Email suggestions?

[Don Henthorn Smithville, TX]

Starting a new venture and want to get an email address that won't change if I change ISP's. Are there any suggestions?

[Noah Alkinburgh]

Don,

You will need to use something like yahoo or hotmail...now depending on your venture, you may not want to be giving out an address like that...for about 8 bucks a year you can buy a domain that has email forwarding and set it up so that you can give out the email don@henthorn.com but that email actually goes to dhenthorn@hotmail.com. It can all be set up so that no one even knows its a hotmail account.

Noah

[Bart Leetch]

Free Pop E-mail @ http://www.hotpop.com/signup.jsp

[Perry Schmidt]

Try www.pobox.com. It's nothing more than a fowarding service. About $15/year I believe. It works very well - a friend of mine who loves to tinker w/ network/email programs says it does everything he wants it to do and then some.

Once you get your name - e.g. perry@pobox.com - it's yours forever, or as long as you pay for the service. But you can forward it to many places and also filter and have it mail to different addresses based on the filter I believe. It's very fast and quite simple too.

FYI -

Perry

[Jerry Hazen]

For a venture that is in any way commercial, I wouldn't consider anything other than your own domain. It's pretty cheap now to get your own domain with email forwarding. I use godaddy.com for mine (just personal, not commercial). Having your email as Don@henthornwoodworking.com looks far more professional than donhenthorn37@hotmail.com. Then whenever you get around to it you can setup that henthornwoodworking.com website! Also, things like pobox.com depend on that company staying in business. Your own domain is yours forever. If godaddy.com is hosting your domain and goes bust, you can just move your domain to another host.

Good luck with the venture!!

J.

[Jim Becker]

Originally posted by Don Henthorn Smithville, TX
Starting a new venture and want to get an email address that won't change if I change ISP's. Are there any suggestions?

Don, many of the hosting services include email as part of their packages. Since this is separate from your ISP (assuming you don't use your current ISP as your hosting service), it's portable. In fact, many offer web access that you can take advantage of when you are traveling. All you need is "any" net access to get to your email. (I use this feature when I travel on business...which I do a lot)

[Dr. Zack Jennings]

doteasy.com
I registered my domain: "zackjennings.com" for 5 years for $90 which includes domain renewals and webspace. I think it's a bargain. My current ISP is Cox Internet. My usual email address is on the zackjennings.com domain. A simple interface allows me to forward mail from that domain to my Cox address or any other.

You can collect your mail directly from the doteasy server. I like having an easy to remember address that I can renew again in 5 years.

[Don Henthorn Smithville, TX]

Thanks for all the replies. I am truly ignorant about these things. What is the difference between my ISP email and web mail? I have noticed that web hosts seem to offer many, many emails and I wondered why any one would need so many email addresses. The domain thing is puzzling too. I don'y know enough about it to even ask intelligent questions. )-:

[Perry Schmidt]

I didn't read it carefully enough - I agree w/ the previous couple of replies. If it's a business (or organization) then pobox.com isn't really approriate. Register your own doman name. Personal email, pobox.com works great.

Perry

[Jim Becker]

Originally posted by Don Henthorn Smithville, TX
[B]What is the difference between my ISP email and web mail?

Nothing...other than you may access them differently. The latter generally refers to receiving your email via a web page, rather than an application such as Outlook or Outlook Express. Your ISP may actually offer "webmail" access to your ISP email! "Webmail" actually allows more companies to be in the business of providing email services...sometimes free, but the real price may be privacy. It's always a lot nicer to have your own domain so you have full control over your email. Services like Hotmail and Yahoo sometimes compromise that control.

I have noticed that web hosts seem to offer many, many emails and I wondered why any one would need so many email addresses.

Many of us use multiple email accounts for different purposes. I have several I use for online shopping to allow me to delete them should they become SPAM magnets. When you have multiple folks in your household or organization, you may want to provide each with their own personal email. (For example, my brother has an email address under my domain name) You don't need to use more than one...it just makes sense sometimes, depending on your activities.

The domain thing is puzzling too. I don'y know enough about it to even ask intelligent questions.

A domain name is simply a way of identifying your...well...idenity, both for things like email and things like a web site or other server resource. The Internet actually runs on a numbering system. That's not all that friendly to mere mortals, so the folks that designed all this mess came up with a way to allow you and I to use easily understandable names, rather than numbers to find things on the Internet.

The naming structure for a Domain (right to left) is consistant and is made up as follows (For you folks who are technical, please note that I've used some terminology that is more descriptive than the technically correct names to make this easier to understand):

Top Level - this is the .com, .net, .org, .edu, .biz, .us, etc. portion of the name and is generally intended to group similar organizations together. ".com" was intended for commercial businesses. There is a lot more to this, and many more top level domains, but there is not space here to go into it all.

Organizational Level - this is the portion "in the middle" of the name that generally represents the specific organization that the domain name is pointing to. In mine, for example, it's the "sawsndust" in "sawsndust.com". This is the part that you have to carefully craft to make it meaningful. It must be unique in the world, too. This portion is separated from the top level by a "." (dot). For complex organizations, there may be an additional name in front of that to represent a "sub-domain", also separated by a dot.

Host Level - this portion may point to a specific resource, such as a web server, mail server, etc., and is a name generally used to describe a physical (or logical) device. This is the "www" designation you may often see in a URL. (Universal Resource Locator - the fully spelled out domain name preceded by a "communications protocol" designation, such as "http://". This portion is sometimes left off as the Domain Name Servers are provided with a "default". For example, on my domain, "http://www.sawsndust.com" and "http://sawsndust.com" will both send you to my web site.

I hope this was helpful.

[Jerry Hazen]

Hi Don,

The registration services make this very easy these days. By way of a tutorial, here's what I did. I have no affiliation with godaddy, it just happens to be an easy to use (and cheap) service. There are others as well.

Go to www.godaddy.com. At the top of the page you'll find a box you can fill in with your preferred internet domain (look for "enter a domain name"). Think about this for a while and pick something that you like and makes sense for your purpose. Fill it in the box then click Go (if this is a nonprofit venture, choose .org before clicking Go). The next screen will tell you if your chosen domain is available and probably offer it as either .com or .us. You can run this search as many times as you want until you get the best domain available for your purpose. If you have a choice between .com or .us, I'd recommend .com as it's more common and easier to remember these days. But .us is perfectly fine too if you'd prefer (that's what I have). That's us as in USA, not the word us.

Then choose your domain and click Smart Registration. The site will walk you through the rest. At some point you will want to choose "email forwarding" and enter your current email address that your ISP issued you. That way, any email sent to your new domain gets forwarded to your current email address. If you ever change internet providers, just update your new forwarding address at godaddy.com. You'll also have to choose at least one email address for your domain. Like Jim said, multiple email addresses can be useful. I think the godaddy registration includes 5. You may want one for your business like info@henthornwoodworking.com and something else for personal use like bigdon@henthornwoodworking.com. Also like Jim said, a separate address for online shopping is helpful to recognize spam later on. You can always just choose one at signup time, then add others later.

If you can post here, I guarantee you can setup your own domain. If this isn't clear, feel free to ask follow up Qs.

J.

[Don Henthorn Smithville, TX]

Thanks for the information and guidance. I think I am ready to go for a domain name.