The short answer is yes, the long answer is not always.

The benefits of using your own custom domain, and the drawbacks of not using it, are listed below:

  • Email providers would shut down, and all you have to do is changing MX records.
  • You don’t always need to pay for extra addresses. A simple catch-all would solve the problem, and you can reduce spam by setting up rules with each recipient address.
  • More solutions available. Some email hosting providers are exclusive for custom domain users, and you can engage with different providers with your inbound and outbound, get the best solution of each. For example, I self host my inbound email with mail-in-a-box and have full control over the spam filter, but I’m concerned with IP reputation and deliverablity, so for the SMTP service I simply choose Amazon SES at a low price.

The points above sound pretty valid, but people have raised some concerns:

  • You have to own an email address to register for a domain anyway. It’s a bad idea to make example.org ’s contact admin@example.org , and you know why. Zoho, Proton, Tuta, whatever, better to be a free address. Why free address? Well, do you happen to pay the bill for email and domain with Paypal and your Paypal needs an email address? If it’s associated to the address you pay for and you happen to run out of credit, you might be locked out. If you pay with credit card / debit card / cash / crypto, the risk would be smaller.
    • Argument: just use the free email address for registering the domain, and use your custom domain email for everything else.
  • Domain registrars might as well not be nice to you, such as closing your account without notification, the odds not being significant.
  • The biggest problem is domain registry, they can raise prices whenever they would like to, and you have no choice but pay.
    • Argument: Do you want a fancy domain name or just a reliable one? If your answer is the latter, then the solution to this problem is straightforward: get a tld among .com , .net and .org . Unless you are a citizen of the country, don’t get any ccTLDs. ccTLDs are more likely to be associated with bunch of regulations that you might not notice before violation and have restrictions with KYC.
  • You might not be able to afford the domain and email hosting price someday in your life anymore. While cheap solutions like Purelymail and Migadu exist (and MXRoute, but only when their black Friday sales are in stock), most “serious and reliable” providers (I’m referring to Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, iCloud, Proton and Fastmail, based on their reverse MX lookup domain count) would cost quite a lot if you need more than one inbox.
  • Not good for anonymity, you always hand out personal information when dealing with registry and registrar. Anonymous registrars like 1984.is and njal.la does not allow you claim the ownership for the domain.
    • Argument: use disposable addresses on public domains when you need anonymity or pseudononymity, and use a custom domain when you don’t.
  • While your new MX records are propagating, you may miss several emails.