I’m looking into getting my own domain to use for email for both my partner and I. I was initially considering using both or first initials followed by our last name (example: ajsmith.tld for Ann and John Smith) but then got to thinking about it and realized that might not be best for privacy. It looks great in a professional setting (like job applications, bills, taxes, etc.), though. So I’m unsure. I’m curios what other privacy concerned people are doing. The main goal is to not have to worry about changing account emails when we change email providers.
Edit: thanks everyone! Lots more replies than I expected and lots of good advice. I ended up going with lastname.tld domain and will combine that with aliases for privacy where needed. I might buy a fun domain later as well but for now this works.
I would say it’s important not to conflate privacy with secrecy. If you have a domain with your name on it (e.g. my mspencer.net) but create email aliases for every situation, sites won’t be automatically correlating your addresses with each other. How do they know which addresses are yours and which aren’t? More importantly, if you self host, emails are encrypted in flight and live on your own hardware at rest, so nobody external to any conversation will be snooping on message contents.
I’m sure legally it has no effect, but I have postfix configured to refuse emails with “updated terms” and “updated our terms” in the body. If I still haven’t been notified that a site’s terms have been updated to allow some new horribleness, they can’t claim they made me aware, huh? I guess they’ll just have to send me paper mail if it’s so important to them.
(You could do that too, if you self host postfix / dovecot / roundcube / opendkim and use greylist and RBLs for anti-spam. It’s been effortless for me, after an admittedly grueling initial setup process taking several days to learn and fail with.)