I did too. I feel smug when I'm asked for my email.

Sorry, buttplug.io is already taken so I don’t have any more ideas.

I made mine firstname@lastname.me but I also have it set up with proton Mail as a catchall email address so I can give out literallyanything@lastname.me and it all goes to the same inbox with the ability to filter and send some addresses strait to trash.

It is like a tattoo: Do not think too much about the first or third tattoo/domain. the tenth will give you an feeling and the 15th you feel completed. Just start with one and as soon as you have control over your first digital cert endpoint, you can forward easy from it to any other domain in you control and depricating out unwanted domains over years without problems. It is a road not the destination to choosen your first domain. Hit the Road Riddick and don't you come back no more.

The first one I registred back then was uncreative yet convenient: My full legal name. I like to advise almost anyone to do so.

For all the places where you do not need or want to reveal your identity you can use something harmless website3001 (or just any random number)

five random letters. short enough to be easily memorizable & easily communicated by voice. no homophones, even in other languages. no one going to try to buy the domain out from under you. You could try four random letters, but that runs more risk of colliding with acronyms.

For me it was just numbers .xyz and I am happy with that. Date of birth if you use it for private stuff and its $1 a month at namecheap.com.

______mail.com, just come up with something available to fill the blank.

Then, use unique addresses for all services you sign up for, and they look like individual accounts created at some mail service.

You can even make a boilerplate static site at the domain to look like a genuine mail service.

The benefit is that you can keep the same email if/when a provider enshittifies, including proton.

Custom domains are a lot like open sourcing in software; helps keep the SaaS honest. If most customers use a custom domain, the service provider would act based on the knowledge that they could lose most customers easily.

You can use a domain with proton mail. And when proton turns into garbage someday, you register your domain with a different mail provider. That way you get to keep your mail address.

Many places you can get WHOIS privacy for free, like Hover.

.eu domains hide it by default, like here: https://www.whois.com/whois/hakkerman.eu

It used to be the default and you could pay for privacy. I think it's free these days.

FYI, Mozilla do free SSL certificates (for HTTPS) these days which used to be quite expensive.

https://letsencrypt.org/

This is a neat trick but also very unprivate as your mail will be unique and a huge barrier (monetary)

What is huge? The costs for a domain are next to nothing.

I had the exact same question and found this overview from hostinger and decided to go with porkbun because renewal is cheap and the website's search works with only porkbun's javascript (in contrast to spaceship which was the cheapest but even loaded some js from bing

edit: according to forbes porkbun has more TLDs than spaceship

Joker (🇩🇪) has a wide variety.
Just make sure the first year promo price and renewal price are appealing.

It actually very easy - majority of email providers have a email transfer service; and if thats not your cup of tea then you can manually export and import them.

You setup both addresses in thunderbird, then simply drag and drop all the emails from one side to the other