What keeps you sticking to this? I read this often and can only wonder why.
A TLD + 50 GB webspace costs you around 2 Euro/month here in Germany and you have full control over your mail. I also find that it creates a sense of importance and seriousnesses (like in "cares about his/her communication"), if you use your own domain for mails. As long as it's not something like "[email protected]", obviously.
Most automatic spam filters work quite well and can also be trained, if not your client is doing the filtering. And some hosters also provide catch-all addresses which are great for seeing who misuses your mail address.
All in all, I never understood the attractiveness of Gmail, when using your own mail is so easy.
- fairly short
- .com
- unambiguous when written with a pen on forms
- easy to spell on the phone
It's the last 3 I find important for an official domain. gmail for example is easy to mention on the phone as everyone knows it. I always have to repeat my fastmail address 3 times and spell it out as people don't know it.
But the .com space is probably more crowded than .de in my case, so you might not find it so easy to get a nice URL.
Security and sysadmin expertise is not free.
Same thing with hosting your own. Just start mapping the potential vulnerabilities. Starting for example from simple social engineering attacks against your domain registrant or hosting provider to take over your domain/servers.
And any professional webhosting provider won't do worse than Google, just on a smaller scale.
If they don't personalise then they essentially don't "color my world view".
I know google has a similar option, but I think some of us have stopped trusting them.
Also, as comments do point out. No point using DDG on Chrome. One has to switch to FF - which is seriously fast enough for my daily needs, both on ubuntu and android.
Finally, there's still two things we need to break free form tracking services.
1. A non google play store smart phone.
2. Get off gmail.
I am failing on both of the above.