Assistance needed for owning email / domain

[yankees60]

Seeking assistance for maintaining my own email / domain in an inexpensive yet reliable solution.

1) I started on the internet / email in 1995. My email address had an ending of @map.com.

2) In 2007 we were informed that they had sold the map.com domain. They further blithely told us that we now had to change our email address to @mapinternet.com.

This was a personal disaster. The intervening 12 years of email use required me to change my email address in an innumerable amount of locations. The worse was, at the time, having 100 eBay ads currently running, each which contained four instances of my email address in them. That required making a total of 400 changes in those ads.

3) As a result of all of that I vowed that no one was ever going to change my personal email address for the rest of my life.

4) At the time it seemed that the only way to do this was to first obtain my own domain and then get a web hoster who could provide me with email capabilities.

5) For domain I chose: HostPC Internet Services.

Their annual costs have been:

2007 to 2015: $10
2016 to 2023: $13

For 2024 to 2027 they want to charge me $23 for each year.

6) For Web hosting I've been with EasyCGI

Their annual costs have been:

2007: $31
2008: $85
2009: $84
2010: $96
2011 to 2012: $107
2013 to 2014: $71
2015 to 2017: $108
2018 to 2020: $82
2021 to 2023: $131

For 2024 to 2026 they want to charge me $214 per year.

7) Going from a combined total of $144 a year to $237 a year seems like a big increase to me, especially given how simple my needs are.

Since 1995 my home email program is Eudora (which has not been upgraded since 2007). I've used Outlook extensively and continuously with various businesses / organizations since 1999. For various reasons I much prefer using the ancient Eudora over any version of Outlook. I do receive 400+ emails a day but with Eudora's super easy filtering most of them automatically go into various folders with me concentrating on a select handful of them for daily review.

9) I also am an owner. That means I want all my emails sitting on the hard drive of this computer, all under my control and always accessible to me. I never want a gmail type solution wherein someday Google says we are discontinuing Gmail and all those emails of yours we have been storing for you will be gone effective this date. Or, you've exceeded your capacity and need to delete some emails.

10) The present domain I have been actively using is: [the initial of my first name and my full last name].com. In 2013 I also bought another domain (from, currently, ionos.com) which is [my full first name and my full last name].com.

I have never used that domain for anything. But am keeping it in case I ever want to use it for anything.

It was initially $0.99 for the first year in 2013. From 2014 to 2022 it was then $15 per year. Last year and this: $17 per year.

11) I've created 9 different email addresses using my active domain. Looking at them I see that I'm actively using only four of them, which is all I foresee needing.

12) Another clarifying need is that I have little need for being able to access my email when I am not sitting at this computer at home. I am able to access my email by logging into EasyCGI.com from any browser wherever I am. I also have email set up on my phone. But in the rare cases for using either it's generally for just viewing purposes as I don't like that when I response the responses are not ending up in my Eudora Out Box, which means they are not stored on this computer.

13) Yesterday I was on the phone with ionos.com asking them questions about my bill. In course of my call I did inquire about them being able to provide me with email in some way.

It seemed this plan could meet all my needs?

WordPress Hosting | WP Plans (ionos.com) -- The "Grow" plan.

It allows me 5 email addresses.

It has 50GB of storage and 15GB of RAM, which would be way, way, way more than I need as I'd only be using it for storage in between times I'm frequently daily downloading received email from there to my Eudora program. I've never be wanting to keep any emails on the website.

The cost is $5 a month with a 3-year term. Plus I get a Free domain. This cost of $60 per year (including domain) would be way, way under the proposed $237 per year for my simple needs.

14) EasyCGI has been extremely reliable. In all the years I've been with them I don't think I've had a total of 10 hours of email outages in all that time.

15) I'm most nervous about the switch over of my domain from one to another. How long does this take? As soon as this is set up I can start sending / receiving emails from the new web site? In actuality, if I had two web sites that had email capabilities can both web sites be used for email from the same domain name? Just trying to clarify my understanding of how this all works.

16) An obvious absolute must is that Eudora be able to download and send emails.

In Eudora there are super simple settings to download / send emails via EasyCGI:

Sending email:

SMTP server: smtp.easycgi.com
Use submission port (587)

Receiving email:

Mail Server: pop.easycgi.com
[No port specified]

When I was at ionos I looked at their email settings for Thunderbird (which is a quasi Eudora successor) and the settings were similar just substituting ionos for easycgi in the settings. Except that they prescribed a port for sending.

It seems as though the basics for email sending / receiving have not really changed over the last 30+ years?

