About Your E-Mail Address

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I’m sure you’d agree that your personal e-mail address is an important part of your contact information these days, just like your cell phone number and your physical mailing address. Yet most people don’t pay much attention to how their e-mail address affects their communication with others. Here we’ll talk about how to ensure you have an e-mail address that you can keep for a long time (i.e. forever), and best ways to get it. First let’s talk about why you wouldn’t want to change your e-mail address.

Importance
of Your E-Mail Address
Changing your e-mail address should be treated as significantly as changing your phone number or mailing address. When you change your mailing address, you let you let your friends, credit card companies, utilities companies, and others know about the change. Nowadays we use our e-mail addresses in a very similar way. Besides keeping in touch with friends and family, we use our e-mails for getting notifications about bank and credit card statements, travel and store specials, and events we may be interested in.
As you can see, our e-mail addresses play a key role in keeping us connected and informed. And, you could argue that unlike mailing addresses, it is much harder to keep track of and notify all those who have your e-mail address about a change. You may be able to notify those that are in your address book. But you haven’t necessarily kept track of all the places you subscribed to with your e-mail address; so even if we wanted to notify them of the change, it may not be practical. The other reason is that the equivalent of the US Post Office mail forwarding service isn’t available for most e-mail services unless you pay some extra money to upgrade your old account or keep your sub scri ption to the old service provider to enable forwarding; neither of which is desirable.
Now, here are some ways to help you avoid changing your e-mail address.

Don’t Use Your
Service Provider’s Address
When you sign up for high-speed Internet service through your phone or cable company, they offer you free e-mail accounts with that service. The e-mail addresses they offer are obviously tied to your service, so they are available as long as you’re paying for the service. It’s possible that you may want to change your service provider because you’re moving or are getting a better deal somewhere else. But if you switch service providers, your e-mail address goes away once you cancel your old service. So when signing up with a high-speed Internet service provider, don’t use the e-mail accounts they offer as your e-mail address.
Use Free Web-Based E-mail
One of the easiest ways is to get a permanent e-mail address is to use one of the web-based e-mail services like Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail. The service is free, and you’ll never have to change your e-mail address when you change service providers. And thanks to a bit of competition that Google created when they introduced Gmail, they all now offer plenty of storage to keep all your e-mails. The other benefits of these accounts are that you can access your e-mail from any computer with an Internet connection, and your entire e-mail address book is always there.
Some people don’t like the user interface of web-based e-mail services. In those cases, you have the option to download your e-mails into Outlook Express or any other e-mail program. Just look under the help section of the e-mail provider for details on how to do this. You should be aware that when you download the e-mails this way, you won’t benefit from the spam filtering and virus scanning features of those services. Instead, you’ll need to make sure that you have those installed on the computer where you download your e-mails.

Don’t Use Your Work E-mail
This may be an obvious one, but still worth mentioning. Most companies prohibit their employees from using their company e-mail address for personal use, for good reason. Besides the fact that you’re using company resources for personal use and exposing the corporate networks to added risk of viruses and spam, you’re also assuming that you’ll always be at that company and will have that same e-mail address. Then when you change companies, you face the same problem that we earlier described about changing service providers. So it’s a good idea to get your own personal e-mail address to avoid this problem.

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