One perk that someone told me about is that you can use your domain to get around not having a static IP (because the DNS will compensate).

If I were to get a Cloudflare domain name then what would be some other pros and cons?

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2 points

One benefit for me that wasn’t immediately apparent is a custom email, paired with something like proton mail and simple login I turned it into a catch all.

It’s fantastic. Company asks for a email, sure. Walmart@problematicpenguin.org. Now, I can sort anything that arrives to walmart@ right into the spam box. Doesn’t matter what address they’d send it from.

Fucking. Brilliant.

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1 point

This. I’ve done this since 2003 (when I got my first custom domain + email) and I’ve discovered several forums, services and companies that have either sold their databases or (most probably) got hacked and never made it public.

Pro-tip: If you are going to give out the address face to face, they might not trust you or not understand when you tell them that your email address is theirCompanyName@yourdomain.org. I even had a store blatantly refusing to type that into their system. So, I started using ROT-13 to encode the company/service name, and just telling them the address is gurvePbzcnalAnzr@yourdomain.org. Nobody has ever asked why my email address was so unpronounceable.

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1 point

I usually get “oh, do you work for…”.

No, it’s just my spam filter.

“Why?”

“Because I have strict rules where if the sender and recipient don’t match, it gets deleted and I’ll never see it.”

And then there’s the ones that are like “check your spam folder”…

“I don’t have a spam folder, because every company has their own email address, so I either get it or I don’t, depending on YOUR system and whether it works properly”.

True or not, “technical jargon” doesn’t really get questioned after a certain point.

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1 point

I miss the days when you could just do johnsmith+walmart@gmail.com when signing up on a website, but now everyone either outright rejects it as invalid or parses it out.

It was useful because you could see who was selling your email address, but that exposed too many companies and was losing them $$$ so they patched it :(

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1 point

See, I keep reading that. Idk for sure if it’s because I use a custom domain, but no company has rejected me yet. Closest I got was a, “Is this a real email address?” “Yes” “That’s so cool! How is your email mydumbcompany@problematicpenguin.com?”

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1 point

Does this work with Google Workspace/gmail? And how do you do it? If you’re at some new store say hshsb do you create the email before you go or while you’re there?

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1 point

You can point simple login to your exosting Gmail account, sure. Simplelogin is a paid service.

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