Ask HN: Is it a bad idea to make an email domain with an uncommon TLD?
I want to make a lifelong email domain, but don't want to pay an enormous amount for a .com.
If I do a ".party" or something, will that ruin my life? Will web forms still reject it and will people always be adding ".com" whenever I tell it to them?
I regret using firstnamelastname.dev as my main personal account
It’s uncommon, and causes confusion if I have to dictate it out over the phone. You have to optimize for the non-technical people scheduling appointments that don’t realize there are options other than .com
I’ve started the process of migrating over to a .com with my middle initial added, and it’s so much easier knowing that everyone will understand the TLD. I imagine .net would be similar.
I've been self hosting a .net email domain for decades.
I don't really have the problem you're describing.
Depending on the recipient, I do sometimes reitterate the .net TLD, but that's it.
I would say a more significant issue would be having a custom domain name that's too long, as this increases the liklyhood that it will be misspelled.
Maybe my last paragraph was worded poorly - but I was trying to say that .net would also be fine.
.dev is absolutely a problem for non-technical people
.com, .net and .org are common TLDs, along with country ones
I have a .me address and I've been totally happy with it. My domain is my initials (same as my HN username - nlh) and I love that my email is just nlh @ nlh . me -- it's actually shorter and better than any .com I could reasonably come up with or purchase.
There is confusion maybe 10% of the time - it's fine. Most of the confused people think I mean "me.com", but it hasn't been a real issue.
Honestly the more confusing thing for most people is that my initials are "nlh" and they are used to the National Hockey League (nhl) and that often ends up getting confused.
But again, all of these are minor. I love my .me domain and email address and am very happy to keep it for life.
(PS / side story: The .com I wanted for many years was "noah.com" because that was my tongue-in-cheek nickname among friends since I was an early internet adopter tech nerd. The domain was owned by a guy who had a 1990s-style single page homepage with no content other than a single link to a photo album -- that lived in stasis for years - easily throgh the mid/late 2010s. I would ping him every few years and ask if he was ready to sell it yet and he always demurred. Then recently I checked and it appears to have been sold to a fintech company. I guess they made him an offer he couldn't refuse!)
re: side story: Our name is fairly unique (at least for me, I've only met one or two others around my age with our name). The past decade, and especially what feels like the past five years, have been very jarring now that I hear the name elsewhere - I always react, even when I don't recognize the voice. It's invariably some 5-11 year old being called on. I assume people with more common names don't have this reaction. What's been your experience with having a name which was extremely uncommon for us but is now one of the most popular names?
Definitely odd! I grew up my whole life with 0-1 other Noahs around (usually 1 other around -- it was weird we always were in pairs). It is weird how suddenly everyone loves the name. I guess our parents were ahead of the trend! :)
There's definitely some risk, I wouldn't personally do it. Non popular TLDs can also change owners and things can get weirder.
Even with an .com domain you might face some problems from time to time. I've had a few sites outright ban any address that doesn't end with popular providers (gmail.com, live.com, etc). I have a burner gmail address just for these cases.
Do NOT use an uncommon TLD. I was using .lol recently and missed a job interview because the employer wasn't receiving any of my emails -- they kept getting rejected by their email servers! And I was only informed by Thunderbird weeks later when it was too late. Ever since then, I've just been using gmail for everything.
I think if you set your domain as custom domain with big provider and set DNS entries you will have much better results.
But for personal mail it feels like waste of money instead of just using one of big providers domain directly.
It won't feel that way anymore when the big provider is closed or kicks you off because of another glitch in one of its anti-fraud systems which nobody seems to fully understand.
Are you sure you were informed by Thunderbird and not by your SMTP server?
It was most certainly due to the SMTP server doing retries with backoffs.
I had a similar issue with .dev tld and getting emails from Walmart.
Why would you think it was a good idea to use a non professional email address when job hunting?
A comedian, or morse code enthusiast?
Because I'm stupid!
I have a firstname.email address and it works pretty well 99.99% of time.
Very few forms have rejected it because their regex accepts only 2 or 3 characters.
And one e-commerce company called my phone after passing an order because I broke their billing system even though everything worked fine on the customer side.
