> If you want real identity security, reg your own domain, and move it with you.

I'm pretty confident that Gmail is more secure than the domain registrar if you're really attacked. At least do your research carefully on this one. Domains do get stolen.

As always, consider your own threat model. But if you're a civilian? Wow, just hope you can walk away from the lockout.

Maybe. I guess it depends on the TLD. My country's TLD manager allows owners to lock their domains against transfers by registrars, or against changing the NS sets.

At that point, registrar can't do much to harm you.

Choosing your country's TLD for the most important domain is probably a good idea, if your country has well functioing and fair TLD manager. I certainly feel I have more of a chance when someone steals my country's domain, rather than some .com or .org. Country domain can be registered only to citizens, and so both the TLD manager and the thief will at least be in the same jurisdiction as me.

I am my own domain registrar.

The $3500 ICANN registration fee and the accompanying $4000 yearly accreditation fee hardly make running your own personal registrar worth it, and that doesn't even cover the necessary legal fees and paperwork you need to fill out to become a proper registrar.

The entire process also seems rather lengthy to me if all you want is set up secure email: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/accreditation-2012-02-...

And can any random person with a gmail or outlook or yahoo email address successfully email you and get replies back?

In my experience, the moment someone emails your domain (at least on Gmail) your domain seems to become whitelisted almost instantaneously, even if others receive your email as spam. I don't know about Yahoo, but the problem is usually reaching out first. Generally, deliverability seems quite fine as long as you don't go for the cheapest package deal and implement all the modern protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc.). Amazon IP addresses also seem to do quite well because Amazon has its own spam prevention system that's tied to your AWS account.

Having said that said, I haven't had a failed delivery in years and I host my email on a cheap VPS. I only started getting deliverability problems when I ignored my mail client's (and server's) warnings before sending a 100MiB email through a mail server that also hosted a TOR relay, which was pretty stupid in hindsight.

Mail deliverability isn't quite as bad as people seem to think it is, but if mail delivery to the big four fails, there's almost never a way to troubleshoot it. That's kind of a pain, I suppose.

Having your own domain doesn't mean running the email server yourself. Or are you suggesting that they filter by registrar?

This 100%. It's the only way you can move your email between providers.

Of course, it just shifts your risk to the domain registrar, so don't use someone too cheap. It's worth paying a decent fee for decent service here.