Use something other than .com for email? Users weigh in with their experiences

Some cite acceptance and confusion, but many say the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

There was an interesting post on Hacker News yesterday about using non-.com domains for email addresses. A user kicked it off by asking:

I want to make a lifelong email domain, but don’t want to pay an enormous amount for a .com.

If I do a “.party” or something, will that ruin my life? Will web forms still reject it and will people always be adding “.com” whenever I tell it to them?

The responses were mixed and gave real-life examples from users about the issues they’ve experienced. These include universal acceptance problems (e.g., web forms not accepting the domain) and user confusion. At the same time, many users said issues using a non-.com have been trivial, and they said the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

The first response is from someone sharing the confusion of his .dev email address:

I regret using firstnamelastname.dev as my main personal account

It’s uncommon, and causes confusion if I have to dictate it out over the phone. You have to optimize for the non-technical people scheduling appointments that don’t realize there are options other than .com

I’ve started the process of migrating over to a .com with my middle initial added, and it’s so much easier knowing that everyone will understand the TLD. I imagine .net would be similar.

Another user said he reaped benefits from his short .me email address:

I have a .me address and I’ve been totally happy with it. My domain is my initials (same as my HN username – nlh) and I love that my email is just nlh @ nlh . me — it’s actually shorter and better than any .com I could reasonably come up with or purchase.

There is confusion maybe 10% of the time – it’s fine. Most of the confused people think I mean “me.com”, but it hasn’t been a real issue.

Honestly the more confusing thing for most people is that my initials are “nlh” and they are used to the National Hockey League (nhl) and that often ends up getting confused.

But again, all of these are minor. I love my .me domain and email address and am very happy to keep it for life.

One person said their .lol email address resulted in missing a job interview. (I’m not sure a .lol is appropriate for applying for a job, but I digress.):

Do NOT use an uncommon TLD. I was using .lol recently and missed a job interview because the employer wasn’t receiving any of my emails — they kept getting rejected by their email servers! And I was only informed by Thunderbird weeks later when it was too late. Ever since then, I’ve just been using gmail for everything.

Some people commented on using .email:

I have a firstname.email address and it works pretty well 99.99% of time.

Very few forms have rejected it because their regex accepts only 2 or 3 characters.

And one e-commerce company called my phone after passing an order because I broke their billing system even though everything worked fine on the customer side….

and

Same thing, I have been using .email for maybe 10 years I believe at this point. It works 99% of the time, I just have a few backup emails like “name.[email|net|me]”, so usually when the system does not accept “.email”, I just give “.net” instead.