Internet domains are much cheaper to buy than most people think, so they don’t have to be used for web pages – they can also be used for email only. Using a domain in this way provides the opportunity to have a much more personalised and easy to remember email addresses, and can also help to control junk email.
The attraction of buying a domain for email use is that you can get a memorable and distict email address, like yourname@yourname.com, rather than an anonymous one, like ugly6524t@someemailaddress.com, which is the type of address in most common use. Anyone can buy an internet domain as long as no-one else has already registered it. A .co.uk domain can be registered for less than £3 per year, although the problem with this is that most simple names are already taken. This might not be a problem if your surname is unusual, but if your name is Jones the domain name will be owned already.
All is not lost even for the Jones’s and Smith’s of our land. There are new domains being introduced fairly regularly, and each one starts out with the full range of names available. In 2012 the .pm domain was introduced for Saint Pierre, and even though this relates to an island off the coast of Newfoundland these domains are available to all EU residents, as are .bm (Bermuda), .bs (Bahamas) and .gl (Greenland). If you register a domain in these countries you could be john@jones.gl which is tidy and simple to remember.
If you buy a domain, you will also need a hosting service, and for email-only these are available for about $5 or less per month – just google “email hosting”. One of the things that might put you off this plan is that many people already have your current email address, and it could be a while before everyone knows the new one. There is a simple solution to this problem in the form of email forwarding. Your new hosting account will allow you to forward your email to any email address you choose, so that people sending mail to john@jones.gl don’t need to know that it actually gets forwarded to your lumpy old Hotmail account.
Another advantage of using an email domain is that you don’t just own one address, because any email address at all will be delivered to you provided that it ends in yourdomain.bm. This means you can use amazon@myyour-domain.bm for your amazon account and footiemessageboard@your-domain.bm for your favourite football forum. This means that if you receive junk mail you can easily see where the sender got the email address from, and if you start getting a lot coming to one address you can set your email software to automatically filter it into your junk folder. You might be surprised to find who’s passed on your email address causing a folder full of junk mail!
