I am the same, self-hosting for many years and while I have the occasional question about it, it's easily corrected. I now have a short .com domain I use because my .fyi one was even more confusing to people, and simply didn't work with some systems I needed to use.

A bigger problem in my opinion is just how heavily people have associated "Google" with "the internet" and "Gmail" with all email in existence. They don't even think about outlook.com or even hotmail anymore. All email is Gmail to many people.

> I've had my own domain for a good 20 years now, and while I've encountered some confusion when giving it out, it's never been as bad as you describe

Similar here, though I haven't encountered any confusion at all. I got remarks like "How do you get your name as the email? That's fancy!"

Well, gmail does that already. It's $7/mo.

https://workspace.google.com/solutions/business-email/

I've had my own domain for ~20 years, first on Google Apps for Domains -> GSuite -> Google Workspaces (or whatever their naming changes have been), and moved over to Fastmail a few years ago.

Fastmail's spam filtering isn't as good as Googles, but has fewer false-positives, and the spam it does let through is trivially manageable. I did host my own mail server for a year or so prior to using Google, but I agree dealing with spam filter configuration and tuning was a headache, and I gave up. Nowadays I can only assume it's even harder to run your own email server, so I'd never recommend anyone do that when there are options for other people to do it for you.

I occasionally get a confused customer support person on the phone when I need to give them my email address, but they understand in about 7 seconds and it's no big deal.

Well, I actually like to have my own domain for things where I have purchased something and have ownership, like my Amazon Kindle account. It is tied to my Gmail account and then Gmail decides I am sketchy for some reason I lose access. It’s probably a little easier to maintain my Domain, and there are legal mechanisms to restore it if it is taken away for any reason other than nonpayment.

Due to spam and deliverability issues, I'd personally never self-host an email server either. Plenty of good providers will allow you to bring your own domain and deal with the hard parts for you.

> It was super not worth it. It confused people all the time.

Genuinely interested: was it in the US? Feels like people in the US are more used to having one big service that everybody uses.

I have never seen confusion about my personal email...

Yeah, I think digital literacy courses cover things like that, and they should.

But mailing addresses are actually extremely complicated and most people probably don't understand the full scope even of US mailing addresses. The spec is 226 pages.[0]

[0]: https://pe.usps.com/cpim/ftp/pubs/Pub28/pub28.pdf

If you've ever had an address with any complexities beyond what is taught in elementary school (number, street, city, state, zip), you'll probably experience issues with getting others to correctly address your mail. The biggest reason this isn't a problem is because the postal service takes significant effort to deliver misaddressed mail.

whoa, I just imagined a world where USPS, Deutche Post, etc - offer domains, servers, cloud services - as a natural extension of treir previous roles..

> I don't know of any technical reason to delay emails to minor domains. My domain has valid MX records, uses SPF, has valid DKIM TXT records, etc.

I still run into that with my business address; after much mucking around with client's MS admin who did various pieces of magic on their online/azure/microsoft email platform until we finally got it down to around 2m for the delay.

The upside appears to be that now all clients who are using microsoft appear to have only a 2m delay when sending email to my business domain.

Strange. I have my own .org and I've never had a problem with the California DMV's reset emails... I just had to reset mine a month or so ago to start my license renewal, and the reset email showed up almost as fast as I could switch tabs to my webmail.

> I have been using a personal domain for my email address for decades

It's not an indicator of intelligence, but mail providers (including Google) could offer this if they want to, with a simple "Choose a personalized email address, like john@smith.com, for $9.99 per year" radio button on signup. They don't do this because:

1. Most people will choose the free option, so it wouldn't be much of a useful revenue stream.

2. People having @gmail.com email addresses is a little bit of zero-cost marketing for them.

Random people don’t know how to do most things, but how easy it is to follow the directions is what matters here not knowing all the individual steps.

You're both wrong (-:

Currently it's too hard for normal users, but it would be possible for e.g. Proton to add a feature where you can either import your domain name, or create a new one.