Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple's Email Domain
45 points by mtlynch
45 points by mtlynch
This article suggests emails that are specifically only to be used for stuff you’re both involved in as a couple, but I would be afraid of people setting up personal stuff on a “couple’s” domain. That would be really awkward to deal with if you ever break up. Some people might not realize what exactly they’re committing to.
Speaking of which, if you ever stop paying for that domain someone can hijack it and receive emails addressed to you. A custom domain is still the best way to “own” an email address, sadly, and us techies are probably mostly aware of the risk, but I suppose it’s still worth mentioning.
if you ever stop paying for that domain someone can hijack it and receive emails addressed to you.
This is worth re emphasising. Think hard before accepting mail!
I’ve been deprecating my first domain now for something like 5 years and there’s no end in sight. So many random site sign ups…
I just redirect and move on. I don’t think it’s realistic to close an email unfortunately.
That’s basically what my wife and I did when we got married. We made a Gmail account with our new names together, then had that forward to our existing emails. That way we didn’t have to deal with migrating accounts, but could still have “one” email to set for logins so that we both could easily recover logins and the like.
I just redirect and move on.
Can you clarify what you mean by this? Do you mean when you’re retiring a domain?
Yeah essentially I don’t delete email accounts/domains. I setup a redirect to my latest email. Then I setup a rule so the redirected email is sorted into a @/<old-account> folder. I also have my normal rules that take precedence to move emails into dedicated folders, like “Social” for lobsters.
I also import all the old emails into the new place, and rerun the sorting rules to clean the inbox.
Then as life goes on I change the email for accounts I log into if I feel like it. But nothing is a rush and I don’t expect to ever decommission an old email. Anyways just one person deciding to fetch my address from an old email convo is enough to justify keeping it IMO.
I haven’t changed my main email a lot, but I have consolidated some random old ones so the import part has happened maybe 5 times.
Because of that (and other issues) email is something we shouldn’t be romanticizing like the author does. It sounds very cool to have the shared domain like that, but honestly it’s better to just use Gmail or even something worse just whenever you’re forced to, and try to not use email otherwise, that’s what I do because I want people to see I do not care about email (of course no one noticed so far, but it’s a principled decision).
honestly it’s better to just use Gmail or even something worse
Until you realize that people use Gmail accounts on a regular basis, just like any other accounts when they need them most and you actually wanna be using some local company you can trust to in worst case go to with you ID that actually has at least some (eg. financial) interest in keeping your email address around.
We talk about a company that accidentally deleted a multi billion company’s cloud presence.
That being said the idea that your email address will stay forever is just a silly assumption and the fact that we build virtual presences assuming what is will still be there in a couple of years is just flawed. Yes, I too think Gmail isn’t going away tomorrow, but what makes one think that they are never for example making accidents, change their policies, maybe because of what ever crazy guy rules the US this time around?
I think one is way better off having someone you can call, maybe even someone who knows you/your company if at all possible. Someone you can call, where you can talk to a human person that has at least some say.
Correct. It’s worth emphasizing for anyone who doesn’t know - Gmail has some account recovery options, but if they fail (you’ve lost your last backup or whatever) there is NO fallback to “prove your identity to a human” - that account is just dead to you forever. It almost happened to my mom when her android phone fell into the ocean and died, as that was the only device she normally signed in on and also the 2fa. (She was able to recover because she HAD signed in via browser on a laptop, but it was close)
the idea that your email address will stay forever is just a silly assumption and the fact that we build virtual presences assuming what is will still be there in a couple of years is just flawed.
I was very influenced by Tim Berners-Lee’s memo “cool URIs don’t change” many moons ago, but I feel the thinking at the time largely assumed things would just go on forever. What should happen to people’s personal sites once they’ve died? It’s a similar problem to non-web things like mail.
I’m also now of the opinion that maintaining pseudo-anonymous identities on the Internet is a sensible default strategy for people (too late for me)
Thanks for reading!
This article suggests emails that are specifically only to be used for stuff you’re both involved in as a couple, but I would be afraid of people setting up personal stuff on a “couple’s” domain. That would be really awkward to deal with if you ever break up. Some people might not realize what exactly they’re committing to.
Wouldn’t the alternative just be that a single person owns the account, which would also be a problem after you break up?
I wouldn’t do it with someone I’ve been dating for three months, but once you’re married, your lives and accounts are naturally pretty intertwined in ways that are hard to unwind if you break up, so I’d rather optimize for the present.
A de-TLD-domain costs 3,90€ per year at Hetzner. If we assume price increases remain within inflation rate and just look at the current price, a lifetime cost of ~60 years would be ~234,00€. Sure, hosting on top of that costs more, but the danger of someone grabbing the domain is mitigated with the aforementioned cost already.
I sometimes like to contemplate on ways to make infrastructure more resilient in the real-life domain. In this case, one could create a legal entity, open a bank account with it, and use a really stable, large provider that allows prepaid to a certain extent while also setting up a SEPA direct debit. Then you drop a certain amount of money into the bank account, pull in more people into the entity and maybe ask them for small regular payments.
E.g. if we include hosting costs of about 5,00€ per month (60,00€ per year), including 3,90€ for the domain, we come up to monthly costs of ~5,50€ per month, that can be met with monthly payments of 3,00€ by each family member (e.g. for a family of four), to build a sizable money buffer.
Of course someone still needs to take care of this, but from my own experience, having dealt with the complexities of domain-loss due to death, having this legal entity in place would already mitigate many occurences pretty well.
Additional safeguards might be to reserve an active backorder with a sizable ‘betting price’, so even if, for some reason, the domain gets yanked, you still catch it with this net. I can also recommend de-TLD-domains for their very good safety guards that are already in place.
