One of the big reasons for me to get my domain was to have control over my emails. Before then, i had relied on service providers and free web-based emails to provide me with email addresses, but what would happen if i switched from rogers to sympatico or hotmail started charging $400/yr to access your old mail? well, i would 1) lose all my old mail and 2) have to contact everyone who had my old email and tell them about my new one. now while the aforementioned has a low risk of ever happening, the amount of work and loss that i would have to go through would be a serious pain in the ass. so i didn’t want to take the chance.

So i got my own domain, and now have my very own personal email that will last as long as i keep paying the less than $10 USD per year to keep the domain and $x for a web host. Well what happens if the price of domains or web hosting skyrocket? well, if they do I think your $400/yr account would skyrocket as well. Provided you manage your hosting properly, my email on domain now lets me receive attachments much larger than the 10 megabyte limit of Gmail, it allows me to download all my mail to my computer and do whatever I want with it, it allows me to have as much storage as I want, it allows me to forward a copy of all my mail to Gmail so I can use their features as well, and lots of other benefits that I will describe later. Basically for a price, I have much more flexibility and less risk than I would ever have had with a third party email.

The problem with one permanent email is that if it ever gets put on a spam list, you will have horrible spam problems for the rest of your email’s life. Now this is a problem for any email, but considering that the goal of this email is to be the one email address you use for ever, you can’t really go about changing your address now can you? Fortunately, the geeks on the web are fighting this battle for you, and your web host most likely has software such as spam assassin installed on your mail server. Your second line of defense can be your mail client using Baysian filtering or other statistic based junk mail filtering. Spam, while ever prevalent on the internet should not be a mission critical problem.

Now on to other non obvious benefits. As I have mentioned before, you can forward a copy of your email to other email accounts which is great if you want a copy of your email that is accessible away from your primary computer. For example, I forward all my mail from my domain to Gmail so I will have a copy of it on-the-go. You can also setup throw-away emails that you use to sign up to all sorts of possibly spam related activities. What I do is everytime I sign up for something on the web I use a different but recognizable email address, so if I get spam at a particular address I now know who let out my email address. For example, I signed up on this pyramid scheme site for freeipods uh, just to see what it was about. Anyways I used the email freeipods@ so any email they would send me would be to the email address freeipods@.

Now this system works great with a catch-all email address. What that is, is one particular mailbox that receives all emails sent to your domain that don’t have a specific mailbox to goto. So I can randomly make up any email when I’m subscribing to a site and it’ll reach my catch-all mailbox, which is useful because some sites require you to click on activation links or that sort of stuff. Anyways, eventually you’ll screw up and sign up to some site which does sell your email to a spam list. When this happens, all you have to do is create a new mailbox for that email address which deletes everything you receive. Ta-da now you don’t ever have to worry about spam from the email anymore. For example, I now know that the freeipods sold my email address out and I’ve forwarded freeipods@ to the trash. So with this system, I have the equivalent of creating useless spam accounts over free webmail, except it’s easier because you don’t actually have to do anything until they start sending you spam.

So even if you have no other need for a domain, I’d recommend you get one for the email features. If you decide to go the cheap route, you may not have all functionality I’ve described; but depending on which registar you signed up with, you should have free email forwarding so that could work as your permanent email provided you have a mailbox behind the scenes (which can change from provider to provider since you only give out your forwarded email). Even if you don’t care about the geeky functionality, you can get one just so you have a chic email address and not one that ends in hotmail.com or gmail.com.