I'm using Proton with a catch all inbox, and have less spam than on my Gmail !
Same thing, I have been using .email for maybe 10 years I believe at this point. It works 99% of the time, I just have a few backup emails like “name.[email|net|me]”, so usually when the system does not accept “.email”, I just give “.net” instead.
My primary email domain is a .me. Never have problems with web forms. It can be more difficult to communicate verbally, so when saying it to non-technical folks I preface it with “my email is a bit weird” and then spell it out slowly. Young people seem to get it more easily.
I also have an email on a .email domain, I have seen it occasionally get rejected by web forms. .party would likely have similar issues.
> It can be more difficult to communicate verbally
Together with a catch all email user part, it's a fun way to find out which companies offer employee discount. "My email is foo@my-domain", "oh, are you a Foo employee?"
More often than not folks look at me gone out rather than asking if I’m an employee.
I registered a .email address for my surname when I saw it was available. However, I never ended up using it. I just imagined if I ever told anyone my email address was "first name at last name dot email", they'd probably think I didn't really understand how email worked or was trying to give them a fake address.
I’ve used .ME in the past, but then I settled on just using a .COM. The cost difference was negligible and nobody ever queries a .COM – I had people thinking my .ME was a mistake.
Unless you desperately want COMMONNAME.TLD, I’d go with the .COM for the lack of headaches. They’re ~$20 a year, which doesn’t seem like much money for the simplicity.
I know people who've used strange ones like .club or .wtf and gotten by and others who due to the groups they interact with have to switch back to dotcom or something more recognizable etc. If you fall in the latter where someone might not "get it" and maybe even append .com (hello@hb.party.com) thinking it's missing then that answers your question. In my country companies end with Ltd (Limited) so got one for my "company.limited" and it's pretty cool, no issues there and makes for some interesting convo when I give people, also my primary email is hosted at fastmail and my email is me@"my full name".com so I can also when some asks say email me @ ... as a sentence.
I got the vanity email address of (almost) my dreams: first@flastna.me (not actual tld, and the reason I had to add the first initial to my last name was because some jerk off squatter has lastna.me).
It looks so cool, and I kinda hate it. Why? Because people I need to give my email to (contractors, HR, doctors, insurance, bank, etc.) are completely baffled by the TLD and just enter it as flastname.com. To a lesser extent, I do still have sites reject the TLD (some surprising ones, for example office 365). I ended up creating an alias for first@firstlastname.com and mostly use that.
I’ve used first@last.name for the last 10 years or so. There have been probably a half dozen web forms where a regex expected 2-3 characters and I input an old gmail account that forwards to this address. Over the phone, the first@last part is easier to communicate since customer rep generally has the name info already. The .name throws them for a moment, but I’ve had one or two even tell me “oh, that’s cool, how did you do that?” which feels nice. It wasn’t my first choice, lastname.com was taken, but I like the precision of .name, arguably the most accurate TLD for a personal email address.
You might want to consult Spamhaus's TLD spam reputation ranking:
https://www.spamhaus.org/reputation-statistics/cctlds/domain...
God only knows how much weight it has on spam filtering policies of the many providers we have, but you'll at least know whether your TLD is considered a particularly bad offender with all that might entail.
I have a .rodeo domain that I use for account emails. It is accepted 99% of the time, but I do fall back on a more common domain for a few websites that won't accept it as a valid TLD, including at least one Fortune 50 company.
I don't use it for outbound email very often, though. It's set up properly with DKIM/DMARC/SPF, but when I have used it for outbound email, it has failed to get through a couple of times.
That said, I do use a number of silly domains for web projects, and have never had an issue with any of them. I've heard it can be a negative signal for search inclusion on the major search engines, but honestly I couldn't possibly care less about that.
I've got an info domain and apart from one form giving me a warning ("make sure the domain is correct"), I've never had an issue over the last 15 years.
The only realistic risk I can think of is the whole TLD going under / changing like the .io - but that's still extremely unlikely.
There's a lot of ideas about different TLDs that are really hard to verify, but ended up somehow in the cargo cult knowledge area. Especially the search / spam ranking. I'm sure there's some edge case somewhere out there, but in general I've yet to see hard data that it's got any meaningful effect.
