Go to Namecheap (or similar) and buy a domain, then your email provider will give you two things to paste into their settings, and then shortly after that your custom domain will be online. It’s very easy.

Why use a custom domain? your email is the base of your digital identity and online security, owning your email is a huge improvement in security.

If you ever want to change email providers you can easily import your mail to any provider and you don’t have to update any websites or setup forwarding. You can also setup unlimited catch all emails.

The main example I point to is if you get banned from Google and use gmail then you lose access to all your accounts. Google has no customer service so you’re cooked if that happens. Or if you use your email through your ISP then you can never switch and they can charge you higher prices knowing this.

It isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, it’s more expensive, not all email providers allow custom domains and they may charge more for them, and you still need a secondary backup email in case you ever lose access to your domain.

There’s also the threat of someone scooping your domain, so buy it for a very long period with auto renewal enabled, transfer lock on, and WHOIS protection on. The threat is low but even Google has forgotten to renew their domains.

Personally, I think it’s worth paying for.

You purchase your own domain through a provider like Porkbun or Namecheap, something like clover333.com

Then you pay for a service like Fastmail (you need at least the Standard plan for custom domains). And you setup Fastmail to use your custom domain as the address. There are various ways to handle this, but if you just do the simple approach and use Fastmail as the nameserver it’s pretty straightforward.