I can also recommend de-TLD-domains for their very good safety guards that are already in place.
Sadly I’m not German :( I briefly considered getting an .eu back in the day until I realized that they took away the domains of all brits after Brexit.
Also, re: safety guards – what do you mean here? Legal protection for handling death etc? My mind immediately jumped to how ~all registrars have a clause saying that they can take away your domain at any moment, but maybe for .de they can’t do that,
You can register a .de-domain even as a non-german. Another high-reliability TLD I can recommend is .is, where you can register in up to 5-year-increments at ISNIC.
Regarding safety guards: DENIC has a well-defined process (AUTH2) where you, as the domain owner (irrespective of the registrar) can always directly get AUTH-codes from DENIC directly, even if your registrar blocked you. Additionally, if a domain ‘expires’, you as the former owner have a 30-day exclusive buy-back right.
For registering domains, I recommend going with the big resellers like InternetX. For .is, ISNIC has time and time again shown that it’s pretty much bulletproof. Iceland has not signed the DMCA or other such treaties, making it very resilient.
I have the unique joy of having a firstname.lastname domain, due to having the rare-ish last name of Gay. It was very annoying in middle school, but now I own kai.gay, so who’s laughing now?
Congratulations! I’m proud of my family vanity domain, but my surname is bisected by a period so it’s not as good as yours.
We kinda did this. My wife not only took my last name but also my lastname.co domain :-)
Yeah, we did the same more than a decade ago. We use Fastmail for the domain, so we can use subdomain addressing and have per company e-mails like us@company.lastname.tld very handy when there are data leaks.
For some reason people are really impressed both by having a family TLD and their company name occurring in the hostname :). I once had a smaller company on the phone within 30 minutes after I made the account, I think they were suspicious that they got hacked because their company name occurred in a customer’s e-mail address.
This was part of the wedding gift to my sister, who assumed the name of her husband and lamented the fact that she would now lose her cool e-mail-address firstname@lastname.de. While the de-TLD-domain of her new family name was taken, I hired a broker, and could trade the initial asking price of 11,000€ (sic!) down to 350€, which was barely acceptable.
As the author rightfully states, e-mail addresses are an increasingly ingrained part of our digital identity, despite social networks and platforms coming and going. Even people not heavily affiliated with technology appreciate this fact.
How did you manage to trade from 11k to 350? Was the initial asking price just wildly unrealistic, or did you have to offer something besides 350€ to make that deal work?
I was also surprised back then, but assume now that the negotiation was semi-automated. I actually lowballed with a counter-offer of, I think, 200€, and slowly increased in increments as I noticed the seller increasingly going down in their offers. At some point we met at 350€.
I think domain squatters just hope that some company just flat out pays the asking price (or close to it). If this anecdote should be any lesson, then that it makes sense to really low-ball in such negotiations. :)
Thanks for sharing that. I’ve passed on a couple of domains that I would have been willing to pay $400-ish for, because they were listed for $15000. If it comes up again, I’ll be tempted to try a low-ball instead of just looking past it.
Fun way to solve the couple comms problem with a not-too-annoying amount of tech, especially if you have Fastmail already. Too bad hardly anyone in the rural community I live in works through email, even though it is infinitely better for conveying information that must be both precise and remembered.
I love reading about custom technology that’s given as a romantic gift. Really sweet—one can easily imagine a woodworker making their spouse a wonderful chair, or a jeweler a special bracelet. What is there for the programmer?
And as a second aside, as I think now about doing this for myself, I would probably reach toward a tool like Jelly from the folks at Good Enough. Yes, there are many of the same downsides as creating a shared account (outlined by OP) but it does come with some advantages of task management that I can imagine would be helpful for planning a wedding and other such shared todos.
mrandmrs @ our surname dot org comes to my wife and I. And I know the date we picked out (twin) children’s names because that’s when I registered firstnamelastname.com for both of them.
My wife and I have been doing this since we had a kid. Overall, it’s worked well. Dealing with school, birthday, activity, and camp logistics is a bit much put on just one parent when both work full-time. By default, it tends to land on the moms. The biggest trouble has been conflicting conventions around archiving messages. Eventually, we turned the email address into an alias for a Google Group. That’s working great (or it will until Google EOLs Groups).
Also, I advise using a domain people can easily spell (like the shinytable.com example in the article). Ours is a short but unusual acronym, so people get confused when we say it.
that only works if your surname is easy to spell, but as I have to spell it all the time in any case that has not been an issue for me :~)
We have a family domain; we all have our own email addresses there, and since I run the mail servers, any addresses can be created as either simple 1:1 aliases or 1:n aliases or I can create subscribable mailing lists.
Both - and + are usable as LHS separators, so we routinely supply, e.g. dsr-lobsters@ as an address. As a bonus, you get to see who sold or leaked your information, and shut them down with a line in a filter. If we want something shared, it takes ten seconds to create a new company@ or whatever address.
I’ve been married for 25 or so years, and we’ve had this domain for 20 or so.
I did this and got divorced, but we never really used the domain for much, so it doesn’t really matter much except I have an ongoing domain cost for a domain I’m never going to use again. I could probably just let it die at this point, but I am a sentimentalist. So far in my adult life, I tend to move everything to a new domain every five years or so anyway.
This post makes a flawed assumption that your email life starts only after marriage. The ROI is simply not there.
Fascinating idea, I would conservatively assume that we’d need this for less than one email thread per year married and more like 1/3 per year together. Completely not a problem, ever. Maybe buying a house would help.