How do I keep my email address if I change providers?

This all sounds very, very familiar. You see, I play the role of your friend
for a few people as well.

What you’re attempting to do could be easy, or it could be next to
impossible. It depends a little on your friend’s willingness to let go and a
lot on just who owns what.

We need to start by reviewing just how email addresses work and how they’re
related to the domain names they use.

As you probably already realize, an email address is comprised of two parts:
the email name and the domain name. If my email address is leo@example.com,
then the domain name is “example.com” and the email name is “leo”.

How “leo@example.com” comes into existence and becomes a working email
address involves several steps and concepts that we’re going to look at
individually.

Domain Name Registration

Domain names are purchased, or more properly “registered”, by individuals or
companies. Domain name registrars are the keepers of the ownership records and
the companies you pay to register a domain. Technically “leased” might actually
be an even better term since they do need to be renewed and paid for on an
ongoing basis.

So, for example, I own the domain “ask-leo.com”. I registered it through the
registrar SimpleURL,
though a registrar you’re more likely to recognize might be GoDaddy because of their frequent
advertising.

Since you don’t mention owning your domain, I’m going to assume that your
friend probably did this for you and that he, in fact, owns it.

Owning a domain is only a start.

DNS: the Domain Name System

Once you own a domain, you need to be able to tell the world where to go
when they need to do something that references that domain. That’s what DNS is
all about.

There’s more, of course, but for our purposes when you own a domain name
there are a couple of important bits of information that you specify in
DNS:

• The IP address of the web server hosting the website for that domain.

• The name of the mail server responsible for processing all email sent to
  that domain.

Both are optional; you can have domain with a website but no email, or email
without a website. And the website and email don’t need to be handled on the
same server.

In most cases when you purchase a domain the registrar will also provide you
with DNS services, but it’s not required. In fact, aside from your registration
information, the only information that your registrar is required to provide is
the location of the DNS servers that will contain the reference information
about your domain. Those DNS servers could be somewhere else entirely. For
example, while I’ve registered ask-leo.com through SimpleURL, who do provide DNS
services, I’ve elected to have my DNS managed by servers at Rackspace, where the servers are
actually located.

Once again, I’m going to assume that your friend is handling all of this for
you as well.

Once you own a domain and have configured DNS so that email is sent to
a particular mail server, then it’s time to configure your mail.

Email Services

This gets a little more vague because there are so many possible options
here.

I’ll start at the extreme end: running your own mail server, as I do. Mail
sent to the domains I own is processed by my own mail server. In many ways I am
my own ISP. That means I’m responsible for creating email accounts and making
sure that everything is set up on the server to process the email that gets
directed at it. In other words, the mail server has to “know” that it’s
supposed to process email for “ask-leo.com”. It also has to know what email
addresses are valid and what to do with the email messages that come in. When I
download email to my email program, I do so by downloading directly from my own
email server.

I’m guessing that this is exactly what your friend is doing. Running an
email server of his own that is configured to receive and process email for the
domain on which your email names reside.

The other extreme goes all the way back to your registrar. In addition to
providing DNS services, many registrars also provide simple email services.
Some provide actual email accounts from which you can directly download your
email, while others provide “forwarding” accounts which automatically forward
email to some other email address completely.

I’m hoping, in the long run, that you may be able to take advantage of
something like that.

What to do?

With all that as background, we can now describe what needs to happen for
you to move your email address to another provider.

• Ideally, you need to own your domain. By this I mean that
  if your email address is “you@example.com”, you want to own the domain
  “example.com”. This is why you’d never be able to move email addresses that are
  provided by your ISP or other services. You’ll never own “hotmail.com” or
  “sbcglobal.com” and the like. True email portability is only possible if you
  own your own internet domain.

  If your friend currently owns your domain, then you would want to negotiate
  with him a transfer of ownership. It can be a little complicated so people
  can’t go stealing domain registrations, but it is possible and it does happen
  all the time.

• Alternately, you need to keep your friend. If he can’t or
  won’t transfer ownership of the domain to you, then he’ll need to make the
  changes you’ll want. For as long as he owns it and you want to keep using
  it.

• Determine if your registrar provides email forwarding. As I
  said, many if not most do, though occasionally for an extra charge. If they
  do not, it might be easiest to change registrars. Much like ownership transfer,
  changing registrars can be a little painful up-front to prevent theft, but it’s
  also done all the time.

• Get yourself an email account on another service. I know
  you want free, in which case I’d recommend Gmail, but I also tend to recommend against free email
  services in general, preferring paid email services
  that offer better support.

• Configure that email account to send “from” your domain’s email
  account. For example, let’s say you got an address “you@gmail.com”.
  You would configure Gmail, or your email
  program, to download from that address, and send using that service, but
  with your “From:” address filled in as “you@yourowndomain.com”.

• Configure email forwarding. At whatever service is
  providing your email forwarding, hopefully your registrar, you would simply
  indicate that all email sent to “you@yourdomain.com” get forwarded to
  “you@gmail.com”. Chances are they’ll allow you to configure multiple email
  addresses this way.

The beauty of this setup is that you can change where you really get your
email without having to tell everyone you have a new email address. People send
you email at “you@yourdomain.com”, and if you decide you’d rather use Hotmail
than Gmail, you simply create a Hotmail account, change the forwarding, and no
one need know the difference.

And to answer your final question: yes, if you own your own domain you can
absolutely set up a web site on it at any time.

Ultimately everything boils down to your ability to make the necessary
changes to your domain’s configuration including both DNS and email forwarding.
Whether by proxy, perhaps using your friend or someone else to help with the
technical details, or directly, it’s something that you’ll need to be able to
do.