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So, you've just decided to move house to another state. Oh, damn you have to change your mailing address, your home phone number, your cell phone number and your internet services provider (ISP)  . If you used your ISP for your email adderess, you'll have to change your email address too. Sure you can setup forwarding addresses... what a hassle. Or a few months ago you just sent all your friends your new work email address and now you just got a new job... mmm... With a bit of planning there are some good options for keeping your email address as well as your phone number. Keep reading for some tips that will hopefully make your life easier...
Short of being given an email address at birth you can make some good decisions to help minimize the hassle: Option 1 : Get your own domain name. For example, <your surname>.com or some coolname like 999reasons.com  . This will allow you to create your own email address like
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This is probably the best option. It will cost you several dollars each year to keep the domain name as well as a monthly/yearly cost for email hosting. Check around for some cheap hosting deals, you could probably get it for a few US dollars per month. Ensure you choose a hosting company that gives you SMTP/POP3 and browser access to your email. Note you can still use your favorite email client like Outlook or Thunderbird. You can also host a domain with some of the free email companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Microsoft's Live etc... Option2: Go with a big email hosting company - If getting your own domain name does not make sense or is too expensive then use a major vendor like Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN/Live to host your email. eg <yourname>@google.com Check out what they have on offer... most of them are FREE and they give you a lot of disk space, usally about 2GB... that's plensch. It does not make sense to go with whomever your local Internet Service Provider (ISP) is currently, as chances are you will move or change them at some time. With these two options, you should be able to keep an email address for life. Here are some other tips: Tip 1: keep your work and personal email addresses separate. This is probably good to do from both an ethical and privacy perspective. The net-net is, this will make it easier if you ever change jobs. You never know, even in a family business you may not be there in the future. Tip 2: Choose an email account that makes sense. FunkyIdiot1053 may have seemed funny at the time.. but when you need to send your resume or a serious email it just is not going to help you. If you can choose something like "firstname.secondname" or something professional. Also, it's worth encouraging your kids to do the same... so they do not have to get a new email as they grow up.
Tip 3: Keep a spare email address for singing up for non-important things like web-offers. This will ensure that if your email falls into the wrong hands you personal email address will not be hammered with SPAM. Tip 4: Use your Email hosting company's SPAM filter. The large vendors are always improving things. They even provide basic virus scanning and can help limit SPAM and the impact of infection. Tip 5: It's not the end of the world if you get it wrong - You can always use email forwarding capabilities of your current email hosting company to forward your old email to a new address. Tip 6: Look at using a VOIP(Voice Over IP) phone - this may let you move addresses and keep the same telephone number as it's using the internet to connect to your phone. Some details on VOIP will be covered in a 999reasons.com article soon. Thanks for taking the time to read this. |
