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]

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

[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.

[enhf94.livejournal.com]

I'm a big fan and 10+yr customer of http://pair.com and, to a lesser extent, their NIC (pairNIC.com). With them, I host several domains, have an IMAP server where I make custom e-mail addresses (for my parents or for spamcatching), keep my own little cloudlet of files - and I am certainly not an expert about any of these things.

Ron, didn't you write some computer thing everyone uses every day or something?

IMAP is better if you check-e-mail on multiple devices, I think.

[ron_newman]

I was a contributor to (not the sole author of) the X Window System, which is now commonly used on Linux machines, but not on Microsoft Windows or Macs.

That doesn't mean, however, that I've had much reason to pay attention to changes in Internet mail services over the past 16 years.

[infinitemorning.livejournal.com]

I use 1&1 (http://www.1and1.com) and have been largely satisfied with the cost and utility of their services. I pay $85 annually (split into two payments) for my current package, but I believe they have less expensive plans.

I just use Gmail for e-mail, though. I believe 1&1 offers POP, SMTP and IMAP access, but when I've set up addresses under my own domains, I've really just used them to forward mail to my Gmail account.