Technology

I didn't know about the tuta IMAP thing. Makes sense, unless they open it up for development from third party providers, but that is unlikely to ever happen. I can definitely see that as being a deal-breaker, and why I'll probably stick with fastmail

Two tips having worked in the corporate world (strict controls):

• Create a basic non-spam web page for it that has something that doesn't look like SEO garbage or whatever. Nothing more than "hey this is a personal domain of the flatbield family" is fine, maybe a link to something (links enhance rep - put a picture of your dog up or link to a wikipedia article or something) and let it rest for at least 30 days. The 3rd party filtering services used by corporate players severely limit, block or distrust a domain newer than 30 days (or longer, depending). Set up a SSL cert on it for another +1 to it's rep value, HTTPS is looked at by these services and ensure the CA record is in your DNS for that SSL issuer.

• Ensure you use the Providers' setup for DKIM, SPF and so forth (many like Fastmail have a DNS-check wizard to get you all set up) as many modern providers will instantly downvote you if anything is missing or wrong with these controls (I've heard GMail and O365 particularly). In 2024 these are a must-have, not a nice-to-have, for getting your email received by anyone and everyone.

If you chose a domain at a TLD which has/had been used by the bad buys (dot-xyz, info, zip, etc.) you may wish to reconsider - there are TLDs which are wholescale blocked or downvoted in rep based on this (by the same services used above). Ensure someone working at a bank (strict egress controls for their employees) can visit your domain as a good litmus test as to it's validity for use in email reputation.

A company such as Fastmail spends a lot of time ensuring their IP address space for sending and receiving mail is clean - getting spammers off their service, getting IP rep cleaned off blacklists and so forth. So your task is to focus on the same thing for your domain - if someone had previously owned the name they could have gotten it on blacklists long ago, a handy way to check old history is looking it up at web.archive.org for captured snapshots (and I've walked away from domain names because of this once I discovered previous content I didn't like).

I only learned about quarantine the other day. Specifically I think it was me sending short messages that make sense when emailing yourself, like a photo with no body text, or just "test".

Going through there, found my Gmail, my personal domain, and my @fastmail domain all going there until I approved one of them.

I had my personal domain on a lifetime mxroute account before this, but wasn't using it. Made the move to fastmail to seriously move away from Google. I have my purchase ebooks backed up there, and they could close my account someday because of it, even if it's a personal backup of purchased items and not sharing with others.

Also making a wasabi account and using rclone to sync my library, so can move away on that front too. though Wasabi has a perfectly usable web interface. i have my reasons for choosing them over backblaze.