What if I told you I would give you an email account, and it’s all yours to use.  You can use it for personal or business email or whatever you want.  There’s only one catch: you can only have it temporarily.  At some undetermined point in the future, your access to that email account would be cut off and you would not be able to use it at all after that.

Would you use that email as your primary email address?  Would you give that address to all of your friends and family?  Would you put it on your business cards and give it to all of your clients as the best point of contact?  Probably not.  It wouldn’t really make sense to be tied into an email address that you will lose at some point in the future.

Guess what.  YOUR email address might be a temporary one.

Does your email address end with:

• 
  
• tampabay.rr.com
  
• verizon.net or verizon.com
  
• roadrunner.net or roadrunner.com
  
• fairpoint.net or fairpoint.com
  
• gwi.net
  
• knology.net or knology.com
  
• comcast.net or comcast.com
  
• att.net or att.com
  
• cox.net or cox.com
  

Can you see what all of those have in common?  Each one is an Internet Service Provider (ISP).  When you sign up with a company to provide you access to the internet, they also give you an email address (or several) that you can use.

If you’re using the email address that was provided to you by your ISP, it’s only yours temporarily.  When you change internet providers, you LOSE your email account.

I’ve been encouraging people for many years to NOT use the email that comes with their internet service.  And it’s kind of ironic that one of the common objections to changing their email address is:

“I really can’t change my email address, because I’ve had this one for years and this is how all of my friends, family and customers know how to contact me.”

They’re kind of surprised when I tell them that at some point they are going to have to change it anyway, whenever they decide to change internet providers.

At that point they kind of throw up a defense that they know is weak -

“Well, I like my internet provider so I will just stay with them.”

Come on.

You seriously expect to be using the same internet service the rest of your life?  Technically it could possibly happen, but the odds are highly against it.  It’s much more likely that you will move to a different area that your current ISP does not cover, or a different ISP in town will offer a better deal or a faster connection (or both).

Or, your current provider might get bought by a larger company, meaning the domain name changes (so everyone’s email address changes).  Sound familiar, Fairpoint customers?

Why put yourself through all that hassle, when you can have an email address that is yours to use for the rest of your life?  And it’s completely FREE?

I’ve been using Gmail since it was introduced by Google in 2004.  And even though I have changed internet providers a few times in the past ten years, my email address has always been the same one.

Of course, you don’t have to use Gmail.  There are lots of web-based email providers, and many of them are free also.  I like Gmail for a variety of reasons (lots of storage space, great spam filter, Outlook compatibility, etc.).

Your other option is to just get your own domain name.  This costs about $10 per year.  Then you can have whatever email address you want.  For example, if I bought the domain name “scottjohnson.com”, I could have the email address scott@scottjohnson.com, info@scottjohnson.com, pctutor@scottjohnson.com or whatever one I wanted – because I would own that domain name.

Whatever you decide, my recommendation is that you take care of it now.  When you change your email address, it’s good to do it when you have time to proceed strategically and make sure everything goes smoothly.  I can help with that.  If you wait until you are forced to change emails (because of one of the above mentioned situations), you might miss something important.  Let’s avoid that.