I'm losing my e-mail address on June 30. Need suggestions on what to do

[ron_newman]

Galaxy Internet Services, the company that has provided my e-mail service for over 16 years, announced last Friday that is is going out of business. I will suddenly lose my e-mail address, rnewman at theCIA.net , on June 30. I've had that address since May of 1997. I have no idea how many places I have registered that address with over the years -- LiveJournal, Facebook, Boston.com, my bank, utilities, lots of mailing lists....

So, I need a new POP and SMTP email provider, and I need it pretty fast. I probably should start giving out rnewman at alum.mit.edu as my new address, but that is only a forwarding service, not a mail server. Any ideas where I should go, either temporarily or 'permanently' ?

Several years ago, I registered a domain, RonNewman.info, but it is currently dormant. Ideally I should make that domain 'live' and somehow associate my e-mail with it, but I need a bit of advice and hand-holding from people who are more experienced with such things.

[Some background: I signed up with Complete Internet Access (TheCIA.net) as a dialup customer in 1997. Soon after that, Galaxy Internet Services acquired TheCIA.net, but kept it going as a separate service. In 2006 I upgraded from dialup to Galaxy's DSL. Last year, Galaxy offloaded all of their residential DSL customers to ExtremeDSL, but allowed me to keep the e-mail address.]

Comments

[ron_newman]

I got the .info domain a few years ago for a Harvard Summer School class on web development. I couldn't get .org or .net or .com (all were taken by other people with my name), and .info was cheap and available. It pointed to a Harvard server for that summer, but has been dormant since then (renewed annually, but unused).

The only .info domain I've run across besides mine is mta.info which is the website of the New York City transit authority. That doesn't strike me as spammy or scammy.

[keithn.livejournal.com]

https://www.google.com/search?q=.info+spam

[zlyoga.livejournal.com]

Thank you! My boss bought a .info domain for my work's website and I have been trying unsuccessfully for the past 2 years to figure out why I can't get google to index it. This explains so much. I had no idea there was an association with .info and spam. All I knew about it was that no one ever used it. Now I can show him this and get him to buy another domain.

[ron_newman]

But if I google for

new york city transit

, the first search result is http://new.mta.info/nyct