Making sure friends, relations and colleagues can keep in touch with you by email is important, especially at Christmas when we want to send good wishes of the season to those we may not have seen for some time.  It can be hard work ensuring that they have up to date addresses to send you Christmas cards as well as email.  Moving house and moving jobs can all mean changes in the addresses that need to be used for others to keep in touch with you.

These days many people will use an email address supplied by their ISP, but will change their ISP from time to time as services and prices change or you move to an area not supplied by the ISP that you used at your last address.  Many have email accounts with Hotmail, Yahoo, Google and so on but if they are not used for a period they will be cancelled and that address lost.

On the other hand if you register a domain you can keep one easily recognisable and memorable email address forever for payment of just a small annual fee.  A domain with an email address may cost as little as £14.50 a year plus tax or £1.21 per month.  I have had my own email address in the style myfirstname@mylastname.com since October 1998, so while I changed my terrestrial address and ISPs many times, my friends, relationships and colleagues have no trouble in remembering how to contact me.  I have also been able to set up email accounts for all the other members of the family the same way ie theirfirstname@theirlastname.ext.  Of course if you are going to create email addresses for each of your children, wife or husband and maybe their husbands and wives too, you will probably be better to buy a package including hosting that will give a number of free mailboxes.  For example, Easyspace’s Starter package comes with a free .co.uk domain name and 10 mailboxes (plus 500mb of web space) for just £25 plus tax.

Some registrars and hosting companies require their email accounts setting up in your email client software on your computer, unlike a webmail email account like Hotmail.  Easyspace email accounts all come with webmail as well however so you can simply go to http://webmail.easyspace.com or the front page of Easyspace’s web site at www.easyspace.com and log in, read and reply to your mail from any computer anywhere in the world that has internet access, as well as download everything on your personal computer whenever you are at home.

So don’t you think that giving your family and friends an email address for life would be a really great Christmas present?  And you can save yourself and them hours in future working to keep everyone up to date with their latest email address.

If you go for the hosting package of course, you have the added bonus of a web site where you can upload all those photos of Christmas, holidays, weddings and other important events to your family and friends.  You can do family trees and maybe set up sub domains for various members of the family so they too can upload their photos, news and so on as well as you yourself.

If this sounds a good idea, you will find the following articles in our knowledge base may help:

Registering a domain name

What domain extensions are available? Please note that with a number of new domain extensions recently launched, if you cannot find one with a .com or .co.uk close enough to your family name, there is a good chance that you will be able to find one with, say, a .eu or .uk.com (and many others) suffix.

Email Setup or Outlook Express Step by Step Mailbox Setup

Beginners Guide & Getting Started

Sounds silly doesn’t it? But it isn’t. Many of us now have a number of email addresses: maybe one for ...   more »

October saw an increase in spam of 8.5% over September – as if it was not too high anyway – according to MessageLabs. This has resulted in many difficulties in use of email because of the action taken by ISPs to protect themselves. Although many will not have notices you can be sure that anyone using a catchall mailbox or using email forwarding will have experienced problems. Why?

First, a catchall mailbox is one that will accept any email @domainname whatever the prefix and whatever the content. It is therefore a spammers dream because they do not have to guess at the prefix. Of course where the Spammers have guessed at prefixes then every one of their guessed prefixes will get delivered into the mailbox. Result: the mailbox gets full and is blocked to other genuine mail until cleared. Of course you can increase the size of the mailbox, but why do so? It is easy to avoid all that spam (and viruses, malware etc) just by removing the catchall status from the mailbox.

Secondly, many ISPs do not treat email forwarded to them the same way as direct mail. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Except that so many of us like to use just one email account, so whenever we buy a new domain, we use the email forwarding option to redirect all our mail to our original mailbox, whether it is Hotmail, Yahoo, BTConnect, Tiscali or whoever. The trouble is that this may be simply sending all mail to the domain to another ISP without any weeding out of spam, virus and so on. Even if it is a proper alias prefixed email account, the mail forwarded from it must be less important if you are BT than email coming to BT mail servers for their customers directly, mustn’t it? So to protect the direct mail of their customers the ISP will lower the priority given to receiving forwarded email. In some cases and at some times when particularly under pressure, forwarded mail will be completely blocked.

If you use an email client like Outlook Express, Outlook or Eudora it is easy to add more than one email account and it is much easier then to organise your email so that you do not mix up work and pleasure or one domain and another.

Just removing catchalls and email forwarding will cut much of the spam and virus threats. And while you are about it, have a look at our safety tips and guide to good email practice.

Time of renewal can be a dangerous time for a domain owner.  A number or dubious operations attempt to gain out of this.  Detail on this is contained in the Domain name Scams and renewals article in the Helpdesk. They may not all be attempts to get you to change registrars and host intentionally or inadvertently, and many use words to make it very easy to inadvertently end up doing just that.  Others will try to get you to take up services that you may not want again often structured to make it very easy to do if you are not right on the ball, like a recent “Final Notice” from the purveyor of a search engine submission service.  

So if you do get what looks to be a renewal reminder make sure you check it is what it claims to be.

We do our best to take care of things at Easyspace.  However, customers can forget to update the email address listed in our database and shown in the Control Panel under Contact Details.  If the email address is no longer working we cannot send you renewal reminders.  This address is very important as it is the only one we will use to send out reminders of lost username and passwords, for obvious security reasons.  We can get round this and change your email address for you, but it is cumbersome and best avoided. 

Failing to renew on time can lead to loss of a domain name and/or extra costs in recovering it from ‘redemption’, a charge made by some registries for stopping the deletion cycle.  It can lead to a break in email services or loss of a web site.  Of course email services and the web site can be set up again, but, all too frequently, we find out that someone has not kept a backup copy of his site; or that it is controlled by his designer, not himself, and the designer will only release it for a charge; or that the backup copy he holds is just not up to date.

Many take the risk of assuming we will renew on their behalf or keep a renewal open for some time.  While we do keep things open for a limited period, we simply cannot afford to be providing services which are not needed or paid for, and in some instances, like registry fees for example, it would involve us in paying out sums to the registry that they will not refund to us.  So all in all, in order to maintain good services at the prices we charge, we simply cannot renew on your behalf. 

My advice is to renew as soon as you get a reminder from us, always.  Doing so will not lose anything.  The renewal period will be for the period renewed from the expiry date; it will not decrease the period or cost you any more. Indeed you may find discounts or other Customer Club incentives are available, as they are at the moment, and which more than matches any disincentives you may have in mind.  And of course it will stop any further renewal reminders for that service!

In line with Easyspace’s concern for our customer’s security, we recommend the download and upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer – IE7 – or the new version of Mozilla’s Firefox 2.0. Main new features are anti phishing and pop up blocking.

Easysafe products already include protections against phishing amongst other protections. Easyspace advice on email protection can be found at Email Perfect Practice and Spam & Virus Protection .

Articles discussing these new browser versions can be found at http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/Article.aspx?liArticleID=219278  and http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-2417737,00.html