Some web forms do reject them. It's common to just have a separate .com email for those, which is just redundant.
It's fine. Moreso than the hypothetical social-stigma aspect, read up a bit into the ownership and management policies of the TLD before committing.
Make sure you have a basic understanding of the expectations and requirements (both on you and them) and are fine with them. ICANNWiki is a good start.
E.g. https://icannwiki.org/.party
> but don't want to pay an enormous amount for a .com.
what, where? .com is on the cheaper end unless you buy it on the second-hand market.
what do you mean by "expectations and requirements"? The URL you've provided only contains four sentences total, which just explain when .party was created as a domain. Is it the wrong link?
What are the terms (if any) you need to agree to as owner of the domain? What are the requirements (if any) on you? What rights do the registry offer you? Is your use allowed and if not: what happens? Is there a particular jurisdiction applying? How are ownership disputes handled (e.g. what would happen to a targeted disney.party)? Is there a transparent process for expired domains (what happens if you fail to renew)?
> Is it the wrong link?
No, I said it's usually a good start. You'll have to do the actual fishing yourself (:
BTW, I believe that lack of transparency and perceived predictability can explain why some TLDs don't seem to get significant legitimate adoption among informed users with a long-term perspective (that is: usage trends towards nefarious, ephemeral, or casual small-scale, contributing to the reputational factor. What are the main parts to the feedback loop(s) is anyone's guess, tho).
We did a fintech startup and used the ever-so-hip-at-the-time .co TLD and several of our client banks would drop inbound emails from us by default, even as a reply-to email. It created some havoc with our sales process until we figured it out and did a quick name pivot.
"never again" -- are .com TLD registrations "enormous" amounts? I think mine are all in the 15 dollar/yr range. You make me think I should go look :)
All anti-spam systems have false positives (some less, some more). Unusual things like an uncommon TLD make it more likely that you’ll be affected by an FP (and less likely that someone else would report it). You don’t need to stick to .com but I would avoid a TLD which has a low volume of legitimate emails.
I have been using a ".capital" email domain for work for the last few years, and the only issue I've encountered is form validation regexes that believe that the TLD portion must be between 2 and 5 characters long (literally "{2,5}" every time---must be copy-pasted from some regex recipe). I feel like it might be becoming less of a problem, but still something to keep in mind.
I use Office365 to host email, and have had no issues whatever with delivery.
Using a .uk domain would probably solve your problem. I was looking for a cheap domain last year and for some reason .uk domains were the cheapest. (I bought it on Cloudflare for $4 per year). I also wanted to avoid some weird TLD that looks like a scam, and this one seems like it should appear reputable to people. I'm curious if anyone knows why this domain would be selling for a fraction of the price of weird TLDs like .club, .app, .today, etc.
Maybe expensive to renew?
I bought several years at the $4 price, so I'm set for a long time.
.uk is not the same as .co.uk, .uk is in fact one of those scummy TLDs.
It's listed with every other country's TLD in this list. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domai...
Isn't ".co.uk" a subdomain of the .uk TLD?
I wouldn't do it. Many rarely used TLDs have flaky registrars and there are a lot of people who mistype their own email let alone someone else's.
+1
I just registered a .re domain at OVH, and the first thing they did was provide me an account I cannot log into and cannot password reset. When I contact their support, they can't help me unless I call an international number.
The whole ordeal gave me such a bad taste, I've postponed using the domain and am thinking of just letting it expire. Such a bad service, when you're used to Porkbun. Domain registrars, on average, are just glorified domain sharks. I really hate how poor the service is when you come from a country where the NIC has been trusted through decades and their CEO comes to schools to lecture about the history of the open Internet.
That's a typical OVH experience.
I thought it was good idea at the time, so I picked up a tld that allowed me to do first letter @remainingname.com so it looked something like j@coblast.com.
It ends up being overly confusing when communicating it.
I have a .in domain email address and there have been occasions where it is rejected by some email address validation logic.
I brought a .ch (swiss, worked for my name) domain and have only ever had a small handful of bad sites that "validate" via checking for .com.
I would say if you're going to make it a lifetime domain then perhaps something that works in a personal and professional setting might be worth considering.
