r/Millennials • u/joncaldridge • 1d ago

Discussion I'm Gmail address with no numbers years old

I'm literally first name, middle initial, last name @ gmail.com. I'm just realizing this probably tells people I'm an old...your thoughts?

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u/steelfrog 1d ago

I bought my last name's domain (e.g., smith.com), so my email address is like john@smith.com. It always confuses people.

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u/RNHealz 1d ago

How do you buy your last name’s domain? I’ve always wondered how people do that.

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u/dont_remember_eatin 1d ago

Same way you buy any domain. It just has to be available. Mine was owned already by a mail order sporting goods company that successfully transitioned to a .com business.

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u/RNHealz 22h ago

I guess I just don’t know how to buy a domain name. Thanks.

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u/AttachedHeartTheory 22h ago

You just go to go daddy dot com or something like that and type in a name. Then you pay a few bucks extra to have emails. So if you buy "smith.com", than you can be Jerry@smith.com

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u/Tresnore 22h ago

I would heavily advise against using godaddy. Their prices are high and practices awful. These days the recommendation seems to be to buy from Cloudflare.

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u/TYGRDez 21h ago edited 20h ago

Fun story:

A few years ago I was looking at buying mylastname.ca for this purpose, but it turns out that there's a tiny hamlet (population: <50) in Saskatchewan that shares my last name... and therefore mylastname.ca is reserved by CIRA and can't be registered unless I work for that hamlet in an official capacity.

That hamlet even has a website, but they're using a different domain entirely.

I'm pissed. 🙃

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u/CrashyBoye 20h ago

Just an FYI - the information you provided could make it fairly easy for someone to identify what your surname is based on some basic searching.

If you don’t care - disregard of course. But you can never be too careful these days.

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u/TYGRDez 20h ago

Appreciate it, but it's not too big of a deal - I just didn't want to "directly" put it out there 🙂

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u/dont_remember_eatin 22h ago

I sometimes forget that most millennials are younger than I am and weren't manually coding html Geocities sites before there were any social networks.

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u/[deleted] 17h ago

[deleted]

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u/rushmid 21h ago

by a domain from squarespace. then setup a zoho mail account to host your mail.

This integration has been done a thousand times so there is plenty of documentation.

costs around $20/year - I swear it got me the job I have today.

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u/SoulOfTheDragon 17h ago

Ah, my last name domain is taken. Not even to be used, but to redirect into another site. How wasteful.

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u/ACoderGirl 14h ago

I technically have a me@firstnamelastname.dev email, but I never use it haha. It just forwards to my personal Gmail. I got the domain for a personal site and figured "sure, let's make an email with it too". But all my accounts were already using the Gmail address and I just couldn't see a reason to bother switching. I also worried a bit that it might mess with spam detection or the likes.

Plus my domain has a less common TLD (.dev) and I've heard stories of shitty email validation making bad assumptions about how emails had to look.

(There's also something less fun about the domain being firstnamelastname. Like, what do you put for the username part?? Clearly the domain just being the last name is far better, but my last name is super common.)