An Email Address Good For Life

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a permanent email address that would never change? You can, and it’s easier than you might think.

If you are one of those loyal people who have had a long standing account with your ISP (Internet Service Provider) and don’t see any reason why you might ever change ISPs in the future, you needn’t read any further. This information does not pertain to you.

If, however, you have ever changed ISPs for whatever reason and have experienced the woes of notifying everyone of your new your email address, including all subscriptions, newsgroups and the like, this article is for you.

Register A Domain Name

The first step is to obtain your own domain name. Pick a name, based on your name, your company name or whatever you wish, such as yourname.com or wonderwidgets.com. I will use the example wonderwigets.com as we go on. Register the name with one of the Internet name registration companies such as www.nic.us or www.register.com. This will set you back about $70. The registration is good initially for two years and must be renewed for $35 each year thereafter.

Next you park the domain name, unless you want to activate a web site, but that's another subject altogether. Parking is usually free from some Internet hosting company that wants your eventual web hosting business. But what you want from them is email redirection.

Redirect your Email

Now that www.wonderwidgets.com is yours you can create any number of permanent email addresses, let's say billybob@wonderwidgets.com and instruct the hosting company to redirect any and all email addressed to *@wonderwidgets.com to your current email address, i.e. billybob5678@moonbeam.com. The "*" is a wild card so mail addressed to "anything"@wonderwidgets.com will be redirected to your current email address. Now don't give out the current moonbeam.com address, just give everybody your permanent address billybob@wonderwidget.com. That way, when you drop moonbeam.com in favor of your new ISP ufo.net, all you need to do is notify the host to change your redirection from moonbeam.com to your new ufo.net email address. I use www.suite.net for this service and they charge about $36 per year for email redirection.

Now when you change ISPs, you only have to notify only one party of the change of email address and the change is seamless and transparent to all who know only your permanent wonderwiget.com address. You have an email address good for life.

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 © 2000, Jim Schoenberger