You Can Fix Email

August 10, 2026

Lots of essential software is getting worse in ways that you can't do anything about. You can't turn off the autoplaying videos on Instagram; you can't control the software updates to your car; you can't clean up the bloat that has metastasized across Windows 11.

But you can fix email, for two reasons:

1. It's an open standard - emails have to be able to talk to all the other emails, no matter what business provides them
2. You can own your identity - if you have a domain, you can switch email providers without changing your email address

Two years ago I took advantage of these properties to turn email from an overwhelming mess into the most organized part of my life. It's very easy, and I'm going to show you how.

What we're going to do

The concept is very simple: buying a domain lets you easily create multiple email addresses, but manage them in a single inbox. By using different addresses in different places, incoming emails sort themselves, and you never miss the important ones.

Suppose you own the domain example.com. You can set it up so that every email ending in @example.com goes to you. This is a basic setup that's similar to my own:

• me@example.com
• contact@example.com
• login@example.com
• purchases@example.com

One email I give to friends and family, one is posted publicly online, one I use for logging into important websites, and one is for buying things. Each of those addresses gets its own folder in my inbox and emails sent to each one go to the appropriate folder automatically.

This means that all the random newsletters and marketing and spam—what happens after buying anything that requires an email—gets sent to its own folder. They don't compete for attention with emails I actually care about.

For example, the purchases@ folder has hundreds of unread emails, but I never worry about that, because I don't give that address to anyone I need to hear from. I can still check that folder if I need to find a receipt or a ticket or something, but a lot of it is Buck Mason telling me that I'd look handsome in a $250 chambray button-down (you're darn right I would). I never bother to unsubscribe from emails that are sent to this inbox—the whole point is that I don't have to curate it.

Meanwhile, the me@ folder has no unread emails, because that address is the one I give to friends and family. They send me 1/100th the email volume that marketers do, so that folder is very easy to keep up with.

I use login@ for online accounts I care about—banks, utilities, airlines, socials, that sort of thing. Having a separate folder for just logins is a game-changer because I actually see email notifications from them, like bills due or flight cancellations. I usually don't feel any need to mark these read, but I have confidence that I will at least glance at anything that gets sent here.

There are ways to get more nuanced with it (I have another address for subscribing to newsletters), but in general it's good to start small. Just having these four separate emails, managed like this, has been a major improvement to my life.

A note about cost

You have to pay for the domain and the email service. The setup I'm describing costs about $6/month, total.

You might balk at the idea of paying for a service you currently get for free, but I suggest you at least consider it! Email is the universal online identity layer and the first way that many places will try to contact you. Not missing important emails—and not worrying about missing important emails—is, at least to me, worth the price of one coffee a month.

Email is a service and running a service costs money. If you're not paying for it directly, then the provider is extracting value from you somewhere else. They certainly don't benefit from you filtering out marketing emails on your own—in many cases, they want you to rely on their algorithmic filters, so that they get to decide what emails you see. The system I'm describing here is not supported by any free email service that I know of, nor would I trust one that did.

Fortunately, email is a cheap commodity with low switching costs—if you use your own domain. I'll talk more about the importance of that at the end.

How to do it

First you have to buy a domain. There are plenty of sites where you can do this. I recommend Porkbun. Cloudflare is also fine. Never use GoDaddy.

Your domain does not need to be a .com! If you find a good .com, go for it, but there's a lot of new TLDs (domain endings) and you can definitely find something decent that only costs a couple bucks a year. Domainr is a good way to search for one.

Next, you need an email service that lets you use your domain. I enthusiastically recommend Fastmail. It's fast, clean, fairly-priced, and incredibly stable. Thanks to Fastmail, my email is the most what if things just worked part of my everyday life. The Individual plan is all you need, for $5/month (at the time of this writing).

Once you have a domain and an email service, all you have to do is make them talk to each other. Fastmail will walk you through it. They don't have a Porkbun-specific guide, but when you get the part where you need to update your domain's nameserver (NS) records, Porkbun has a quick and easy explainer. If you're using Fastmail as your email provider, the values you need to enter in the last step are:

ns1.messagingengine.com
ns2.messagingengine.com

Those are Fastmail's nameservers. With that done, you just go back to Fastmail and finish following the instructions. Now you can receive email at your own domain!

The last step is to create the email addresses you want to use. Fastmail calls these aliases and can automatically send the email that each alias receives to its own folder. You can even make a catch-all folder for addresses that aren't specified; the only time I ever get anything in that folder is when I misspell my own email address.

That's it!

On migrating away from your old email

Moving away from an existing email feels like an impossible task. But either you do it at some point or you will be in business with that email provider for the rest of your life. You only have to do this transition once, and then you have a transferable identity that you own.

You can do the transition slowly. Even if you never fully stop checking your old email, just moving your accounts and purchases over to the new one will significantly improve your peace of mind. Then you can start telling people you know to use the new email. I almost never get anything noteworthy to the old email anymore; it happens quicker than you think.

I probably would not go crazy with a .lol domain or the like. Try to pick one that you won't be embarrassed to use professionally. Switching emails is annoying and you really don't want to have to do it twice.

On the other hand, life is serious enough—nothing wrong with having an email address that makes you smile.

Why it matters

Here's a small anecdote. Last year Fastmail did a redesign of the inbox that I didn't like. (The specifics aren't that important—basically it was harder to scan and everything took up too much space.) I wrote them a support email.

From: Alexander Petros

Hi!

I've been a very happy fastmail customer for the last year. One of the selling points when I recommend it to people is that the interface is useful, stable and respectful of my time.

As a software engineer, I understand that it's annoying to support multiple interface paradigms. But launching this redesign without even a "try the new interface" button is completely baffling to me. One of the reasons I pay for fastmail is for a consistent user experience. The interface changing on me with no recourse is exactly the kind of thing I thought I was paying to not have happen.

[...]

We had a little bit of back and forth, and then, two days later, I got this reply:

From: Fastmail

Hello Alexander,

Thanks for reaching out to us.

I wanted to follow up and let you know that based on the feedback we've received, we've added an accessibility option that allows customers to turn the dividing lines between rows on or off. While you do not specifically dividing lines in your ticket, I believe this will more closely resemble the previous layout.

[...]

Cheers,

I was very excited about this.

From: Alexander Petros

Hi Chelsea,

This 100% solves my problem! Thank you for the response and for letting me know :)

Sincerely,

Obviously, that was a lovely customer support experience. It's a big part of the reason I'm willing to endorse Fastmail so strongly. But it's important to note that this process is not about finding the One Good Company that will treat you better than all the Bad Companies.

When I tell Fastmail that the experience they're providing isn't what I want, they know that I have the ability to switch to an email provider that would. I liked Fastmail and didn't want to switch, but if I had to, it wouldn't have been that hard, since I own alexpetros.com. Because the switching costs are reasonably low, they have to compete for my business by providing a service I like.

Imagine sending that same support request to a company that knows you're stuck with them.

Thanks to Sophia Petros for her feedback on a draft of this post.