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]

That reply is a bit cryptic for me; can you say a bit more please?

[srakkt.livejournal.com]

I mean only that if you would like to host your own domain and e-mail on my servers, I would be happy to do so for you for free.

[ron_newman]

Ahh, thanks! I may yet decide to take you up on that, given that you live just around the corner from me ;-)

[srakkt.livejournal.com]

well the servers aren't *here* they're hosted elsewhere.

I've also sent out feelers about buying thecia.net - if I can, I'll just buy it and then you can keep your e-mail address.

[ron_newman]

Oooh, let's talk about that! It would be ideal. Is Galaxy interested in selling to you?

(I do not know if there are any other remaining @thecia.net email customers besides me. Most of the others probably left long ago, or changed over to @gis.net addresses, which are also about to disappear.)

[ron_newman]

I've also sent out feelers about buying thecia.net - if I can, I'll just buy it and then you can keep your e-mail address.

Any news on this yet? I like this idea if you can pull it off.

[srakkt.livejournal.com]

I never received any useful reply to my inquiry. I think the best bet may be to try and camp the name with one of the "preorder" services. Particularly if the registrar they're using offers such a service.