All email addresses have form name@domain-name. The domain-name is a name that is registered on Internet, by yourself or by another company. Today it is common for all companies to register their own domain name and so all email addressed to that company would be addressed to someone@company-domain-name. For individuals it is common today to use domain name of your email provider, usually your ISP ,and email has form you@ISP-domain-name. So if your name is John Doe and you have an email account with Yahoo, then your email address would be:johndoe@yahoo.com.

Email Addresses and email accounts

An email address is not an email account! You can have an email address and not an email account, in which case you would use email forwarding to forward email to an address that had an account. Without an email account you cannot access or store email. Email accounts are always linked to email addresses but addresses are not always linked to email accounts. Addresses can and often are linked to other addresses (email forwarding). As an analogy assume you live at No 9 bridge road (your address) and your house ( account) gets destroyed in a storm. You decide not to rebuild old house; as it wasn't very stable anyway, and you move to a new house at 20 King street. In order to get mail that was addressed to 9 bridge road to come to 20 king street you go to post office and arrange for you mail to be re-directed. You can continue for this arrangement for as long as you want, normally until you have notified everyone of change of address, but if your willing to pay you can do it for a lifetime. Theme based or Personalised email addresses Many companies offer email addresses (many free) with unusual domain names. Like you@smileyface.com or you@backstreet-boys.com you@Iluvyou.com. They can be very amusing and very easy to remember but maybe not an address for a lifetime. Lifetime email addresses Many of us use email accounts that come, usually free, with our ISP (Internet Service Provider) account. The problem with these type of email accounts is that you loose them if you change ISP or ISP closes. Changing ISP is very common, for cost reasons or because you move locations etc. Lifetime email addresses are a great idea just like lifetime phone numbers. Unfortunately definition of a lifetime varies! Usually if you no longer subscribe to particular service your lifetime email address comes to end of its life! My idea of a lifetime email address is an address that stays with me until I cease to exist and not email provider! So how do you get a lifetime email address? and what methods are used to provide them.

Purchase an email account separate from your ISP

Having decided on a domain name we now need to check its availability before we can register it. All registrars that can register a .name domain name also have a facility for checking its availablity. So to check availablity of your domain name go to either any of .name registrars a complete list is available here: http://www.gnr.name/registrarlist.html

Before you Purchase

If you check on one or two of registrars above you will notice that there can be a great variance in price. The most logical choice is to choose cheapest. Before you choose you should be aware that on its own a domain name is not of much use so please read on.

Domain names-Email Addresses and Websites.

A domain name is an address. A domain name is not a mailbox or a website! Once you've purchased a domain name you need to link it to a website and/or mailbox. So when purchasing a domain name from a registrar you need to find out if it includes any of following in price or are they extra. a) website and/or email forwarding b) website hosting c) pop3 mailboxes and/or webmail.

To access email sent to your email address you will either need to forward that email to an existing address or have it sent directly to a mailbox. This was discussed in part 1 available at my websites see below.

Email Forwarding

This is same technique as is used in standard mail forwarding when you move house. Letters addressed to your old address are forwarded on to your new address. The main difference is that with normal mail forwarding is usually temporary (i.e. 3-6 months), whereas in email you could do it for as long as you want. So as an example my new lifetime email address is steve@lifetime.name and I have an existing hotmail account of stevelifetime@hotmail.com. I arrange that any email sent to steve@lifetime.name is forwarded on to stevelifetime@hotmail.com

Mailboxes

Email is stored on a email server in mailboxes. The mailbox is in effect physical storage equivalent to a physical mailbox for letters. The mailbox is in turn linked to an email address or addresses. It is very common to have email from multiple email addresses forwarded to a single mailbox for storage and access. The address is not mailbox and mailbox is not address, they are different. To read email in your mailbox you need to access mailbox using appropriate email software

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