Due to spam and deliverability issues, I'd personally never self-host an email server either. Plenty of good providers will allow you to bring your own domain and deal with the hard parts for you.

Well, I actually like to have my own domain for things where I have purchased something and have ownership, like my Amazon Kindle account. It is tied to my Gmail account and then Gmail decides I am sketchy for some reason I lose access. It’s probably a little easier to maintain my Domain, and there are legal mechanisms to restore it if it is taken away for any reason other than nonpayment.

I've had my own domain for ~20 years, first on Google Apps for Domains -> GSuite -> Google Workspaces (or whatever their naming changes have been), and moved over to Fastmail a few years ago.

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.

> It was super not worth it. It confused people all the time.

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...

Yes, exactly. US. Every millennial has Gmail, idk what GenZ does, probably also Gmail. GenX and Boomers probably split between Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, and a few AOLs - and that covers probably 95% of Americans.

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?

I feel like the US have a culture of big chains like that. You want an email? GMail. You want mexican food? Chipotle. etc. I don't mean that as a criticism, but there seems to be a cultural thing.

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 think the confusion was less about the part after the @ not being a major well known service, but not being something that sounds like a company or a service. I think their confusion is that it has my name in it, and people are used to a name going before the @. ...so when I say my name, they're expecting another @.