Put simply, one's house is literally on their own property, and one's Gmail account is literally on Google's property.

If someone owned a vast amount of land, more than needed for everyone on earth to build a house, and the owner told people they could freely build structures but you lose it if you break the rules and the rules can change any time...

Land is a weak analogy here, because land is scarce.

I've had a recruitment consultant suggest I use a gmail e-mail address on my CV, because it looks weird to have an address at a domain (my own, and not anything strange btw) that people haven't heard of. Sounds crazy. But try dictating an e-mail address over the phone to a hotel or whatever and see that if you say 'Fred Bloggs seventy six at gmail dot com' or whatever, you never have to repeat yourself, whereas anything less usual you'll be spelling it out all day.

On the technical side, one hears about individuals' domains being marked (blamelessly) as possible-spammers by the big e-mail services, and finding it hard to get messages through. There is effectively some scarcity in legible, desirable gmail addresses.

I agree that it's not black-and-white. It's also not as dramatic as the land analogy suggests. There are plenty of other email providers that are perfectly socially acceptable to use.

Counter point, I’ve been told by recruiting that my email makes me stand out because it’s not the norm domain name and it’s a little “fun” in the sense that it conveys a little light personality.

I'm 100% certain that a number of opportunities I've been offered have been because I proved a certain level of competence by maintaining my own email and domain; this certainty is largely due to the incidence of comments like the ones you note. It's definitely a way to stand out.

I got a call from a recruiter from a large company that simply “had to reach out” because my email was so unique. So, there’s that too!

Maybe it has hurt me somehow but...I wouldn’t want to work somewhere that would hold my email domain against me

The scarcity of land makes it different, but not a weak analogy.

>Because a house is significantly more important than an email address.

If you cant pay your rent because no customer can reach you anymore or loose trust in you (because you don't answer) your house is gone shorter than you think.

Telecom regulators see fit to make sure phone numbers can be ported from one carrier to another. I fail to understand why the same mandate is not required for email addresses and authentication services. They might not look to be as important as a house, but their loss can still have quite a significant impact on someone's livelihood.

The technical mechanisms for maintaining a stable identity already exist. Why aren't people using them?

Yeah, I don't think there's any meaningful way to "port" a "gmail.com" email address away from Google. The entire internet infrastructure is set up so that can't happen, based on the meaning of "domain".

Seems like there's an opportunity there though. If someone could create a platform that would take your address, create you a custom domain, set it up, get your email flowing there (including porting over all your existing email out of gmail), and then helping you move your sign ins to that new address..

That'd be huge. It would also be very, very hard, the amount of infrastructure it would touch.. but doable.