Not getting <firstname>@ shouldn't really be a problem. Everyone should buy their own domain name for email. It's cheap, easy to setup (and natively supported by Fastmail), and it means that you're not locked into one mail provider ever again.

Don't be <firstname>@fastmail, be <firstname>@<lastname>.me - or whatever you prefer.

I have an uncommon last name - about 3 families in the world with it as far as I can tell. Some asshole has been squatting <mylastname>.com for over 20 years and said he "hadn't considered selling it" then wanted $100,000 for it. The same guy has been squatting hundreds of domains since the 90s, many of them 1 letter off from major websites.

What can I do against this scum? I saw that there have been many successful disputes against him so I was thinking of constructing one in a similar vein saying that his use of my unique last name to serve malware and ads is damaging to my reputation but it seems a little weak.

Also no other TLD is even an option for an email address because people always assume you made a mistake and just send things to .com anyway in my experience.

For 100 thousand you could just buy a tld and be firstname@lastname

You could register a second or third level .name domain, so in your case probably 0x00000000.name or firstname.0x00000000.name ;)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.name

why not just register a domain that isn't your last name, and use that?

I agree. If your provider goes down you need to literally change your email and inform everyone and change it in all your services. If you own the domain, you can just switch providers.

so like 6 billion domains?

Huh? There is more than one TLD. .us is available for US people. Every country has a TLD. There's a whole pile of generic TLDs. Finding one for you will not be a problem.

You have to realize that the general public doesn't always understand that the internet isn't always .com.

My email is josh@josh[dot]micronesia. When someone — such as a banker, or "everyday" person — asks for my email address, I overwhelmingly hear, "josh at josh dot m n at... what? gmail dot com? yahoo dot com?"

The repetition probably confused them, and it also doesn't look that nice. If you use something like me@josh[dot]micronesia I'm sure you would be met with much less confusion.

I get this too with my `.systems` tld. It's really not that much of a problem when I'm telling someone my email address out loud.

What I have problems with are old html/js forms not accepting it for one reason or another.

what do you think the odds are of the company running .systems being around in 10 years?

50%?

It's just not that hard to run a registrar. Even if the current one bites the dust, someone will pick it up. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If it's very hard, you write or message it to them.

I bought a 2 letter domain on a .vg and a .mg TLD. It's amazing how many websites refuse my [email protected] email address on signup as "not a valid email address".

1) there are 7 billion of us

2) we share surnames

3) yes, why not?

How does 2) work out realistically?

Say your last name is Zhang. Do you start an email thread with the other 100 million people named Zhang?

What if your last name is Nike? Mills? Ford?

what about someone social engineering the registrar [1] or hacking the TLD nameservers [2] and getting control of all your accounts using that email?

[1] https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-... [2] https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error-taking-control-of-all...

Can't recommend Fastmail enough. I run a variety of services that depend upon email forwarding and it's _significantly_ better and (like it says on the tin) faster than Gmail.

This is stuff like having [email protected] addresses that forward onto our Helpdesk, etc, that really need to work reliably.

You don't need gmail to use google doc. Go to https://accounts.google.com "More options", "create an account". You can create one using a different domain and mail server.

Google docs is pretty amazing for collaboration and accessibility, just don't put your secrets in there.

I've been using Fastmail since 2008 and it's been great ever since. I've submitted a few support requests in my time using the service and they were handled promptly and politely.

Just another vote for Fastmail. I have it set up with my personal domain, it's been great to have various email aliases. I use [email protected] for Github/Gitlab/connected services, resume@domain for resume, and linkedin@domain to easily filter out LI's 10k emails. I'm sure others have plenty of other creative uses as well.

A cool feature with Fastmail is how flexable your address is. Say my email is [email protected], I can also send emails to [email protected] instead of [email protected] combine that with how easy it is to make alternative addresses, and you can make an email for every site you use.

Also a satisfied fastmail user, nice ui, nice ios client. Wanted to use my own domain, and with gmail, I had to pay pretty much the same as for fastmail, and I was tired of the whole we read your mail etc.

1. Gmail won't be scanning emails anymore, although I'm not sure what difference it makes whether they index it when they already have your data at their fingertips.

2. I guess that's nice, whether worth $30/year though is a different question... you can just as well get your own domain entirely and forward through it.

3. Do you ever need support though? I haven't with Gmail (at least nothing major enough to care about; I do see random bugs every now and then)

4. Gmail UI is pretty amazingly solid too (do you not find it so?), just not that fast (but then again that's why there's a mobile and basic version, and an app, etc.).

> $360/year

I think you mistook $30/year for $30/month.

Whoops! I did, thanks! Fixing now...

Support matters a ton if Google suspends your account and deletes your online identity by mistake. I've seen too many stories like it, and somehow people just assume it'll never happen to them.

Gmail's UI was the best thing I ever used... Until FastMail.