For what it's worth, I use Fastmail + a custom domain and couldn't be happier. But I'd hardly recommend it to everyone for personal email.
I'd recommend for #2 picking a date that you do other annual preventative stuff on, such as changing your smoke detector batteries. That way you build an association in your mind between that other stuff and extending the domain, making it further unlikely that you will forget.
Generally, you can start out with 10 years. Some registrars offer even more, but the underlying registries generally only support 10 years. The registrars that offer more do so by doing 10 years with the underlying registry and then automatically extending that every year transparently to you. If they go out of business more than 10 years before the end of the term they purported to sell you, those remaining years will go poof.
Also have on your calendar reminder for #3 a reminder to check to make sure your contact information still works, particularly email. If you own domain X and use it for email, you probably don't want to use an @X email address as your contact address for the registrar you registered X from. If something goes wrong with your account or domain at the registry and they try to contact you, you don't want their email to you to get eaten by whatever problem they are trying to contact you about.
And 2FA? Yeah, if you’re not already doing that for PayPal, Venmo, eBay, and others, you’re not gonna add it for your domain. If you are already doing that, it’s no extra burden.
We can’t expect everyone to own a domain to control their messaging sovereignty.
https://zotlabs.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project https://zotlabs.org/help/en/developer/zot_protocol#What_is_Z...
Being able to keep your address across service providers being the important part here, that way your online life doesn't get in a huge jumble when your provider goes away.
What's the solution?
Spam filtering for one. Uptime and updating without downtime. You would absolutely need redundancy (complexity of the solution required starts building up quickly). Keeping tabs on mail server security and the vulnerabilities discovered in your particular software stack. A 15 second down time means an important mail might not reach you. If your mail server crashes due to unknown reason at 4 am, do you really want it to be your problem to fix? And it will of course happen when it least fits your schedule for the day. On most days I could live with my website being offline for a few hours because I've screwed up, but with E-Mail?
The solution?
The more you think it through, own the domain, yes, but use a mature and reliable (and paid for) provider you trust to do the hosting for you. For someone technical enough to securely own a domain and not let it expire that seems like the best solution really, unless maybe you own your own hosting service? :P (but then, technically, I guess it's not your own private mail server either)
Why though?
How come Fastmail handles mails on Opera's behalf, and why Opera now prevents Fastmail from doing it? How come they couldn't manage to agree on a way to avoid losing their users' email addresses?
Many services make it difficult to change login or email (My Steam login is an email I havent used in over 15 years).
Or when they say "Steam Support will immediately email you a link to click on to verify your new email address" do they mean it's sent to your old email address where you can't get it?
I can login with my more recent email account, so it would be easy to forget the old hotmail account is even tied to it.