I would say that .ch is not an uncommon tld at all, it is the national tld of a country and it has existed for decades. I also think that the issue you had with forms requiring .com must have been an amateur made website because I can't imagine someone who develops for a living doing that type of mistake.
I agree with the .ch comment, I was really just highlighting that sharing it with people has never been an issue.
Regarding the validation point, not so much anymore but during 2015 - 2020 you'd be surprised.
I would argue for most people, anything other than a .com, .edu could be "uncommon". I have had people question .net or .org...
American perspective, I'm assuming people in Europe are used to things like the individual country domains. But it seems rare to even see .us here...
Yes the fact that you don't use your country's tld is a uniquely USA thing. I lived in Italy, UK, Australia, Brazil, Thailand and Indonesia, in all those places the national tld (e.g. ".it" in Italy) is the most commonly used. Even American services usually have a localised version with that tld, e.g. google.it; Some American email providers offer local tlds as well, e.g. I used to have [username]@hotmail.it
I'm curious about the situation in the UK. They don't seem to use ".uk", but rather ".co.uk". I bought a couple ".uk" domains because they were cheaper than all the other weird ones like .club, .today, etc. I couldn't figure out why a well-known place like the UK would have deeply discounted TLD's.
Many countries mainly use second level tlds, e.g. co.uk, gov.uk, co.th, com.au, .com.my, etc. because the registry of that country decided to make those available to the public, and the first level alone is not.
In some cases the first level tld subsequently became available to the public - for example in 2022 .au has become available, but the original second levels, e.g. .com.au or .gov.au remain more popular because the public is more familiar with it.
PS I just saw here that .uk also became available to the public in 2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk
Because .COM is administered by a major US player in the military industrial complex, it's the de-facto US TLD. By choosing a dotcom you're signalling your commitment to play ball with US policy. This is why Rubmaps switched to .CH around the time of FOSTA-SESTA.
.CH and .LI should be the first pick if you're buying in long term. .COM etc. are Verisign Corp (essentially US Gov) names and you're screwed if there's a global conflict down the line and want to be treated neutrally. I'm not tying myself to the future Montenegrin (.ME) administration or god forbid some fly-by-night meme gTLD run out of Hong Kong that goes bankrupt in two years and defaults on their ICANN payments, getting wiped from the root zone.
> getting wiped from the root zone
It won't come to that, there's an established process for transferring gTLDs to other registries. Every registry is required to provide a full backup of their domain data to ICANN every couple of weeks or so, I don't remember the exact period. You might get hit by significantly increased renewal fees, though.
My primary email uses a .ng domain, currently through Fastmail. I’ve had exactly one site reject it and zero spam filter issues that I know of. The only real issue has been that it’s a pain to tell people in person, so I usually end up just giving my old Gmail in those situations.
I've been using a catch-all xx.to domain as my email for over 15 years without any problems. I use a different email for each website, like amazon@xx.to, etc. It's great for fighting spam and catching companies that sell your email address or have had data breaches.
I have an .org address that very rarely bites me, but usually works in large majority of cases.
You should be fine- of course doing business with a silly domain name ymmv:
Shypooper.party or valiumlover.me might give employers & recruiters pause to think.
My usual email domain is a .us, and very ocassionally, I have trouble with it and need to use a .org.
I would never use my .fun or .pictures domains for email; I imagine there are lots of places still using ancient regexes for domain checking.
A few years ago I bought a couple .us domains on Namecheap without realizing that Whois Privacy isn't supported and accidentally doxxed myself. My main phone number was basically unusable for a few months with constant spam calls. I quickly changed the Whois info to a burner number but the damage was already done.
Ended up setting up Google Voice to immediately go to voicemail for all non-contacts and used a generic "this phone number is not in service" message with that ascending tone. No idea if that actually had an effect but the number of spam calls plummeted after about a month of that and is basically back to normal now.
I'm still steering clear of .us after that experience...
"ruin my life" sounds a bit drastic.
The only drawback I can think of is some sites not recognizing the TLD like you already suggested.
What cost do you consider enormous?
Yes, they're not the cheapest, but they're still cheaper than many other types.
