Making sure friends, relations and colleagues can keep in touch with you by email is important, especially at Christmas when we want to send good wishes of the season to those we may not have seen for some time. It can be hard work ensuring that they have up to date addresses to send you Christmas cards as well as email. Moving house and moving jobs can all mean changes in the addresses that need to be used for others to keep in touch with you.
These days many people will use an email address supplied by their ISP, but will change their ISP from time to time as services and prices change or you move to an area not supplied by the ISP that you used at your last address. Many have email accounts with Hotmail, Yahoo, Google and so on but if they are not used for a period they will be cancelled and that address lost.
On the other hand if you register a domain you can keep one easily recognisable and memorable email address forever for payment of just a small annual fee. A domain with an email address may cost as little as £14.50 a year plus tax or £1.21 per month. I have had my own email address in the style myfirstname@mylastname.com since October 1998, so while I changed my terrestrial address and ISPs many times, my friends, relationships and colleagues have no trouble in remembering how to contact me. I have also been able to set up email accounts for all the other members of the family the same way ie theirfirstname@theirlastname.ext. Of course if you are going to create email addresses for each of your children, wife or husband and maybe their husbands and wives too, you will probably be better to buy a package including hosting that will give a number of free mailboxes. For example, Easyspace’s Starter package comes with a free .co.uk domain name and 10 mailboxes (plus 500mb of web space) for just £25 plus tax.
Some registrars and hosting companies require their email accounts setting up in your email client software on your computer, unlike a webmail email account like Hotmail. Easyspace email accounts all come with webmail as well however so you can simply go to https://www.easyspace.com/webmail or the front page of Easyspace’s web site at www.easyspace.com and log in, read and reply to your mail from any computer anywhere in the world that has internet access, as well as download everything on your personal computer whenever you are at home.
So don’t you think that giving your family and friends an email address for life would be a really great Christmas present? And you can save yourself and them hours in future working to keep everyone up to date with their latest email address.
If you go for the hosting package of course, you have the added bonus of a web site where you can upload all those photos of Christmas, holidays, weddings and other important events to your family and friends. You can do family trees and maybe set up sub domains for various members of the family so they too can upload their photos, news and so on as well as you yourself.
If this sounds a good idea, you will find the following articles in our knowledge base may help.
What domain extensions are available? Please note that with a number of new domain extensions recently launched, if you cannot find one with a .com or .co.uk close enough to your family name, there is a good chance that you will be able to find one with, say, a .eu or .uk.com (and many others) suffix.
