On Sun, 13 Apr 2008 08:52:56 +0100, Andy Hall wrote:

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.

On the subject of portable email addresses - I still have some of my BT
Internet/ Talk21 email addresses even though I am currently on another
carrier (I knew NTL before she was a Virgin...).

I kept some originally by having a dial in PAYG account which I used once
every 6 months; they then did a deal where you pay £1.50 a month to keep
your email addresses alive. This was at the time they closed down Talk21
as a competitor to Hotmail. This seems like a good idea; I wonder if other
ISPs offer anything similar?

Strangely, I still have a working email account at '123isp' which I used
years back because they could bond two ISDN sessions together to get a
128K link, something that BT didn't offer at the time. I quit them when
Broadband became available at my local exchange but they never seem to
have cancelled my email account. I suspect a lot of small ISPs may be a
little flaky on cancelling email and web access when customers migrate.

Still, this is drifting off topic for an OT post.....