Member Avatar for bwallace

I hope this is the right forum.

Is there any benefit to keeping an e-mail address with a provider like Yahoo or Gmail, as opposed to only using one at your own domain? For example, if you have a account, would there be any legitimate reason to keep your account? I'd imagine an address we can access even if our website goes down would be handy, but that's the only reason I can see not to close our other accounts.

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A short, practical supplement to the discussion started by , with notes tied to ’s delivery symptoms and ’s hosting point.

Domain-hosted mail is fine when the mail stack and DNS are configured and monitored. Lost or “vanishing” messages usually point at delivery problems, not the addressing model: common causes include misconfigured MX records, missing or incorrect SPF/DKIM/DMARC, outbound IPs on spam blocklists, mailserver queue failures, or disk/quota problems on the host. Mailserver logs and bounce reports are the single best source of truth when messages do not arrive.

Two pragmatic approaches reduce risk. First, harden the domain mail setup: publish an SPF TXT, enable DKIM signing, add a DMARC policy (start with monitoring), verify reverse DNS for the sending IP, and keep the mail queue and disk usage under watch. Second, add an independent mailbox or an MX-hosting option as a fallback and for account-rescue purposes; the fallback can be kept unused day-to-day but available if the primary host goes offline.

Quick checks and examples:

# check MX
dig mx example.com

# view SPF
dig txt example.com

# sample minimal SPF
"v=spf1 mx -all"

Checklist (action phrases only):

  • Verify MX records and TTL.
  • Publish SPF and enable DKIM; add DMARC in monitoring mode first.
  • Confirm reverse DNS (PTR) for the outbound IP.
  • Inspect mailserver logs and bounce headers for 4xx/5xx reasons.
  • Configure an IMAP-forward or secondary mailbox for critical alerts.
  • Avoid catch-all addresses unless spam filtering is very strong.

These steps address the reliability issues experienced and preserve the control and branding that motivated the original question.

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Member Avatar for barryt

i have never ever had any problems with my me@gmail account but my own domain emails sometime give me problems, rather i send a copy of my own domain to my gmail it works great and i am always on

Member Avatar for bwallace

i have never ever had any problems with my me@gmail account but my own domain emails sometime give me problems, rather i send a copy of my own domain to my gmail it works great and i am always on

What kinds of problems have you had with your own domain? We haven't had problems with Gmail either, but Yahoo seems to constantly have problems (e-mail search returns nothing, read messages appear unread, messages appear out of date order).

Member Avatar for barryt

i also find that mails don't get to certain yahoo mails, at our own domain its like a ghost story some mail just never get to the intended recipient, it is not in the junk mail neither in any other spam related mail and there is no pattern to why it does not show, i would say 1/1000 mails just vanishes forever :)

Member Avatar for bwallace

I wonder how much of that had to do with your web host or email system. I've known emails to vanish from Hotmail (I think) when I used it several years ago. We'll see how it goes using our email accounts own domain primarily.

Member Avatar for Panton439

I never reply to emails with service offers received from gmail account. always looks more professional. The only benefit (i mean first of all business professionals) there is in Gmail is online mail client. And even this can be obtained with Google APP - you sltill can have account hosted by Google mail server.

Anton @ Website Designers

Member Avatar for barryt

i never receive any funny mail in my g mail (touch wood) and had the mail account for couple of years now

Member Avatar for bwallace

I never reply to emails with service offers received from gmail account. always looks more professional. The only benefit (i mean first of all business professionals) there is in Gmail is online mail client. And even this can be obtained with Google APP - you sltill can have account hosted by Google mail server.

Anton @ Website Designers

I've heard that, which is part of why I'm seeing less reason to keep a Yahoo/Gmail account. We access our e-mails through webmail accounts on our site so that hasn't been a problem.

Edited by bwallace because: n/a
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