Personal Email Addresses

For the second cycling season, I’ve been the Ride Coordinator for the Harpeth Bike Club. While managing lots of personal email addresses, I’m amazed at the people that are locked into their Internet Service provider by using the ISP-provided address.
What does this mean?  Many use @comcast.net as their email address.  They sign up at their bank with it.  They sign up to ebay with it.  They subscribe to mailing lists.  Their whole life is connected to that email address.
Problem is there are choices (or should be choices) as to who provides you Internet service.  You want to switch to ABI or AT&T because Comcast provides shi.tty service?  Well, that means you’re in for a ton of work to get rid of that comcast.net email address.  That’s a major problem, and will make you tolerant of problems with your current ISP just so you don’t have to go through that.
So what do you do?  The easiest thing is to get a Yahoo, Google Gmail or an AOL email account.  They’re free and they can actually retrieve your email from Comcast or any other POP/SMTP mail server (using the same email settings your Outlook uses.)  Those services have antivirus and spam filters that work great.  They have webmail interfaces that work very smoothly, though they may take getting used to.  I don’t want to get into a review of webmail interfaces here…
The most difficult thing is to go to Godaddy or some other DNS registrar and buy a permanent name, like patclements.com!   You’re stuck with that email domain, but you’re not stuck with Godaddy or any other hosting service.  You’re not requried to set up a website either, though it’s kinda fun.  However, a DNS name costs about $10 a year to keep it.
Go start weening yourself from your ISP email address.  Do it over time.  When you suddenly get a good choice and want to change ISP’s, you’re positioned perfectly for it.