Never change your email address again.
Help you get your account back? No.
Help you avoid this situation again in the future? Absolutely.
It’s frustrating when a service promising to provide something forever goes away. Apparently, “forever” isn’t what it used to be, and “lifetime” turns out to be the company’s lifetime, not yours.
An email address for life
The only way to keep one email address for life is to own a domain. Free services like Gmail or Outlook may last a long time, but only a domain you control guarantees permanence. Your address never changes, even if you switch email providers.
Email for life
Having a single email address you can count on for the rest of your days is pretty appealing, mostly because changing your email address is such a pain.
You’d never have to tell all your friends that your email address changed, and you’d never have to hope that they updated their address books.
You’d never have to run around to all the online services and shopping sites you use to manually update your email address.
You’d never lose important email because someone didn’t have your updated email address.
If you own your own domain, your email address is what it is and will not change (unless you want it to).
There are a few ways to make that happen.
Help make it permanent by becoming a Patron.
Related
How Do I Keep My Email Address When I Change My ISP?
Changing your internet provider doesn’t mean you have to lose your email address. I'll explain why ISP-issued addresses can trap you, and offer better options like free online services, mail forwarding, or even owning your own domain—so your email stays yours no matter where you move.#1860
Worst option: your ISP
One thing I can tell you not to do is this: don’t rely on the email address your ISP gives you as part of your service.
- You could move to an area not serviced by your current ISP.
- Your ISP could change.
- Another ISP could buy your ISP.
- Your ISP could go out of business.
Regardless of the reason, one thing I can tell you: the email address assigned to you by your ISP will need to be changed at some point.
There are almost no exceptions.1
Better choice: a large company’s email service
Google and Gmail will probably be around for a while. Hotmail email addresses will probably work for as long as Microsoft exists, even though the website has changed to Outlook.com.
Yahoo? Your guess is as good as mine. AOL? Probably good for a while, but who knows? Both of these companies have gone through corporate changes that could have easily impacted their email product.
You can count on some of the existing general-purpose email services to be around for a long time, and you can probably guess which ones I consider the safest in that respect: Google and Microsoft.
Paid email services are a little more difficult to judge because their existence is predicated on making money. Should that change, priorities might change, and you could someday get that unwelcome message that the service is closing.
Special-purpose email services run an additional risk: their purpose. ProtonMail, for example, is a fully encrypted email service that could someday be at the mercy of various governments for whom encryption is so offensive. Such services have been shut down in the past either in response to government requests or in reaction to government threats.
But using a service like Gmail or Outlook.com is a pretty reasonable solution, as long as you don’t lose your account to a hack.
Related
What’s the Difference Between an Email Domain, Account, Address, and Alias?
Email terms can be confusing, but they don’t have to be. I'll explain the differences between domains, accounts, addresses, and aliases—plus how they work together to get your messages delivered. This simple breakdown (with an easy metaphor) will help you understand and manage your email with confidence.#17975
Best way: your own domain
The best solution is not the simplest, but it puts nearly everything under your control.
Own your own domain.
Just as I own “askleo.com”, you can purchase (or more correctly, lease) a domain on the internet that is completely and only yours. You control all the email addresses on that domain (as many as you like!), but more importantly, you control how and where that email is handled, and you can change it any time.
Email on your own domain can be handled in several ways.
Domain registrars (the companies that sell internet domain names) often offer email services. They become your email provider for the email addresses on your domain.
Your domain host is the company that stores your website’s files and makes them accessible on the internet. They almost certainly offer email services. If you choose to host a website with your domain, your domain host can become your email provider for the email addresses on your domain.
Any other email account anywhere. Even if your registrar doesn’t offer email services directly, they usually offer email forwarding. Email sent to your email address on your domain is automatically forwarded to any other email address. For example, all email might be forwarded from your domain registrar to an Outlook.com email address, and you then deal with your email using Outlook.com.
Any other email service that can import POP3. Most of the major email services (like Gmail and others) support what I refer to as POP3 pickup. If your registrar does offer email services, these services act like an email client program, picking up your email from the registrar or host. For example, while your registrar might support full email access if you like, you can instead configure Gmail (or other services that support it) to fetch the email periodically via POP3. You then interact with your email using Gmail.
There are other options; these are just the most common.
Why your domain is best
Here’s why this option is best: you can change the approach at any time without changing your email address. As long as you own your domain, your email address need never change, even though the way it’s handled can be changed as needed.
For example, let’s say:
- You own the internet domain “yourveryowndomainname.com”2.
- You have an email address: leo@yourveryowndomainname.com.
- Your domain registrar provides basic email services.
- You use Google Mail to access the servers at your registrar, fetch the email sent to you, and send email as leo@yourveryowndomainname.com.
In other words, you use your Gmail account to send and receive email as leo@yourveryowndomainname.com.
One day, your Gmail account is hacked, or Google makes you angry enough to want to leave, or (long shot here) Google goes out of business.