17) Am I on the right track on how I'm viewing things?

18) If you understand my simple needs do you have any recommended solutions that would be both reliable and good priced?


Thanks for getting this far!

[dualstow]

Good lord that's a lot of extraneous information, but I get it - sometimes it feels good to tell all.
Have you considered just getting a reliable paid email service? Perhaps protonmail or fastmail?

Pro's:
Very affordable. There is a free level.
Reliable & Secure
You probably won't have to change the domain in your lifetime (like your example of map to mapinternet)
Specific to proton: you can get a really short domain like pm.me; unlimited aliases to help fight spam & junk

Con's:
Proton can be clunky at times. (It works, though). And searching is not as easy as with unencrypted mail unless you use their tool to download it all. But, that can be done too. It just takes a few seconds to index first.
I don't know that you'd be able to continue with Eudora. Maybe? And probably yes, with Fastmail.

[yankees60]

Good lord that's a lot of extraneous information, but I get it - sometimes it feels good to tell all.
Have you considered just getting a reliable paid email service? Perhaps protonmail or fastmail?

Pro's:
Very affordable. There is a free level.
Reliable & Secure
You probably won't have to change the domain in your lifetime (like your example of map to mapinternet)
Specific to proton: you can get a really short domain like pm.me; unlimited aliases to help fight spam & junk

Con's:
Proton can be clunky at times. (It works, though). And searching is not as easy as with unencrypted mail unless you use their tool to download it all. But, that can be done too. It just takes a few seconds to index first.
I don't know that you'd be able to continue with Eudora. Maybe? And probably yes, with Fastmail.

I wanted to provide all information in case any of it was helpful to anyone to provide me a solution.

I would not consider anything that I do not fully own and that could ever require me to change my email address for the rest of my life.

Your solution would actually require me to redo what I had to do in 2007, something I never want to do again.

I want to continue to use Eudora until it no longer works with some future Windows operating system. That day may or not come. Email seems to be fairly basic software. But if it does it will continue to be my present email address and with all emails coming to this computer's hard drive in that future Eudora replacement.

[dualstow]

Full disclosure: I asked the A.I. for the bottom line on your post. Then, after posting, I delved a little more deeply and saw the bit about Eudora being a dealbreaker and the part where you don't want to repeat even a one-time change, and I thought, oh boy am I going to get scolded.
For what it's worth, I think you can bring your own domain's mail to proton, but I realize that doesn't solve the problem you're presenting at all. I'll just leave it here in case it comes up.

So is this mainly for the ebay offerings?

[yankees60]

Full disclosure: I asked the A.I. for the bottom line on your post. Then, after posting, I delved a little more deeply and saw the bit about Eudora being a dealbreaker and the part where you don't want to repeat even a one-time change, and I thought, oh boy am I going to get scolded.
For what it's worth, I think you can bring your own domain's mail to proton, but I realize that doesn't solve the problem you're presenting at all. I'll just leave it here in case it comes up.

So is this mainly for the ebay offerings?

Yes, I do not want to go through the ordeal again of a "one-time change" plus not retain the present email addresses all with my name in all of them.

This is not related at all to eBay offerings. It's related to my annual costs going up nearly 50% to do my own email. Not a tremendous amount for one year but when you add it up for 5, 10 years ... that money could well be spent elsewhere.

[yankees60]

Good lord that's a lot of extraneous information, but I get it - sometimes it feels good to tell all.
Have you considered just getting a reliable paid email service? Perhaps protonmail or fastmail?

Pro's:
Very affordable. There is a free level.
Reliable & Secure
You probably won't have to change the domain in your lifetime (like your example of map to mapinternet)
Specific to proton: you can get a really short domain like pm.me; unlimited aliases to help fight spam & junk

Con's:
Proton can be clunky at times. (It works, though). And searching is not as easy as with unencrypted mail unless you use their tool to download it all. But, that can be done too. It just takes a few seconds to index first.
I don't know that you'd be able to continue with Eudora. Maybe? And probably yes, with Fastmail.

After gathering more information .. I am going to further investigate both Protonmail and Fastmail to see if they would work.

[dualstow]

Cool!
I lost my fastmail account in the early aughts after not logging in for a year, but proton is serving me well. Proton has greatly expanded their services since I first signed up.

relevant Reddit thread here.

[yankees60]

Cool!
I lost my fastmail account in the early aughts after not logging in for a year, but proton is serving me well. Proton has greatly expanded their services since I first signed up.

relevant Reddit thread here.

Thanks for the additional resource.

