Email provider

[fourtwentyfour]

My email address is anything@firstnameAsecondname

I am experiencing ocasional lost, bounced, incoming emails, for no obvious reason.

A and B are my middle initials. Maybe some writers use A and B in error, instead of A only.

I would like to also have anything@firstnameABsecondname as it might be a better choice.

My question is would it be better to use the same provider, Ionus, or is another to be preferred? I see some are around £5 pa, but I pay £10, all plus vat.

[chas49]

Assuming the only reason for the 'lost' emails is the senders guessing incorrectly/assuming you meant to put in your second initial as well, then, yes - your idea of having an additional email address seems reasonable.

As I understand your issue - you have a domain with a name like firstnameAsecondname.com (or .co.uk, or whatever)

If you want an additional address with a name like firstnameABsecondname.com, it'll cost you a further domain registration fee, plus the Instant Mail cost (as IONOS call it). Off the top of my head, that's going to cost more like £20/30 p.a. Still cheapish but is it worth it for a few emails? Only you can decide that!

How do you know about the lost emails? Presumably the senders contact you by some other means and then you tell them - "you used the wrong address"? Presumably they learn from that and the problem is solved? Or is there something else going on?

[Infrasonic]

If you are getting issues with incoming email your email host may have its DMARC (or equivalent) policies turned up' too high' (which is subjective of course...).

For instance if the sending end have a compromised grey listed SMTP IP address (because it is being used by spammers) then your host might have it set to reject/bounce all email from that IP address as it is on publicly available blocklists (PBL) or their own internal proprietary lists.

Most SMTP servers are shared spaces for multiple email accounts - hence the issue, one or two spammers can ruin it for everyone else. A decent email host will quickly rotate its SMTP IP addresses to clean ones from its allocated block and then kick the spammers off promptly. The poor ones don't...

Most webmail like Gmail or Outlook.com will just send email that fails some part of the authentication chain (ARC/SPF/DKIM) or looks spammy to the spam/junk folder where you can mark it as 'not junk' or 'safe sender' if needs be so that it is allow listed and delivered to the inbox the next time.
Occasionally they have a purge and start rejecting or bouncing en masse causing major issues for legit emails.

You might only get access to SPF/DKIM authentication and DMARC policies with the better paid for domain email hosting services.
Many of the cheaper packages only give you SPF control.

IONOS is the parent company for quite a few brands, including Fasthosts here in the UK. You'll need to do some research to find hosts that offer you the level of control you need - there's loads of review websites that do comparative features reviews for email hosts.

[Midsmartin]

We need to know more about emails that you do not receive, from their sender.

It's possible that your email provider has blocked the incoming messages, if they have been sent from an email provider temporarily blacklisted for sending spam. This happens fairly often with email sent from hosting companies like 123-reg etc, as other customers may be deliberately sending spam, or have hosted websites/servers that have been hacked into.

You could cheaply register a domain for your other name variants, and forward all mail to your main domain.

But you would be making a rod for your own back, encouraging your contacts to use the alternative domain, and you'd never be able to get rid of the extra address. I'd try to avoid it if you can.