In your reply to Browser Barrier (September 20), you said that people should switch to an email service "that doesn't depend on your ISP". I assume you mean a personal domain name, and I would like to do this. Are there any sites I could look at? Angela Carter
Nominet, which runs the UK registry, has a useful guide at nominet.org.uk/registrants/. The basic idea is to buy a domain name and use "mail forwarding" to redirect all your email to whichever service you prefer. If you change your ISP from, say, Orange to BT, you don't have to change your email address. You just log on to your domain host's site and paste in your new forwarding address at BT, Gmail, Hotmail, Fastmail.fm or whatever. This is a frequently asked question, and I gave a fuller answer on February 23, 2006.
Buying a domain name involves getting out your credit card and comparing the offers at a range of registrars. You can usually buy different names at different prices for one, two, five or 10 years, and with or without other services such as mailboxes, web hosting and URL forwarding.
Most of the obvious names have gone, particularly in the .com domain, but there are plenty of alternatives. You could probably still get angelacarter.info, .name, or .me.uk. You could also get an international domain, at a price: examples include angelacarter.eu, .cc (Cocos Islands) and .tv (Tuvalu). GoDaddy.com's smart search feature will suggest alternatives, but I'd still tend to add an initial or other variation and go for the best .com or co.uk available.
Comment: If you can't reach the "fuller answer" it's also on the blog below. Or try this trick!
I'm unable to comment at the moment (ie Comments feature not working). However, the point of owning a domain name is so that you can switch mail services. If you were to use a Web mail address instead of an ISP address, you still have the same problem: you can't easily switch. You might, for example, be locked into Hotmail when Gmail is better, or locked out of Gmail when you forget your password or your mailbox is hacked. This is almost as bad as being locked into an ISP address.
In fact, in the long term, you cannot rely on an ISP (Freeserve, Wannado, Orange...) or a Web-based service to offer a usable service -- or any service -- for 20 years, or 50 years, or whatever. If that sounds a long time, it isn't: I've already got one email address that I'm still using after 20 years, and I paid for 10 years of my own domain name up front.
