It’s time to ditch your local email address

My old Internet Service Provider (ISP), Insight Communications was recently bought out (or they merged, I'm not quite sure how it went down) by Comcast. The entire conversion process was actually quite painless. The only real work I had to do was to register for a new comcast.net email address to replace my insightbb.com email address.

I didn't even care if I got the same relative email address at Comcast mainly because I never use my ISP's email address. I wish I could say the same for some of my clients.

A majority of Noobie's clients use the email address provided by their Internet Service Provider. Why? Because that's what they are told to use. Some are even told that they can have up to 5 free email addresses to use for their family.

Big deal.

The problem with your ISPs email address

Ok, I don't really have anything against using the email address(es) provided by your ISP. It's just not worth the hassle to me. Let's go back to the insightbb.com to comcast.net conversion for a minute. Like I mentioned, it was fairly painless to register for a new comcast.net email address. It's also fairly painless to start using that new email address. But what about all of your friends, family and business associates that have your old email address in their email address book? Do you really know every single person that may have your old email address so you can send them notification of your new email address?

I personally felt the pain of this last situation when I sent a broadcast message to Noobie's email mailing list this week and received bounce messages (undeliverable email notices) for every single subscriber with a @insightbb.com email address. Sure I can guess, or should I say hope, that each of these subscribers was able to get the same @comcast.net email address but there really is no way to be sure. And for many, I have no other way to contact them except for their email address, which no longer works.

The email address change problem isn't just restricted to ISP mergers either. What if you move to a new location that doesn't have the same ISP as your old location? You won't be able to take your old email address with you. And odds are your old ISP won't be very accommodating when you ask them to forward email from your old email address to your new one.

And let's not forget all of those services on the Internet that use your email address as your user name. Most web sites don't allow you to change your user name once you create your account so you are stuck for the rest of your life using your old email address as a login unless you terminate your account and create a new one.

A better alternative

My solution? Go with a big, national, web-based email service such as Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail. This frees you from the ties to your local ISP. You can also create as many email accounts as you want for each family member. There are no restrictions limiting you to 5 email addresses per family.

And if your ISP gets bought out or you move to another part of the country, nothing changes. Like I said, your Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail address is not tied to your physical location like your ISP one is. Even better, if you move you don't have to learn your new ISP's email interface or tell anyone about a new email address. It's just business as usual.

Any arguments against what I am saying? Leave them as a comment below.