I’m sure all of us have gotten those messages from friends that say “My email address has changed… please update your address books. My new email address is blah@blah.com.” Sometimes it’s for a legitimate reason, but other times it’s because the person has changed Internet Service Providers (ISP). This bothers me because in this day and age, no one should have to be held hostage his/her ISP.

If you are using an email address like “bob@comcast.net”, “fred@att.net”, or “mary@sbcglobal.net”, stop it! You may decide to change ISPs someday or move to an area where your cable provider is Insight, rather than Comcast. If this happens, your email address will go away. For this reason, you really should be using a web-based mail service from one of the big (free) providers. I personally recommend Gmail. By using Gmail (or Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc.) you ensure that you will not have to change email addresses even if you move or change ISPs.

Now, all this is meant to address personal email addresses, of course. If you are using a personal email account for business use: shame on you! That’s also bad, but for different reasons that I won’t go into right now

Don’t let your ISP control your email. Go get a Gmail account and free yourself!