Google gets lots of your email either way, since many of your correspondents will be on gmail. I've been getting domains mostly from porkbun.com which offers free whois privacy. namesilo.com has it too.
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
25 points (100.0% liked)
Privacy
38075 readers
872 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
What are this community’s thoughts on Cloudflare?
For domain registration? I don't see much of an issue. I also use their DNS services, but not caching or proxying or anything that would allow them access to any data in flight or info on connections to my servers or anything like that. I'm not trying to be anonymous, though, just private.
They front a huge percentage of the internet, so you can pretty much guarantee that all of the three-letter agencies have their fingers in Cloudflare's infrastructure, whether they cooperate willingly or not.
If you care about your privacy you should avoid these kind of infrastructure monopolies, since they are such a juicy target.
Used CF for years, email routing is neat but they aren't a inbox provider. They just give a way to send email to another inbox.
Domain registrars are required to collect your real information and display it in the Whois database. Many registrars offer a "Whois privacy" service where they put their name and address in the database instead of yours, most charge a fee for this. That's one thing to keep in mind.
The fee has been gone for awhile now, they're required to give it to you for free with a domain.
Your own domain is not great for privacy though like others have said the registrar can hide your info at least from whois. If you already have a domain lookup the whois record and see what it says. Presumably even with whois privacy your identity is probably discoverable.
Custom domains are not great for deliverability too. Though mostly mine is fine. Sometimes Yahoo and ATT manged accounts give me delivery issues.
What your own domain is good for is nice, long term, and portable addresses. Also for many cheap addresses. I get something like 30 email accounts with my basic Namecheap cPanel account for about $25 per year.
Mine was fine until I upgraded my broadband. Under my new service the ISP doesn't allow their IPs to be taken off of the Zen spamlist, so I'm pretty much fucked over and at the behest of the ISP
Edit: How do you have a limit? You outsource? I self host so my limit is my hardware.
Edit 2: Ah I see, there are services that charge for their hardware.
I specifically chose a shared hosting situation so they deal with the issues in this case. I do have a VPS and could have placed it there but I did not want the hassle and it is not something my wife could manage if something ever happened to me.
As far as unlimited, they do have such a plan but I do not need it. 30 is infinite in my case.
Instead of 30 addresses it's generally easier to just enable catch-all on your primary address. That way you're not manually creating each new address.
Depends on your use case. I want partitioning by user and separate credentials by use. So a no for me and catch all.
Do you mean 30 email accounts for $25 a year?
Yes. I do not use them all, but I can and my cPanel shared hosting only costs $25 per year. I can use web hosting part too if I want. It is all included. The above cost does not include the domain name itself.
See: https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/shared/
Edit: Looks like after first year it will be about $50/year.
I do this. Its great because of catchall emails and the ability to make one address per merchant. Then if a company leaks your email or gets hacked, you can simply change the email from hacked-company@domain.tld to hacked-company2@domain.tld and block the old address.
It also is good for ownership as you said. If Tuta gets purchased by Google (for example), then you can simply pivot to any of the many other email providers and not rely on a company being not evil.
You seem to have all the same reasoning I did. It is nice to hear someone else confirm it. Also when I need to I still plan on using @tuta.com for things I want more privacy on.
You could find a provider that lets you bring your own domain, and maintain that instead.