Email, Gmail and the
Advantages of a Personal Domain Name

We use domain names every day to access web sites, to access our ISP's email servers, and basically to do almost anything on the Internet.

As we become more and more dependent upon email for our business and personal lives, simply changing an email address becomes a trauma.  Obviously, if you are leaving an ISP, they are not going to forward your email to you even for a short period, unless you keep your account active.

One of the solutions many people have chosen is to use a free email account, or even an enhanced-services paid account, from some of the large search engine sites like Google, Yahoo! and Hotmail.  Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts are readily available.

Google's Gmail.com continues to stay in preview/beta status, but is quite popular.  I think Gmail's beta is a grand marketing scheme — today's term is "viral marketing" — word-of-mouth advertising and personal user testimonials tend to result in new users who actually use the system.  The only way to get a Gmail account is via an invitation -- if you want an invitation, you can request one from me via email.  I have 50 I can give away.

All these free accounts still have one thing in common.  Your continued use of their system and that email address is subject to their decision to continue to offer the service.  Or, they might continue the services, but change the terms or start to charge for the services.  Already some of these (Yahoo! and Hotmail) have changed from allowing free POP3 downloading of your emails.

Both instituted premium-level paid accounts that have the ability to download emails to local clients like Outlook Express and Eudora.  Their free accounts are now restricted to accessing via webmail only.  Gmail allows free POP3 downloading.

Getting a personal or business domain name can solve a number of problems with emails.  Most domain registrars offer a service where they will forward emails addressed to the domain to at least one other email account.  For example, if you registered the domain name example.com, you could forward all emails to the account to your regular email at your ISP, whether that was AOL, Cox, or some other.  Then, if you changed ISP's, all you need to do is change to where your emails forward.

Some domain registrars, such as GoDaddy.com and BuyDomains.com (both of whom I use), will allow you to actually set up multiple email forwarding accounts as well as a catch-all account.  That way, you could set up bill@example.com to forward to your AOL email addres, shirley@example.com to forward to your wife's Yahoo! email address (because she really likes the Yahoo! interface) and then the catch-all to forward to your regular account.

Catch-all accounts also come in handy if you have to give out an email address.  You can easily tell who gave your address to a spammer.  Continuing with the "example.com" example, if you were registering a copy of Microsoft Office , you could give your address as microsoft@example.com . That way, if you got spam on the account, you would know who to blame (this is only an example — I have not had spam like that from addresses I have given to Microsoft).

So, if you have your own domain name, you can easily change ISP's without disrupting your email flow, you can usually route emails for the whole family, and you can try to track which addresses are getting spammed.  By the way, you don't have to had a web site to have a domain.

Link to this page — just add this code to your web page!

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