I think this is a smart move. Email isn't a platform where you need to conquer the world to be successful. Hey has been doing great business with an only-paid model. Might as well serve the paying customers first and build up revenue.

Also, whenever you're launching something new, you generally need to limit onboarding. Google did it with Gmail, Bluesky did it with their service. You can't have a flood of 10 million new users all at once before you've had a chance to scale things. Seems reasonable to let paying users in first given that email doesn't have network lock-in effects.

I think there is reasonable skepticism around how committed Mozilla is to this. However, I think that starting with the paid tiers is a smart move given that they'd have to limit signups initially anyway.

[citation needed]

You probably know this already, but people should have their own domain. Then they can change provider without changing the address.

Until they forget or unable to renew. And then their PII is in the hands of the person who gets the domain.

You own/control the name, not the set of files on a hosting service somewhere.

The price should just be the present value of the annual fee cash flows.

Turns out that sum of PV($X in 1 year) + PV($X in 2 years) + … converges even though the series is infinite. Look up “perpetual bonds”.

The value of $10 paid annually forever is probably $200-500 depending on [things].

Source: I work in a bank but I’m also shit at finance so take this with a large grain of salt.

Though the traditional way would just be finding a registrar which can direct debit (e.g. CSC Global or MarkMonitor) or setting up a trust account for someone to manage it for you. Or just power of attorney plus escrowed account.

Then the question is whether we want cryptocurrencies or not (I don't).

I had forgotten to renew my domain from Gandi, it expired, and I stopped getting emails. I also could not find my password for Gandi, and I couldn't get the password reset to work, so I panicked, but fortunately Gandi will let you renew someone else's domain. Not a transfer, just if account A wants to pay to renew account B's domain without any change of ownership, they allowed that, so I made a quick throwaway account, and renewed everything for eight years.

I have been using a personal domain for my email address for decades and when I have to give it out verbally to someone, it is about a 50% chance that the conversation is:

"My email is <[email protected]>"

"uuhhh... at gmail.com?"

"No it's just <@myname.tld>"

"Yeah, but is it gmail or yahoo?"

Also, Gmail actually blocks true spam, whereas nothing I tried on my shared-hosting server with SpamAssassin ever worked.

I don't have any love for Google, but I'll never go back to giving out a personal domain email for any reason.

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.

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...

It was almost embarrassing for me, I have to admit — especially times when I’d been clever about it and set up, say, [email protected] as a forwarder, and the cashier at Sears needed my email address. They once asked me oh, do you work for Sears?

In most parts of the world, you don't almost exclusively chains of restaurants, and people don't expect that. Just like it's normal to have someone suggest a restaurant you have never heard about, it's normal to have someone use an email provider you've never heard about.

Or maybe that's completely unrelated, I don't know :-).

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.

But still, I have this feeling that many people who would be competent to own their domain just don't do it. And they could give an email to their family, too. And help friends setup theirs.

I'm not completely sure that the issue is "it's too hard". To me, it's like password managers. Sure, it's too hard for some people. But most people just can't be arsed to use a password manager, though they would be totally competent.

"It's too hard" is, in my experience, often an excuse to be lazy.

For most people, if they want or need to switch email providers they will simply sign up for a new service, give people their new address, and move on with their life.

This whole conversation is a lot to do about something that the average joe just doesn't give a shit about. It isn't laziness. It really isn't that important of a life task for most. It's an appropriate prioritization of tasks under a lifestyle different than yours.

I don't really see an actual problem here, unlike some others commenting, but it is a general shame to me that more people don't have their own email domain. It would make the world more... colorful... somehow, even if in just a small way.

I honestly think that most people don't know why it matters. 20 years ago I was happy (and proud) to have gmail, and didn't see a point in having my domain. Until I chose to move away from gmail, and then it all made sense.

I have an example: many (most?) universities give you an alumni email when you graduate. Some offer actual hosting, but others just ask you to redirect. It is free, and for many universities, graduates would trust their university more than gmail, right? And it wouldn't lock them into gmail. Still, none of my friends from university use it. Most use gmail instead.

Now tell them: "Look, if you use gmail, then Google can read all your emails. You didn't give a shit 4 months ago ("I have nothing to hide"), but now you've heard of random Canadians and Europeans getting deported or declined entry in the US for random reasons, including one who wrote stuff against Trump. How do you feel about the US reading you emails and deciding whether they should deport you or not based on that? If you controlled a domain, you could move away from gmail. Now you can't. Also know that if they can read your emails, it means that they know the flights/hotels/trips you booked, whatever you bought online, and they can just access all your accounts everywhere."

What will they think? "If I was to do it again, I would still use gmail" or "Would actually be nicer if I had been using my alumnus email all along"?

