What's a phone book? Never mind that.
I've had the same email address since 1995 — ian@mcyork.com. It has outlived more ISPs than I can count, a couple of countries, a whole graveyard of email providers, and every change in how I actually pick up my mail. Thirty years, one address. That wasn't luck. It's the single best digital decision I ever made, and it runs me a few dollars a year.
Your email address isn't a communication channel. It's the master key to your entire life online. Think about what actually hangs off it: every account you've ever made, every password reset, your two-factor recovery codes, receipts, flight confirmations, the medical portal, years of contacts. Lose the address and you don't lose an inbox — you lose the whole keyring.
And most people are hanging that keyring on a nail in somebody else's house.
When your address is yourname@gmail.com or yourname@icloud.com, you're renting space in a namespace you don't own. That's fine — right up until it isn't. Terms change. Accounts get locked by something automated you can't argue with. And services that felt permanent just evaporate. Pick your example. What if Yahoo goes poof? It's teetered before. Say it does. Um... what do you do now? You have no email. So you dig through all your contacts and send out the note: hey, I changed my email to pinkbunny42@somenewISP.com.
And right there is the part nobody thinks about. That note is you asking everyone you know to do unnecessary work — please, update your address books. They won't. People have a lazy gene about this; they figure they'll get to it later. Then later comes, someone thinks of you, goes looking — and the address they've got is dead. You didn't just lose your inbox. You quietly fell out of everyone else's.
"My close friends know how to reach me regardless," you say. Sure. Except in the real world you've also moved, changed your cell number, and been issued four different credit-card numbers this year because somebody "detected suspicious activity." Stuff changes, all the time. The perfect storm leaves you in the internet's dust. And every site you've ever logged into and forgotten the password of? It can't email you a reset anymore either. That list is long — far more onerous than changing a credit-card number.
There's a quieter version of this that catches more people than you'd think: using your work email for everything. It's convenient. The inbox is always open, IT handles the spam, and it feels permanent because the job feels permanent. Then the job ends — they always end, one way or another — and that inbox belongs to someone else, or to nobody. Every account tied to it, every contact, every thread of history: gone. I've watched people learn that one the hard way. Don't be the lesson.
So here's the fix, and it's boring, which is exactly why it works. Own the domain. Imagine a rock — one touchstone that's always there, no matter what. That's what your address becomes. The reason ian@mcyork.com has survived thirty years is simple: the domain is mine, and the backend is just plumbing. Right now my mail flows through one provider. Next year it might be another. Doesn't matter. The address never changes, because I'm not renting it — I own the ground it stands on. Swapping providers is a DNS change nobody on the outside ever notices.
I've even done it to my own address. My first one here was ianm@mcyork.com; these days I hand out ian@mcyork.com. I never sent a soul an update. Mail to the old one still lands in front of me, my replies just go out from the new, and my more luddite-prone friends will never know — or need to know — that anything changed. That's the whole thing in one small proof: on your own domain, even changing yourself costs nobody anything.
It's three steps, and none of them are hard:
- Register a domain. Something you'll actually keep — your name, your handle, whatever's yours. A few bucks a year.
- Point it at an email service that supports custom domains. Fastmail, Proton, iCloud+, plenty of others. What I run and recommend is Google Workspace — it's the Gmail you already know how to use, just running on your own domain. Solid, well-supported, easy to stand up.
- Use that address everywhere. It's yours now.
Want to switch providers down the road? Change the DNS records. Your contacts notice nothing. Your accounts keep working. Your history stays put.
Here's the part worth sitting with. Everything else you'd call permanent isn't. Phone numbers are portable in theory and a headache in practice. Move house and your street address changes — there's no forwarding that lasts forever. But a domain? Renew it once a year and it's yours until you decide otherwise. It's the one piece of your identity that doesn't care where you live, which company you pay, or what's in your pocket.
There's no phone book anymore. Nobody's going to look you up. When someone needs to find you, they're going to dig through an old thread and hope the address at the top still works. Make sure it still works. Own your domain, control your destiny — register it, put your email on it, and never change your address again.
"Okay, but there's a catch, right? Managing all that has to be technical and a pain." Let's go through it over a beer sometime. I'll get you started.
This one's been kicking around, in one form or another, since 2022.