Tomorrow, many of you who get your Internet through Comcast will suddenly and against your will find yourselves customers of Time-Warner Cable. For some of you, this means that your most precious form of identity — your e-mail address — will be changing. And if you live where I live, it'll be déjà vu all over again because your address will change back to what it used to be a few years ago before evildoers changed it. My first Internet connection (a Paleolithic Era dial-up) gave me an e-mail @netcom.ix.something. Then I had an aol.com address and one with r.r.com, which was Road Runner, and then it was something else and then it was comcast.net and I'm sure I'm leaving out a couple but anyway, now it's back to Road Runner, which is the brand name of Time-Warner and…
Enough already. Let me tell you what to do.
Stop sending out "change of e-mail address notices" like so many of my friends are doing this week. Get yourself a permanent e-mail address…one that will never change, one that will follow you for the rest of your life. There are two ways to do this.
One way — the best way, the way I did it — is to get a domain. I own evanier.com and povonline.com and newsfromme.com and a few others. As long as I maintain ownership of the domain, an e-mail address there can only be changed by me.
So how it works is that let's say I'm stuck with Muckenfuss Cable for broadband in my area and they give me an e-mail address of mark3569@muckenfuss.com. I connect to the Internet through them and I get my e-mail by logging into that account…but I don't give that address out to anyone. That address can be changed on me without my consent. What I do instead is to give out my permanent address — the one at my domain — and then I set the address at my domain to forward to the address at muckenfuss.com. This is pretty easy to do.
Next year, Muckenfuss Cable may be bought by Shmidlap Communications and they may change my e-mail address to mark9936@shmidlap.net. No big deal. It'll take about thirty seconds for me to change the forwarding information for my permanent address and have it go to the new address, instead. Half a minute's work and I'm current. I don't have to send out change notices to all my friends and worry about e-mail being sent to the old address when it becomes inactive and not getting to me. I can even change Internet Service Providers voluntarily. I don't lose the e-mail address via which all my friends contact me if I leave Muckenfuss and get my Internet some other way.
If you don't have a domain or don't want one, there's another method. Get an account with a service such as gmail.com and set that account to forward to your current I.S.P. e-mail address. This is so easy to set up that a child of three could do it…and you should be able to find a child of three. Then you give the gmail address out to everyone. It may not last forever but it'll probably come close.
But this whole thing of your e-mail address changing when one company buys another is ridiculous…and there'll be probably be a lot of it before, as is inevitable, Time-Warner owns every inch of the Internet. Protect yourself from this. Get a permanent address.