No problem. You set up the same system, only this time you use your account at another online provider in place of Gmail. Your email address never changes. It’s still leo@yourveryowndomainname.com; you’re just using a different provider to access it.
It’s what I do
Email sent to any email address that’s destined for me @askleo.com is handled by a Google Mail account. My replies? Usually typed in the Gmail web interface.
The same is true for my personal email, except it’s all handled by ProtonMail.
If I ever want to change, I can. If I ever want my registrar to handle it, they can. If I ever want to handle it myself, I can.3 If I want to switch it all to a different online service or something else, I can…
…all without changing my email addresses @askleo.com or @ any of the other domains I own.
As long as I own those domains, the email addresses need not change.
And I intend to own most of them for the rest of my life.
Do this
At a minimum, never rely on your ISP’s assigned email address to last. At least get yourself a Gmail account or something similar that won’t change when your ISP does.
Then, consider getting your own domain. It’s not as overwhelming as you might think, and it’s the utmost in flexibility for the future.
Whatever email address you use, use it to subscribe to Confident Computing! Less frustration and more confidence, solutions, answers, and tips in your inbox every week.
Footnotes & References
1: Two things have to be true: you never move outside your ISP’s coverage area, and they never change their email service. Ever. Both are highly unlikely.
2: You don’t; I do. It’s an example domain. You would use whatever domain name you like and can purchase.
3: This requires that I run my own mail server, which I have available to me.
I agree with you but what happens if your domain host goes bust? I’d rather have a paid for Email address with Google if I want to pay for it.
Domain hosts, at least, have a formal secession plan. If my domain host goes bust, for example, then another is in line to replace it, by definition. (Though, honestly, it probably had about as much chance as Google going bust, but good to note.)
In ALL cases you’re probably at greater risk of a hack. Google will have no support for you. Your Domain Registrar will.
Hmm, not sure about the line “If my domain host goes bust, for example, then another is in line to replace it” how does it ensure your emails are secure? Does the new one takes them over and preserves them?
Incidentally, I have my own domain and server but use my Google email most.
PS why do I have to type in my name and address every time now? Didn’t need to before.
Regardless of where you hold your mail, you MUST back it up. No, a dieing domain host will probably toss your email, but if you’re backing it up in just about ANY way (even fetching it into google is a start), then you’d lose nothing.
Name and address: you mean here? That’s a cookie thing – are you clearing cookies?
How about an e-mail forwarding service? Same e-mail address, just change where it gets forwarded to when necessary. I have used this $20/yr service for years: https://www.pobox.com/
What happens when pobox.com goes away? That’s EXACTLY the scenario that the original question was about. Your email address belongs to them, and if they go out of business your email address goes with them.
This is really good advice i have used my own domain email for over 10 years and have moved WEB host multiple times migrating my mail along with it, this is usually very simple to do and with no loss of important mail, before i migrate host i usually setup the email in outlook and download the entire mailbox to my laptop, having your own domain mail allows you to add addresses for other family members and allows your to have different addresses for different purposes.
I also use Gmail on redirect for general internet sites i join from time to time (like here) and use my primary domain mail account for important mail such as service providers and friends
Registering a domain name is very low cost @$10 per annum and hosting is cheap if you only need mail hosting , this can often be handled by the domain registrar
I had an e-mail address using my personal dot US domain. I figured that was eternal. Well, it wasn’t!
One day I got an e-mail from the company that handles the dot US domains. They said I had to prove I was a US citizen in order to keep my dot US domain. This was because I had my personal information “protected” (hidden from public view) by my domain name registrar to minimize spamming of my account. Unfortunately my ISP wouldn’t help me with this problem. At first they said they would and then they dropped the ball.
They said they would accept the following as proof of my US citizenship:
1. Copy of my passport (I think it was the photo page).
2. Copy of my birth certificate.
First, I do not have a passport (haven’t needed one since I retired from the military).
And I was not about to give them a copy of my birth certificate because with all the hackings going on, if someone would have hacked their system, that’s all the hackers would need for identity theft.
They said that’s all they could accept – according to their contract with the US Dept of Commerce. So they immediately closed down my domain as of midnight. I had to figure out where all my e-mail addressres were and contact those people to change it. I’m sure I still haven’t totally recovered from that mess.
Now I have a gmail account, but am not happy with gmail’s spam system. I get 9 e-mails every day from the same provider. Some days I get all 9. Other days I don’t because gmail thinks some of them are spam. I would love to tell gmail to turn off their spam filter for my account and let me manage it myself.
You can turn off gmail spam filtering for any address that you are sure will always be genuine.
(I do this a lot, for the same reason you mention – messages which I know are definitely not spam, and which reading them I struggle to think what kind of cockamamie algorithm could possibly think they are)
To do this you need to first find and open a message from the address you always want to receive messages from.
