On 2008-04-13 00:28:51 +0100, "George \(dicegeorge\)"
said:

if you use your ISP's email package
then when you move to another ISP
you will lose your email account,
and confuse all your contacts,
so use googlemail instead
www.gmail.com
or something else free and independent of yr isp
before you're trapped

In principle, having email addresses separate to the ISP is a good idea
for portability reasons.

Using Google mail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, ... is less of a good idea
because many mail recipients and other email services have SPAM filters
to drop mail from anybody at these domain addresses. Some Ecommerce
sites will not accept orders from users using these mail domains.

The correct solution to assure email address portability is to register
one's own domain name and to use an email hosting service.

Google etc. email accounts are useful for the different purpose of
having disposable email addresses.