Switching My E-Mail Provider

Why would you ever pay for e-mail? It’s supposed to be free isn’t it? Link to heading

I’m sure most people would raise their eyebrows when you tell them that you pay for e-mail. Ever since the earliest days of computers that I can remember (AOL), E-mail was something that came with your computer for free – there was no subscription cost. Your e-mail address was provided with your AOL subscription during the days of dial-up. When we eventually entered the post-AOL world, e-mail was still provided for free from our Ineternet Service Provider (ISP). Eventually I moved over to Yahoo and then G-mail, never paying a single cent for my e-mail. I went to college and my school used G-mail and then my work used Microsoft. At some point I retired my ISP e-mail address, and switched my personal e-mail to G-mail full time. Throughout this 25+ year journey I never paid for e-mail directly. So why, in 2021, did I decide to begin paying for an e-mail address?

The short answer is: privacy. My mindset began to shift. Instead of finding it “convenient” that G-mail had added my upcoming flights and hotel reservations from my e-mail to my calendar, I started finding it a bit overbearing. This meant that G-mail was scanning my e-mail. Put the dots together and you quickly realize that your free e-mail is nothing more than advertising revenue for their business model – ads in the inbox, targeted to match your conversations and purchases.

I now began searching for alternatives – there are a lot of other choices out there that I bet most people are unaware of because again, who actually pays for e-mail? Your search for privacy respecting e-mail providers will quickly land on a few choice products that all provide excellent service. I signed up for both Proton Mail and Tutanota. I also learned during my search that using the standard domain name provided by your e-mail provider was a limitation that is easily overcome. My critera became two-fold: number one was to find a privacy respecting e-mail service (i.e. one that is not scanning my e-mail for advertising) and number two was to use a custom domain name that would allow me to make my e-mail provider into an expendable hosting service. This means that instead of creating a new e-mail address everytime I wanted to switch providers, I could simply change who was hosting my e-mail on the backend and nobody in the world would be any wiser. I considered this a bit of freedom from the e-mail stranglehold I didn’t realize I had been under for my entire life. Switch to Proton Mail (initially) and then Tutanota (next) with a custom domain was extremely straight forward and gave me my first true introduction into managing DNS records. Although my Synology NAS was my first true introduction to self-hosting, switching my e-mail really sparked my interest in discovering how and why all of these services work together.