Then using the top right drop down arrow, choose the option “Filter messages like these”
Nine times out of ten it chooses to filter based on the email address or “list id” for mailing lists, which generally works just fine.
Hit “Create filter with this search”
Now it will open a screen where you can choose what you want to do – in this case tick the box for “Never send it to spam”
If you have some already in spam, tick the “Also apply filter to xx matching conversations” to have them pulled out of spam.
Click create filter – and your job is done – you will never have to pick that email out of spam again.
(Of course nothing is guaranteed to last forever – many of the ones I have done this with have changed the address they send from every few years though, so I do still need to keep an eye open for any slipping through)
OK, you’ve convinced me that I should use my own domain for my email address. But you left out one very important part of that process: How do I notify my hundreds of contacts of the change from my present email address to the new one? Doing so one by one would be a major PIA and I can’t send out the information to everyone at once b/c that will look like spam. So what do I o?
Thanks,
Vicky Campagna
{email address removed}
The only solution is to notify them yourself, or update the sites that have your email address yourself. This is true any time you change an email address. That’s why you only want to do it once, to your email address for life.
PS: NEVER post your email address in a public forum, as you did here. It’s asking for spam.
Programs like Outlook (MS Office version) and Thunderbird allow you do do a mail merge so each person gets an individual personally addressed email.
I got my own email address quite a few years ago. Does it cost me? Yes.
I have changed service providers at least 4-5 times but my web host remained stable.
If he went down (over 10 years) I could probably transfer to a different web host.
For those who can, being a member of an alumni association may be the answer to a permanent address. It is unlikely a university, or college, especially a state one will ever go out of business during your lifetime. Some have associate members who have not attended the school but are supporters etc.
I’ve actually seen alumni associations provide email for a while and then discontinue the service.
My University (and former long-term employer) implied that upon retiring I had a forever address. This year I used it to get a Zoom account. Now the University “has taken control of their named domain” because they have obtained a University-wide Zoom account and blocked me from logging in to Zoom because retirees are no allowed to use the University Zoom account. I have just changed my login email to access Zoom and am here because I’m researching getting my own domain name.
Just want to go on record here that – based on Leo’s recommendation here on this site – I signed up (domain name and email) with his provider (SOS) several years ago, and have been very pleased with their service. I don’t get anything for recommending them – I just wanted to share my positive experience with the company.
I use Office outlook not outlook.com, I also own my own domain, can I use my office servers to send and collect my domain mail in the same way you have described the Gmail system. I do prefer the office system to both outlook.com and Gmail
Yes.
What if your email changes without you knowing? Because that’s what happened to me.
An email address doesn’t just change. Could you go into details about exactly what happened including email provider, what was changed etc. (Please don’t include your email addresses as that could result in you getting spam).
What Information Should I Provide When Asking for Help?
I had a email for 2 months and it changed. The email provider was Temp-Mail. and my email went from {email address removed} to {email address removed}. I was saddened. nickrizos was nowhere to be found.
With a provider name like Temp-Mail, I’m not at all surprised.
Leo is right. I checked and temp-mail is a provider of disposable email addresses to use one time for signing up for things and then never using again.
Since I also have a .us domain, I looked the information. I found “Registrants of .us domains must be American citizens, residents, or organizations, or a foreign entity with a presence in the United States of America.” Since this is a requirement, I am surprised that the company you registered with didn’t ask for that information when you registered it.
What happens when you stop paying for the domain? Does your email just cease to exist?
I’ve been looking for an email that doesn’t expire whatsoever, so I know it’ll be permanent. So far Apple (iCloud) has the most security, but I don’t know.
Sometime after you stop paying for the domain, it disappears from the internet and your ability to get or access email goes away.
Hello~
Are there any email services that doesn’t cause your email to expire? Are there any that would ensure your email never gets deleted so you are knowingly comfortable that you don’t lose everything?
I read that iCloud doesn’t get deleted once you link an AppleID, that’s about it.
You can get your own domain (like I own askleo.com) set up an email address on it (like leo@askleo.com), route it through an email provider (like Gmail) download it to a desktop email program (like Thunderbird), and you are limited only by your own disk space and desire to retain your email. You can also change the middle-man (Gmail in this example) with any other (like Outlook.com) without changing your email address.
You’ve convinced me to follow in your footsteps. The problem is that I’m not completely clear on how to A) get my own domain name and B) set up an email on KartHost that works through Gmail at the cheapest price.
Do I lease a domain name AND sign up for one of their email plans? Just one or the other? I’m confused.
Thanks for the help both here and your entire website! (and YouTube and newsletters and…)
You would (from Karthost or another domain registrar):
)
– purchase a domain (as mentioned, it’s really a lease
– purchase email services as well. This would enable email on that domain, and if you’re doing it with the domain registrar they’ll set up the behind-the-scenes magic.
Then if you want to use Gmail to access yoru email, this article: How Do I Route My Email through Gmail?