> "ruin my life" sounds a bit drastic.
Not necessarily. Say you apply to a job advert and use an email address from your personal email domain as your contact. Say email exchanges between you and your potential future employer are silently dropped because their email provider deems your domain non-kosher. Your application is ultimately dropped as a result. Does this classify as "ruin my life"?
Before this scenario is brushed off as hypothetical, this happened to me on a couple of occasions albeit by using a not-so-popular email provider (i.e., not Gmail).
I spent $900 on a clean dotcom domain name last year primarily for email purposes. I had a lot of doubts, but in hindsight I am happy I did it - now I can host my email anywhere while keeping the same address.
One of my clients has a .us and recently purchased the equivalent of "exampleus[.]com" to make things a little easier for their customers.
it depends on the kind of people you you are networking with, I suppose.
i've been using a rather 'rare' two letter tld for my e-mail address since forever. besides the typical autocomplete in forms to suggest to change it to a more common tld, it seems to work quite well for me. People also don't seem to have an issue remembering the tld as it seems to match closely with the common tld used within my country, but distinctive enough to not forget. .party as tld might not be the best idea of course, considering you might want to be taken seriously in your future e-mailing endeavors.
I'd suggest on going with common and well known TLD if this is a long term commitment. Depending upon nature of email you're trying to send some mailboxes might reject or delay delivery.
One thing to consider is that cheaper/less common the TLD, the lower the spam reputation.
Also, check the renewal price - some of those newer TLDs have much higher fees for renewal than initial registration.
For under 10 people, it’s really not worth all the pain.
Biggest issue is trust, everybody will assume you’re a spam domain. Never mind the numerous number of forms that won’t allow it.
What do you plan to use the email for? If it’s for serious stuff I would stick with one of the OGs. Not worth getting a “unique” TLD.
> Not worth
What's the "worth" part mean here?
Your email may get rejected if it’s not one of the usual ones. May have issues receiving mail. My company for example blocks over 100 different TLDs. Don’t even look at reputation of domain, just automatic block. Not worth dealing with that imo.
Your company sucks.
I bought .store and regretted it, ended up switching to .com
Combination of spam classification and form fill regex issues
How do you know the spam classification happened due to the TLD?
You never really know the cause for things like that, otherwise you're just handing out instructions to spammers on how to circumvent restrictions. You can only double check the basics, idly guess about everything else, and try a new approach while crossing your fingers.
Yeah I don't think TLD matching is included in any bounceback or header that I have seen, for either Exchange or SpamAssassin, unless you have a named mail flow rule for it.
But, here is a fun lil screenshot from the exchange online antispam policies: https://i.imgur.com/fuUWke4.png
I’ve not had issues.
The one I’m using is far more expensive than com though so that may have helped
I use a .party email address. No regrets. Do it.
I have used .us forever and it's never caused a problem.
I can’t recommend this for anyone. It’s a nightmare.
One of the biggest regrets I have is buying a .us domain
It is forbidden by law to obfuscate the domain holder on the Whois record, like you can with any other domain.
A decade after it expired, I finally stopped getting calls from web developers on the other side of the world trying to build me a site.
The contact information policy is a pain, though I don't get any calls.
Country one's are generally ok. Depends on wars, but generally ok :)
I've known a several admins who just flat out block all the new TLDs, because the ratio of spam and phishing to legitimate email is so high for them.
So as well as the issues with trying to explain a TLD to people and bad validation, you're also going to find that your emails are more likely to get flagged as spam out outright blocked.
Only if you're not applying for job interviews
Been using .guru for 10 years. No problems.
no one cares
use anything you want
your work will speak for itself
Once in a while I like to play word games with 2LD and TLD that make an interesting conjunection (d.boreh.am and such). I've encountered weirdness here and there with these over the years (not just email -- some DNS hosting providers will act oddly too). For that reason I'd stick with well trodden territory for my main email. Also as others have said, the fringe TLDs can carry some future risk of either censorship or price hikes.
It’s possible that you’ll lose some basic conveniences not using one of the original TLDs, and there may be some software out there somewhere that assigns implicit higher risk scores to non-conventional domain names, but you should be fine.