Have a Domain name - just want to access emails with it

[deanobeano]

Ok folks!

Years ago (when I ran my small company) I registered a domain name (.co.uk) for it and set up a couple of email addresses that utilised the domain name.

Fast forward to now and I'm retired, have no need for the domain as such (it never hosted a webpage or anything like that).
But, I still use the two email addresses.

Every year (coming up soon) I get a domain renewal come through, which costs me approx £10 to extend for a year.

Can I continue to use the email if I do not renew the domain? / Or are there any free domain transfer and hosting companies out there?

The domain is registered with TSOHost
My email is 'hosted' (if that's the correct word) using a free account with Zoho
It is unlikely that anyone else would register the domain if it lapses

Or, should I just take the time to change the sites where I still use these emails for a google or Outlook free one?

[Captain_Morgan]

Once you stop paying for the domain name you’ll lose the ability to send & receive new email.
Perhaps not immediately but within a few days.

Depending on how your free host operates it could have implications for archiving or moving any old emails.

At a tenner a year I’d be inclined to leave as is.

[r3g]

deanobeano said:

Ok folks!

Years ago (when I ran my small company) I registered a domain name (.co.uk) for it and set up a couple of email addresses that utilised the domain name.

Fast forward to now and I'm retired, have no need for the domain as such (it never hosted a webpage or anything like that).
But, I still use the two email addresses.

Every year (coming up soon) I get a domain renewal come through, which costs me approx £10 to extend for a year.

Can I continue to use the email if I do not renew the domain? / Or are there any free domain transfer and hosting companies out there?

The domain is registered with TSOHost
My email is 'hosted' (if that's the correct word) using a free account with Zoho
It is unlikely that anyone else would register the domain if it lapses

Or, should I just take the time to change the sites where I still use these emails for a google or Outlook free one?

No sir, If your domain is deanobeano.co.uk and your email address end with deanobeano.co.uk then if you don't renew the domain, it stops working and so do your emails.

I have my own domain for exactly this purpose (just for personal email addresses that I fully control) but it's actually turned out to be more hassle than it's worth. I'm happy with the (low) cost, but the host's third party anti-spam services they use have royally pissed me off, blocking perfectly innocent mails both outbound and inbound. Even after lengthy discussions about it where I forwarded the full email headers and body to them so that they could forward to their third party anti-spam providers for investigation, nothing productive came of it other than "we'll tweak our algorithms, let us know if you still have any problems" and I still do every so often.

I've now gone back to using a gmail account over IMAP in my email client and never have any issues - it just works.

[deanobeano]

Yes, I hear you there!

Every year I renew and say to myself ' You've got a year to start using your Gmail as your main email for all your logins'

Fast forward a year and I've done nothing about it!

As both domain emails refer to myself and my wife, changing all the logins seems like a large task!

[Captain_Morgan]

r3g said:

I have my own domain for exactly this purpose (just for personal email addresses that I fully control) but it's actually turned out to be more hassle than it's worth. I'm happy with the (low) cost, but the host's third party anti-spam services they use have royally pissed me off, blocking perfectly innocent mails both outbound and inbound. Even after lengthy discussions about it where I forwarded the full email headers and body to them so that they could forward to their third party anti-spam providers for investigation, nothing productive came of it other than "we'll tweak our algorithms, let us know if you still have any problems" and I still do every so often.

I've now gone back to using a gmail account over IMAP in my email client and never have any issues - it just works.

Generally that’s a issue with your email provider not using a personal domain.

If you’d used the paid for gmail platforms with your own domain it’s unlikely to have blocked as frequently.

[r3g]

Captain_Morgan said:

r3g said:

I have my own domain for exactly this purpose (just for personal email addresses that I fully control) but it's actually turned out to be more hassle than it's worth. I'm happy with the (low) cost, but the host's third party anti-spam services they use have royally pissed me off, blocking perfectly innocent mails both outbound and inbound. Even after lengthy discussions about it where I forwarded the full email headers and body to them so that they could forward to their third party anti-spam providers for investigation, nothing productive came of it other than "we'll tweak our algorithms, let us know if you still have any problems" and I still do every so often.

I've now gone back to using a gmail account over IMAP in my email client and never have any issues - it just works.

Generally that’s a issue with your email provider not using a personal domain.

If you’d used the paid for gmail platforms with your own domain it’s unlikely to have blocked as frequently.

It's a load of buck-passing and I don't care who it is. The host says it's nothing to do with them, there's no block or filtering with their "stuff", it's being flagged as spam with their third party anti-spam providers like Spamhaus. I instructed the host to remove the third party anti-spam filters from my account and I would deal with any myself, but they refused saying it's not about incoming mail, but rather the risk of me abusing their services by sending out spam myself which could break their servers that are shared with other customers.

It's easy to say "well if you'd used gmail platforms with your own domain then it'd be fine" , but that was the whole point of buying a domain purely for email in the first place because gmail ditched the plus-addressing so you could no longer filter the spam mails yourself, whereas I can use whatever random prefixes I want on my own domain as there's no mail boxes on the end of them and so it all gets redirected into my own personal email account.

There's only so many times you can relocate the dot position in a gmail address before you run out, and as you can't set up as many gmail accounts as you want anymore unless you have a lot of sim cards then it's making the best of a bad situation.