This morning, I suddenly remembered an article I wrote about ten years ago and published in one of the local papers in Sydney. The article, now reloaded in this post, was titled “How to create a permanent email address.”
In my original article, I suggested ways to creating an email address using your favorite domain name or in fact, your own domain name, which you would like to be your permanent email address.
The suggested technique simply involved setting up a virtual (now called, forwarding) email account which you could fashion more aesthetically than the server-restricted, 6-character, and imagination-stretching username email address. Emails sent to a virtual email account were forwarded to a real email account like an email address issued by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) with a mailbox which held your incoming emails until these were downloaded to your local drive.
It was actually a very simple technique which utilized the forwarding capabilities of mail servers, with your “permanent email address” being no different from a postal office box. With prior arrangements with the postal office, your mails would follow you wherever you go or the postal office would hold your mails until you pick them up.
Today, this technique is still very much in use.
We use the technique, and have in fact extended its application to servicing special-purpose function or event. For example, our websites group has created an email address which identifies the department to which the message is addressed. The contact form in this site for example uses an email address which redirects the messages sent through it to my real email account. If the technique is used for a special-purpose event or function, the email address can be deleted once the event or function is completed. The email address can also be deleted without any hesitation if it is receiving a lot of spams.
A virtual or forwarding email address has so much flexibility that you can customize it to your personal preferences for a more aesthetically fashioned looking email address. Or it can be customized to cater to a specific business need.
And if you’re using it as a permanent email address, you have the flexibility to change ISP. No need to tell your contacts that you changed your email address because you changed ISP.
The facility to set up a virtual or forwarding email address has been around for as long as I remember. We wonder at times why we still see email accounts of website owners and managers being displayed on their web pages. Or, why we also see even writers (and bloggers, too!) of popular and large news sites displaying their email addresses on their posts.
Have they ever wondered why they are receiving a lot of spams in their mailbox.
I am thinking of writing another similar article like: Why you should not use a webmail?
What do you think? Share us your thoughts.
Reprinted from A Matter of Sharing
