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

[yendi]

Beyond POP and SMTP, do you have any other requirements? Gmail handles those and obviously is cheap.

Pretty much any host (mine is Dreamhost, and I do have a referral link that you can use or ignore) also offers POP and SMTP along with custom mailboxes, and most will take care of domain registration and maintenance as a part of their hosting fee.

[ron_newman]

I don't currently have other requirements, but some folks elsewhere are telling me I should consider switching from POP to IMAP (something I've never used).

While I do have some files being web-served from Galaxy, they are very old and I'm happy to let them die rather than transferring them to a new host. At some point I'll want to start fully anew with HTTP service.

[avjudge]

I've been using my MIT alum forwarding address pretty much since they came out, and in that time have occasionally used my ISP, and then, probably for nearly the last decade, Gmail for the actual mail server (and yes, I still use old-fashioned POP). It's worked fine for me, and I like not having my address tied to a commercial service I might want to dump some day.

If you do continue using your alum address, MIT provides an SMTP server and I'd recommend using it because I've found spam filters are happier if your SMTP server and the from address match.

[gingicat]

I would definitely recommend just finding a new place to host your domain.

[cos]

Can you call their customer service and find out what their plans for the domain name are? Might they sell it to someplace that will offer email forwarding? Or if they have no plans, might they be willing to sell it to someone who'd do that?

[keithn.livejournal.com]

IMO Gmail is the best e-mail option out there and has been for a few years. It's free, 15gb of free storage, supports POP and IMAP, good web interface (which is all I use), mobile apps designed specifically for it, etc.

I believe you can use your own custom domain with gmail, although I don't know if I'd want a .info e-mail address given that .info domains seem to primarily be used for spam and scams. You might find many of your e-mails hitting people's spam filters instead of their inboxes if you have a .info e-mail address.

[jwg.livejournal.com]

If you use IMAP instead of POP your email stays on the server until you delete it from your mailbox copy on your own computer. This is useful if you access your mail from several computers as I do.

I have been using a2hosting.com for my own website and for a non-profit who has email lists and a web site and uses other web-hosted applications.

[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.

[ron_newman]

I sent e-mail asking if they were planning to sell TheCIA.net , and got back an answer of "no". I suppose I could phone them and make a proposal, but I have no idea if they are receptive.

[ron_newman]

Any suggestions on how and where to do this (especially if you've done it yourself), I'll greatly appreciate.

[londo.livejournal.com]

I own a domain and have had really good experiences with forwarding from there to my gmail account. I could offer you some handholding on that; I am reasonably competent as a Unix user, but not a sysadmin or able to tackle the really hard stuff, this might make me more or less useful as a handholder.

[keithn.livejournal.com]

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

[sairaali.livejournal.com]

Ditto all of this. Every few months I think that maybe I ought to get all my data out of the google ecosystem and somewhere I control, but I've always had better things to do than learn how to run a mail server. So instead I periodically download everything I have in gdocs/drive and open Thunderbird every few weeks to grab local copies of email.

[cos]

That's too narrow a question. The actual question you want to ask them is what their plans are for the domain. Whether they'd sell it to someone who will offer forwarding service is a sub-question - it's one possible plan for the domain, but you don't want to come up with every possible plan and ask them one by one, "do you plan to do this?". See if they'll tell you what they do plan to do, not just yes or no on whether they plan to do one specific thing.

[yendi]

Gmail also supports IMAP, and I do agree that it's a better option (more flexible). That said, again, most mail providers should provide that.

[thespian.livejournal.com]

do you actually want to *do* anything with it? because if not, I can host it (I can host as many domains as I want on my professional account) and set up gmail as the mail host for it. Then all you would need to do is use gmail (I do it for my own email). No cost to that. I cannot help you if you want to start hosting an active website, but the other, I can do.

[lizzielizzie.livejournal.com]

I was just coming here to suggest this. :-)

[frugaljoe.livejournal.com]

I've helped a few folks on the Davis LJ set up sites, and repair broken sites over the years. I'd be happy to get everything up and running for you if you'd like for free. Let me know if I can help?

[ron_newman]

Possibly, yes. (Do we know each other?)

[frugaljoe.livejournal.com]

No, we don't know each other - I know you from all of your work on LJ, and posts on Universal Hub...but we've never met. If you'd like to chat, send me an email at joefrugal@gmail.com.

[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

[rethcir.livejournal.com]

Nobody takes you seriously unless you use gmail these days.

[ron_newman]

But isn't gmail the new hotmail?

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

Why would not you use Gmail?