Many users are enslaved when their ISP raises their rates.  The users don’t want to leave and find another provider because they’ll have to change their email address.

If I need to change ISP to chase better prices or better service, I don’t want to worry about my friends, family, and professional contacts not being able to contact me.  Of course, many ISPs are strictly local (people move away), ISPs go out of business, and ISPs gets bought out.  For all of the above reasons, ISP provided email accounts should be considered temporary.

Previously, free email providers didn’t offer services as favorable as a typical ISP’s service.  However, today, most of the free email providers have grown the size of their mailboxes to compete with Google’s gmail (started at 1 Gigabyte and is now at approximately 6 GB).  Many free email providers also provide decent antispam software, yet still allow you to check your junkmail folder for legitimate emails that my have been mistaken as spam.

It’s time for merchants to stop declaring free email accounts as hot spots for thievery and refusing orders or sign-ups using free email accounts.  Free email accounts are perfectly legitimate.  Despite this, an order from kisses244@hotmail.com is definitely more deserving of scrutiny than an order from MarcusAdams@comcast.net.  However, an order from marcus.adams@hotmail.com still looks pretty good.

When you register yProxy, please remember that if you use your ISP provided email address such as myname@comcast.net, what happens when you change ISPs down the road and you need me to resend your registration information?  I can send your registration information right to the email address that you used on the order form because I know that your email address is password protected, and only you should have access to it.

If you want me to send your registration information to a new email address, that new email address could belong to anybody.  You’ll need to prove your identity to me by providing a preponderance of data that I can verify.  That’s not fun for you or for me.

You will have similar problems with many other online sites.  If you need to retrieve your password via email later, and you’ve switched ISPs, you may be out of luck if you used your ISP’s email services.

When I was in college, people asked me for two addresses.  There was my address and my permanent address.  My address was the apartment or other location I was staying at the time, most definitely temporary.  Then there was my parent’s house, my permanent address, where mail would always find me.

Everyone should have a permanent email address.  Either use a free email provider that’s going to be around for awhile, like Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail, or get your own domain and have an email address like mail@marcusadams.org.  It’s the 21st century–everyone should own at least one domain name.