Question about the email address domain used by Discourse

Hi,

I am getting ready to create a Discourse installation and am trying to plan ahead so I don’t have to backtrack. I am leaning toward installing Discourse on a domain example.com instead of the common subdomain.example.com

My question has to do with email addresses: I will have to use something like Mailgun to deliver email from the Discourse app — will that necessarily be sent from something like admin@example.com vs, say, admin@email.example.com

The reason it matters is that I currently use an address myname@example.com for my personal business email, where example.com is the address I plan to install Discourse at. I’m wondering if I will have to give that up when I set up Discourse.

Would I be able to keep myname@example.com connected to my own email provider and connect admin@example.com to mailgun/Discourse?

Is this one of the reasons most people use a subdomain to install their Discourse instance? I am leaning against using a subdomain because I think it would look cleaner and I don’t have any need to set up a landing page. But I’m open to hearing why people might suggest to use a subdomain regardless.

Thank you!

If you’re sure that you will never, ever want to have a web site with static data for your domain, I would use WWW for reasons described at Why use www? | www. is not deprecated.

If you ever want to set up Straightforward direct-delivery incoming mail, you’ll be very happy that you didn’t use the apex domain.

You can have your forum send from something other than the forum domain name, but you’ll need to edit the app.yml by hand and/or find some other way to change the notification_email address.

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Thank you! Seems like I should just set up on a subdomain and use a redirect from the apex domain until I have the need for a different homepage.

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