All good advice. I’d recommended protonmail for mail hosting - got very good experience with them and the onky downside is you have to use their client.

I tried both hosting my own mail server and using a paid mail hosting with my own domain and I advise against the former.

The reason not to roll out your own mail server is that your email might go to spam at many many common mail services. Servers and domains that don’t usually send out big amount of email are considered suspicious by spam filters and the process of letting other mail servers know that they are there by sending out emails is called warming them up. It’s hard and it takes time… Also, why would you think you can do hosting better than a professional that is paid for that? Let someone else handle that.

With your own domain you are also not bound to one provider - you can change both domain registrar and your email hosting later without changing your email address.

Also, avoid using something too unusual. I went with firstname@lastname.email cause I thought it couldn’t be simpler than that. Bad idea… and I can’t count how many times people send mail to a wrong address because such tld is unfamiliar. I get told by web forms regularly that my email is not a valid address and even people that got my email written on a piece of paper have replaced the .email with .gmail.com cause “that couldn’t be right”…

Even for point 1 it’s just wrong. They should not work there for that wage and if the business needs to charge more money to pay them more then charge more money.

Relying on tips for worker pay not only shifts the responsibility for paying the employees away from employer to the customer but also makes employees getting paid optional (depending on how a random person that walked in feels).

I tried to do grocery shopping at instacart recently.

The prices looked good, I spent some time making a bigger basket(around 100$) and went to checkout. Then I found out that they charge service fee about 13$, delivery fee 4.50$, heavy fee and at the very end they also added tax. My 100$ shopping was now over 120$ but then they asked me to tip the driver and options were 10% or 20%. I tried to enter custom amount but was discouraged with a scary prompt saying that my driver will see the tip and that tips under 15% are highly discouraged as my order might be deprioritised… so all those service fees, delivery fees and heavy fees are just used to run the website?! But actually paying your own employees? Nooo… that’s up to you, kind stranger on the internet! Please, be generous (we are tired to look for another poor bastard every two weeks or so)!