As is my usual I'm in the gathering information / asking a lot of questions mode.

[dualstow]

Some sidenotes: One can use Google Takeout to download all their mail at once. It takes a few days to receive the download.

The wikipage says Eudora has been open-sourced so I guess it’ll live on. There’s a successor called Hermes Mail though it looks like that, too, has stopped updating.

[dualstow]

Hypothetical: what if I paid you $15 a year for an email address @ “vinny.com” (I know it’s really your last name). As the administrator, would you be able to read my emails? Probably not, right? There must be families with a tech-oriented mother or father that do this.

[yankees60]

Hypothetical: what if I paid you $15 a year for an email address @ “vinny.com” (I know it’s really your last name). As the administrator, would you be able to read my emails? Probably not, right? There must be families with a tech-oriented mother or father that do this.

I think I would because as the administrator your email needs to be set up by me, including password. So, I am able to get into it at any time.

Wherever I have worked I have always assumed that the person who set up my email had full access to all my emails. But I never worried about it as they always had more enough to handle dealing with all their own responsibilities and no time to explore anyone else's emails.

So extremely possible but unlikely.

[yankees60]

Some sidenotes: One can use Google Takeout to download all their mail at once. It takes a few days to receive the download.

The wikipage says Eudora has been open-sourced so I guess it’ll live on. There’s a successor called Hermes Mail though it looks like that, too, has stopped updating.

Thanks for letting me know Eudora has a Wikipedia entry. Had never prior occurred to me.

Just read it. Lots of good information there.

[Xan]

Unless you're doing fully end-to-end encryption with your email (which is unlikely), your email admin can read your mail. You would need to have the encryption key in your possession and never leave your possession, which means you need to configure your client in a very particular way, and then people sending you mail need to know your public key in order to encrypt data in a way that only you can decrypt.

[dualstow]

Thanks!
(I often wonder about the same with large outfits like Google.
https://nordvpn.com/blog/gmail-encryption/ )

[dualstow]

Xan, you use Gandi as a host, right?

[yankees60]

Xan, you use Gandi as a host, right?

I've been collecting recommendations elsewhere. Gandi is a name that I've several times seen.

[yankees60]

Unless you're doing fully end-to-end encryption with your email (which is unlikely), your email admin can read your mail. You would need to have the encryption key in your possession and never leave your possession, which means you need to configure your client in a very particular way, and then people sending you mail need to know your public key in order to encrypt data in a way that only you can decrypt.

Which is why I've several times read the admonition to never put anything in an email you'd not want to see on the front page of the Wall Street Journal (because some day it could!).

[dualstow]

Too late. My whole life was in gmail for 10 years. Probably not controversial enough though.

[yankees60]

Too late. My whole life was in gmail for 10 years. Probably not controversial enough though.

I cannot even keep up on all the emails I receive. I don't know how I'd find useful items from having access to 1,000's and 1,000's of someone else's emails.

But I'm sure someone (Xan?) will shortly be telling me how it is possible and not that difficult.

[dualstow]

It wouldn’t mean anything to you, as you barely know Google exists

[yankees60]

It wouldn’t mean anything to you, as you barely know Google exists

I well know it exists. I just abandoned it in 2013 to constantly use Bing in its place. Google is only in the rare occasion when I cannot get a satisfactory result from Bing.

[dualstow]

Yeah, Bing seems to be getting a bit better.

[yankees60]

Yeah, Bing seems to be getting a bit better.

I decided to go with Bing in 2013 after someone introduced me to a web site where you could do a simultaneous search on Bing and Googe. You then reviewed the results and decided which one was giving better results.

Me doing that led me to believing that Bing was giving superior results.

Since then I've searched for that website but it seems to be no longer.

[dualstow]

But did you also search for it using Google?

I think Google is superior, or was, until they started to manipulate the results and tell us how to think instead of just doing what a search engine should do. Same problems crept up with Gemini, the Alphabet A.I. that is now built into Pixel phones’ Android.

Do you have a deadline as to when you’re going to change web hosts?

[yankees60]

But did you also search for it using Google?

I think Google is superior, or was, until they started to manipulate the results and tell us how to think instead of just doing what a search engine should do. Same problems crept up with Gemini, the Alphabet A.I. that is now built into Pixel phones’ Android.

Do you have a deadline as to when you’re going to change web hosts?

I believe that both the domain and web hosting renewals are around July 7th. Since the domain is only $22 a year and less complex ... if I end up with not enough time ... I can put that off for a year.

Taking care of email, though, is something I do hope to achieve by July 7th.