If you need free, you need free.
But if you can pay, you want to pay a vendor whose scale is such that you mean something to them while still being mature enough to rely on.
This applies to pretty much everything, not just email.
With Google and Apple, you service needs are overhead and with Google in particular, your value is entirely in them being able to monitor as much as they legally can about your activity.
With Fastmail, Protonmail, etc, you are a customer already and they're invested in making you a bigger happy cuatomer in the future. They have staff that will service your support tickets, you represent profit on their books, and the services they offer you are generally designed for your scale more precisely.
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/en-ca/developer-platform/email-ro...
So far as I can tell, Cloudflare seems to still be in the early stages of enshittification [1], and while I as a business customer am probably going to be taken for a ride later than most customers, I'm also small fry, so I'm guessing at some point in the next 5 years, some of the "for free" features like zero trust / tunnels are going to become prohibitively expensive for me.
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
I assume Cloudflare will enshittify because too much of its services are free or too cheap to make sense, so my guess is they're trying to achieve massive market capture and dependency so they can later start squeezing customers for way more money.
I prefer more transparent cost structures, like what I get through Migadu for example.
I don’t want these massive entities (Google, MS, CF) controlling my data.
The rest of apple's email landscape sucks. It is pretty poor at managing spam, the client is terrible, it doesn't sync rules between the desktop app, icloud email, and iphone.
I hate email in general. It is getting to be 1 in a 100 type scenario of anything of value and likely worse if I knew all the emails that were deleted before I saw them.
The error message was very clear: hide-my-email was not permitted.
I was just trying to check for available service appointments near me and didn’t want the spam. But I guess sending spam is very very important to Toyota.
Worth every penny.
Cashier: "What's your email?"
Me: "walmart@somedomain.com"
Cashier: "No I meant YOUR email address."
Me: "Yeah walmart@somedomain.com"
Cashier: "Oh do you work for Walmart???"
Me: "No see I set up my email so... oh nevermind, 420BLAZEIT@GMAIL.COM"I think if you are at the level of catch-alls and your own domain(s) then you tell the cashier "no thanks!"
The advantages are numerous: tracking who leaked my data (many times before the company even noticed it), easier to spot spam (20 years ago spam filters were a lot less sophisticated), minimize credential stuffing (before Pwd Managers became the norm), etc.
I'd be worried if 1) I hadn't seen many versions of similarly creative extortion emails over the years, and 2) if they hadn't use some obvious "donotspamCompanyThatWasHacked@mydomain".
Sadly, I can see how this may trick some people into sending money to scammers.
ON only one occasion in ~20 years, someone refused to do business with me because they thought I was impersonating them and told me I was being disrespectful by using their brand as my email, and even after explaining how it works they weren't happy.
But better than giving them an iCloud “hide my email” generated addy ;)
- I have a catch all setup to forward all emails to specific user on mail server
- able to setup adhoc email addresses for each online service (ie, iarch@example.com)
- able to claim example.com in haveibeenpwned
Now I get breach emails from hibp for the whole domain. Unfortunately, I was exposed in this IA breach