As available technology changes, I may want to change ISPs one day down the road. I have made the same basic mistake twice by having my e-mail addresses at my ISP, and of course getting everyone I correspond with to switch to a new address is an almost impossible task.

I see that Yahoo!, MSN and others offer e-mail accounts, some for free and others where you can pay a fee and have the ability to pull your messages into MS LookOut or some other mail client. So, what I am looking for is the benefit of your thinking along these lines. Hopefully, I will be able to plan a logical transition rather than trying to work with multiple ISPs for a month or two.

Any good thoughts out there?

Thanks in advance.

-Brad

As part of my job I've done regular internet "mystery shops" of car dealers for several years to assess how prompty and properly they reply to queries from consumers.

In doing this I have to come up with a different fictitious name, address, and e-mail address for each test "shop". I really appreciate the ability to quickly set up accounts with hotmail, excite, yahoo, and others. It's made my job a lot easier.

I have found, though, that some don't treat the @hotmail.com type address with the same seriousness that they might a name brand ISP address. I guess some recognize them as being "throwaway accounts" and assume the user isn't truly serious and/or mature enought to have a "real" e-mail address.

Maybe one day e-mail addresses will become "portable" just like phone numbers recently have.
~erik~

My solution was to get my own domain.

So while I have had 3 different ISP's it wasn't a problem. I have had 2 different web hosting companies host my domain and still have the same email addresses. That is right, having my own domain lets me have lots of email address in the order of lazy eight addresses.

Allen

[This message was edited by AllenLacy on December 29, 2003 at 04:53 PM.]

quote:

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Originally posted by gpsfun:
As available technology changes, I may want to change ISPs one day down the road. I have made the same basic mistake twice by having my e-mail addresses at my ISP, and of course getting everyone I correspond with to switch to a new address is an almost impossible task.

I see that Yahoo!, MSN and others offer e-mail accounts, some for free and others where you can pay a fee and have the ability to pull your messages into MS LookOut or some other mail client. So, what I am looking for is the benefit of your thinking along these lines. Hopefully, I will be able to plan a logical transition rather than trying to work with multiple ISPs for a month or two.

Any good thoughts out there?

Thanks in advance.

-Brad

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Like Allen I too have my own domain.
I got mine through Yahoo and the cost is $35/year.
You get one POP account, web address forwarding, and as many email forwards as you want.
They will even automatically renew your domain name so you won't loose it.
You can check it out here.

Of course unless you want to exclusively use a work computer or the library, you still have to pay for an ISP, but the $3/month for the features of portability and forwarding make it worth it to me.

I got thepruetts.com and I use forwards for everything. Buy something at Widgets, Inc and don't want them selling your address? Just give them widgets@yourdomain.com and it will come to the mailbox at your current ISP. If they start spamming it, point it at Erik's address...uhhh...I mean an invalid address.
It also makes it easy to switch ISPs. I have switched 3 times in the last 6 years and have the same addresses.
I have some addresses pointing to a Yahoo web account and more personal/account related items pointing to my ISP POP.

If you need to know more, just let me know.
They have good FAQs though.

Kenneth

I signed up for a domain name at 000domains for $13.50 per year, which includes six e-mail aliases you can redirect to whatever real mailbox you wish to keep unpublished.

You can designate one of the aliases as a wild card address that you can redirect to a catch-all file. This is good for situations where you are required to provide an e-mail address to someone you really don't want to receive a lot of mail from. Using merchants as an example, you could give your e-mail address as sears@yourdomainname.com, target@yourdomainname.com, ford@yourdomainname.com, etc. If your e-mail client allows you to create rules, you can have the client sort the stuff you want into folders you will read and send the rest to the wastebasket.

I picked a neat domain name with ten letters in it, which was a mistake. For $13.50, I may go back and get an easier one.

Thanks again, Erik, Allen and Kenneth.

Happy New Year to all!

Many years ago when I signed up with Mindspring, each of us in the family decided to set up free web accounts. I settled in with Yahoo. Since then I've come to appreciate having a web address. Much spam later I've upgraded to a paid account with Yahoo. For what I consider to be a fair price, I now have more storage space. Perhaps the nicest feature of my paid account is the ability to set up disposable emails on the fly.

I now create a disposable email address whenever I sign up on line anywhere. If I start getting too much spam on the address, I just trash the address.