This doesn't happen because people are using gmail. It happens when people post things on social media or get searched at border crossings.

I'm not following.

That was my point, I'm happy to see that we agree :-).

Speaking of that I do wish the post office had a mail service where they issued addresses to citizens or something.

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.

e.g. https://www.digipost.no/

    (*) Choose a personalized email address, like [email protected], for $9.99/year.
    ( ) Choose a GMail address, like [email protected], for free.

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, and people get it without my having to go into a technical explanation. And regardless, the reason there is this problem is because easy, seamless personal-domain options don't really exist. If they did, this problem would go away. I don't really consider this to be an obstacle.

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!"

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.

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

That makes it very weird to me that someone would ever be confused by an email that is not @gmail.com...

The practical experience of having your own domain for your email is that you delegate your domain to Google / Fastmail / Proton / whatever, and it takes care of everything else. Some webmail providers will also let you buy a domain on their own website as a part of registration flow.

It really is not hard. Harder than not having a domain of your own, but not as hard as you make it sound.

It's just not something normal people do, but I don't like the snarkiness of implying that's an indicator of intelligence. Otherwise we go down the no true Scotsman rabbit hole, what do you mean you're using Proton. You didn't set up your own mail server ?

What do you mean you're using AWS, your not using a solar powered raspberry pi?

Plus all the good places to host your personal domain cost money, so now people who have gotten email for 'free' for 20+ years now have to start paying a monthly email hosting bill and annual domain registration fee because some 'nerd' told them they "should"? And if they ever forget to pay either one, suddenly their email is down and their email 'identity' is at risk of being resold.

This advice is exactly like changing your own oil: Anyone with enough interest in cars and dedication to learn the steps certainly can easily do it, yet nobody should try to convince their grandparents who aren't already highly self-motivated to start doing it.

If you don't trust Gmail, then you have to use Proton to host it, don't trust them then your on AWS, don't trust them you still need you ISP to play nice with a home server.

Unless you want to raise your own carrier pigeons...

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.

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.

You think that that skill (maintaining own domain for email) is an indicator of intelligence?

My question is always: of those who are competent, why is the vast majority not having their own domain?

I have a .app domain for my email, and have had it since like 2018. Now I'm wondering if that was a mistake.

UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

There is a mixed history of what happens to the ccTLD in such cases.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729526

If the UK loses control of it, I'd put most of my betting money on Option 3: The new owners extort everyone with a .io domain for a rate proportional to the perceived value. In other words, $50K a year for a successful tech company, $1000 a year for the average joe who doesn't want to lose control of a domain tied to 1,000 accounts.

I would occasionally check it, and the price would vary by hundreds of dollars, but never a price I was willing to pay. Eventually I think it lapsed again and was picked up by some Chinese site that (I think) was trying to sell massages.

Finally, in 2021, I guess they got tired of paying for it, and it fully lapsed, and I was able to purchase it, so I bought it for ten years.

If firefox doesn't have enough compelling ideas and features in its primary domain of the browser, then how are they going to develop a new mail competency in such a complete way that they can take on gmail?

Whether they succeed or fail, this will sap resources from the browser team. And it seems overwhelmingly likely to fail.

Also isn't a huge proportion of internet activity mobile users, and outside the US the majority of phones are Android, and most people leave things default, thus Firefox is condemned have a minor share essentially since Chrome is packaged natively with Android?

Anyways I hope they can dislodge some of the Google train. I abhor using Gmail. Better yet if they can compete with Outlook to some extent. Mozilla actually produces software I trust enough, which has enough utility that I'll install it.

Indeed, Firefox' market share in Germany is larger than in many other countries.

They're likely not taking on Gmail, they're taking on Mailbox.org, Proton and Tuta.

On Android I use Fastmail's mobile client, but I'm thinking of trying the new mobile Thunderbird there too.

I use it to follow three Gmail accounts in parallel, since the web version is a PITA to deal with that scenario. Getting access to my local archive is a bonus point.

Well, now I've heard everything. This is either peak greybeard creativity, or that was a thing in like 1992 and a system has been left alone for 30+ years to just do its 90s thing. Either way I kind of love it.

A good desktop client, once configured, works a lot better than web-based email clients, especially (but not only) when you have different email accounts that you want to use in the same interface.

With that feature I could also help an elderly friend after Microsoft abruptly replaced the easy to use Windows Mail with a mess that they didn't even bother to translate into other languages.

Your comments reveal a major blind spot. 99% of people (or whatever) are using dedicated email clients instead of webmail. They do everything on their phone.

Count me as one. It's nice to have a single local application that is set up for around 5 different accounts on two different providers.

I also like the immediacy of search on the local data. When I search for something I don't want to see a spinning busy-beachball indicator.

Whether this is true or not depends a lot on which the bubble is that you live in.