Every ISP provides a service platform that usually includes, e-mail, personal web site, technical support, and other interesting goodies& and every time you change your ISP you get a whole new basket full. Nice??? Your e-mail address is much like a telephone number& it has many of the same benefits and suffers many of the same pitfalls. So how many e-mail addresses do you manage and why? You have the e-mail from your ISP, you have the free Hotmail account, you have the free Yahoo account, you have the free GMail account, you have the e-mail from work, you have the e-mail from school... you have ALL this e-mail and none of it is actually dedicated to you. Personally, I have given out the same 2 primary e-mail addresses for several years. I have changed my ISP several times with generally no interruption of my e-mail flow. How is that so?

1. have your own domain names

2. know and understand how e-mail works (in general)

Because of these 2 things only, There is no e-mail confusion... Yes there is SPAM and yes there are viruses...

Yes I have a Hotmail account, yes I have a Yahoo account but I DO NOT USE THEM for Correspondence (with very little exception). My Yahoo, Hotmail and other e-mail accounts are for access to the associated on-line communities (we'll get to that later)

If you are the stick to it type... an ISP monogamist so to speak... you may have the fortune of having the same e-mail address for years... and then along comes a reason to change your ISP, you want high speed, you move to a new place... something upsets the apple cart and voila... you now have a new ISP and a new bag of goodies. What do you do?? You can just change your e-mail address to the new one... But what about all the business collaterals that you had printed up last year, what about the list of friends and business associates that you communicate with... How do you handle this without loosing your mind?

There are plenty of services out there that can help with this type of migration... many are even free (but at what cost to your data/privacy). AOL even offers to let you take your e-mail address with you to another ISP... but again... at what cost?

Again, my solution is to have in place a trusted coordinator for you on-line services, have your own domain name for at least e-mail forwarding or for the most bang... do them both.