The Hot Iron

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Theirs is not Your Domain Name

It may be your email address and your identity, but if you have your email through a third-party service, using their domain name, you don’t have complete control of it.  These examples have caused grief for thousands, and hopefully it drove some of them to their own domain name.

Many people have their email addresses through their Internet provider.  This is a very common practice, and all tends to work well with sending and receiving email.  But what happens when you decide to change Internet providers, or you move and have to choose a new provider?  Or if you change from dial-up to broadband and go with a new provider.  In all cases your old email account will cease to exist when you stop paying for it.  Some providers may offer limited forwarding, but that will soon end.

The extreme case of this was when AT&T (note the capital letters) bought cable and broadband provider MediaOne.  They decided to terminate the use of the email domain name, mediaone.net, in favor of their own, attbi.com.  Individuals and businesses were then forced to change their email address, and in some cases business cards and letterhead.  And to add insult to injury, when Comcast bought AT&T Broadband and they eliminated attbi.com for comcast.net, more changes ensued.

Up until recently, individuals and businesses were paying AOL monthly fees just to keep their AOL email address, even when they have moved on to broadband.  AOL’s announcement of offering their email services for free changed this; you must contact them to make this change.

If you own your own domain name, your email address would not have changed in any of these cases, and saved you printing costs and time wasted telling everyone of your new email address.