lack of headaches. They’re ~$20 a year, which doesn’t seem like much money for the simplicity.
The only realistic risk I can think of is the whole TLD going under / changing like the .io - but that's still extremely unlikely.
There's a lot of ideas about different TLDs that are really hard to verify, but ended up somehow in the cargo cult knowledge area. Especially the search / spam ranking. I'm sure there's some edge case somewhere out there, but in general I've yet to see hard data that it's got any meaningful effect.
It looks so cool, and I kinda hate it. Why? Because people I need to give my email to (contractors, HR, doctors, insurance, bank, etc.) are completely baffled by the TLD and just enter it as flastname.com. To a lesser extent, I do still have sites reject the TLD (some surprising ones, for example office 365). I ended up creating an alias for first@firstlastname.com and mostly use that.
Make sure you have a basic understanding of the expectations and requirements (both on you and them) and are fine with them. ICANNWiki is a good start.
E.g. https://icannwiki.org/.party
> but don't want to pay an enormous amount for a .com.
what, where? .com is on the cheaper end unless you buy it on the second-hand market.
> Is it the wrong link?
No, I said it's usually a good start. You'll have to do the actual fishing yourself (:
BTW, I believe that lack of transparency and perceived predictability can explain why some TLDs don't seem to get significant legitimate adoption among informed users with a long-term perspective (that is: usage trends towards nefarious, ephemeral, or casual small-scale, contributing to the reputational factor. What are the main parts to the feedback loop(s) is anyone's guess, tho).
https://www.spamhaus.org/reputation-statistics/cctlds/domain...
God only knows how much weight it has on spam filtering policies of the many providers we have, but you'll at least know whether your TLD is considered a particularly bad offender with all that might entail.
I use Office365 to host email, and have had no issues whatever with delivery.
Isn't ".co.uk" a subdomain of the .uk TLD?
"never again" -- are .com TLD registrations "enormous" amounts? I think mine are all in the 15 dollar/yr range. You make me think I should go look :)
I just registered a .re domain at OVH, and the first thing they did was provide me an account I cannot log into and cannot password reset. When I contact their support, they can't help me unless I call an international number.
The whole ordeal gave me such a bad taste, I've postponed using the domain and am thinking of just letting it expire. Such a bad service, when you're used to Porkbun. Domain registrars, on average, are just glorified domain sharks. I really hate how poor the service is when you come from a country where the NIC has been trusted through decades and their CEO comes to schools to lecture about the history of the open Internet.
Beyond that, I just host my email with Proton which has been a really pleasant experience.
I would say if you're going to make it a lifetime domain then perhaps something that works in a personal and professional setting might be worth considering.
Regarding the validation point, not so much anymore but during 2015 - 2020 you'd be surprised.
American perspective, I'm assuming people in Europe are used to things like the individual country domains. But it seems rare to even see .us here...
It won't come to that, there's an established process for transferring gTLDs to other registries. Every registry is required to provide a full backup of their domain data to ICANN every couple of weeks or so, I don't remember the exact period. You might get hit by significantly increased renewal fees, though.
In some cases the first level tld subsequently became available to the public - for example in 2022 .au has become available, but the original second levels, e.g. .com.au or .gov.au remain more popular because the public is more familiar with it.
PS I just saw here that .uk also became available to the public in 2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk
