A better a personal domain name & email address? .net or .com w/ a twist

June 7, 2022 2:45 PM

I own the domain and use [e-mail] as my email. People often ask if that's .com? .com is not available and $$ The twist is I own jon-doe.com too, so I'm thinking [e-mail] is probably better going forward just to have a .com email even though the dash is not preferred. .net email addresses are almost always the less preferable correct?

I will obviously keep both but, as long as the domain name ultimately is simple and easy enough to remember, a .com with a slightest of less simple domain name is probably the long-term most reliable domain name and email address in almost 100% of cases, right?

I can even see cases where people might have lost my email address and remember or guess to send to [e-mail] (which I do not own currently) and never think of the .net address and I never receive the message that the greatest opportunity ever has almost come my way.

So:

[e-mail]

or

[e-mail]

posted by Che boludo! to Work & Money (22 answers total)

Personally I think it's a difference without a difference.

I, too, use [e-mail] as my primary email address. I do tend to emphasize the "that's dot net, not dot com" when I give out the address, but if there were a hyphen in my address I'd have to emphasize that too. I'd expect people would be equally likely to forget the hyphen as to forget the TLD.
posted by ook at 2:56 PM on June 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

I use a .net, I've never been aware of any issues. I also agree that people might forget the dash
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 2:58 PM on June 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

Hyphens also risk being confused with underscores which some places still use to separate first name and last name. I'm in the .net camp.
posted by beaning at 2:59 PM on June 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

(That said, though, I also have [e-mail], which receives a TON of mail meant for other people with my name; sometimes this is obviously because they don't remember their own gmail address so just used mine in a form, sometimes it's obviously a mistake on the sender's part. So it's very likely that you're right, you are likely missing some mail that's meant for you because people blindly sent it to the .com address instead. I'm not sure adding a hyphen would fix that though.)
posted by ook at 3:00 PM on June 7, 2022

I used to have a hyphenated last name, and when I spelled it out for people, a surprising number would put in an apostrophe instead. I think net is probably less confusing.
posted by FencingGal at 3:06 PM on June 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

As someone who worked for a media website where one of its URLs was xxxxx-yyyy.net and xxxxxyyyy.net was pornography I recommend sticking with .net over the dash.
posted by warriorqueen at 3:06 PM on June 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

Definitely .net

I’ve had a .net for 20 years and have never had a problem.
posted by bowbeacon at 3:08 PM on June 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

I concur, stick with the .net, and I will also add that people pretty regularly mess up even email addresses in very common .com domains like gmail and hotmail, so it's not like having a slightly more normal domain will save you. People are impressively bad at hearing, recording, remembering, and email addresses. There's no way around it.
posted by primethyme at 3:17 PM on June 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

dot-net is a first-class domain, an equal to dot-com.

I have a dot-co-dot-uk with a hyphen I have to keep spelling out for people.

(I had a hyphenated family name while married, that's almost unthinkable of a mistake, FencingGal.)
posted by k3ninho at 3:20 PM on June 7, 2022

A/B test: set up the redirect, and every time you need to supply an email, flip a coin to pick. Record successes and failures.
posted by flimflam at 3:33 PM on June 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Yeah, .net all the way. I have a .net and I've never had anyone even raise the issue of .net or .com for my domain.
posted by tiamat at 4:00 PM on June 7, 2022

It seems to me that the problems with the .net address (specifically, incorrectly addressed mail from people who only half-remember your domain name) would still be there with a .com/dash address, and at least the .net address doesn’t have the transaction costs of switching.
posted by kevinbelt at 4:07 PM on June 7, 2022

I used to have a .net and now use a .info. It's never been a problem.
posted by humbug at 4:22 PM on June 7, 2022

I have had a .net that also had a hyphen and it was a pain in the ass, but mostly because of the hyphen. Even the word hyphen confused some people. "Is that, like, a dash?"

I have had mostly a .org email since then, and I have no problems. I assume that would be similar to your .net/.com issue. When I speak it I just emphasize by saying "DOT ORG" or "DOT Oh Ar Gee"

So I too vote for .net and use the hyphenated one to forward to your .net address, and make sure your reply-to is the .net.
posted by terrapin at 4:26 PM on June 7, 2022

I'm a [e-mail] kind of guy. I can't even believe how often I have difficulty explaining it to people. "It's FIRSTNAME AT FIRSTNAME LASTNAME DOT COM. No, no, FIRSTNAME AT FIRSTNAME LASTNAME just like my name that you already have there. No, yes, it's FIRSTNAME AT FIRSTNAME LASTNAME. Right, FIRSTNAME AT FIRSTNAME LASTNAME DOT COM."

The com vs. net argument is trivial.
posted by eschatfische at 4:30 PM on June 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I would stick with your .net email address.

Unfortunately either way you might get people trying to send emails to jondoe.com, but I think it's more likely that people will do that when they inevitably leave out the dash in jon-doe.com.
posted by kinddieserzeit at 5:01 PM on June 7, 2022

I have the firstname.ca domain (I'm in Canada) and use [e-mail] as the email address I use when I'm saying the address to someone. firstname.ca vs firstname.com doesn't seem to be an issue for me.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:42 PM on June 7, 2022

The dash seems substantially worse than a .net address to me, too. I would stick with what you have.
posted by Stacey at 6:19 PM on June 7, 2022

I have a .net and a dash in my email/domain of my main email for 20 years. I own the same .com now too, but it's not worth transitioning over email amongst my contacts so I've kept the .net as my main email. I have not found the .net to be a problem, and the only problem with my hyphen is filling out forms when asking for receipts when I'm buying something because finding out where the hypen is on their keyboard is annoying to find.

Another vote for [e-mail] although it never hurts to buy extra domains related to what you use and put in forwarding just in case.
posted by Bunglegirl at 7:08 PM on June 7, 2022

I used to have the .com of my domain, but it was so not a problem I let it lapse years ago.
posted by wierdo at 7:54 PM on June 7, 2022

People have an astonishing ability to screw up even the simplest email addresses. I get email intended for theora44 all the time (not really, but myname@gmail gets a lot of misaddressed mail). Some people get that email addresses require specificity, some people really don't. If you really want it correct, send someone an email. at the very least, say it lowly, carefully, and enunciate.
posted by theora55 at 9:06 PM on June 7, 2022

Pretty much just another comment here saying to stick with the .net. I have a personal domain ending in .org and even though I have people questioning that it really, truly ends in .org, it's fine. The tricky thing is unusual characters, like hyphens or even emojis(!) or unexpected subdomains (like [e-mail], for example). Stick to as short as you can, with as few odd characters as possible, IMHO. :)
posted by juliebug at 2:32 AM on June 8, 2022