Personal Domain and Lifetime Email Addresses … no, I’m not selling them. I just wish people would get an easy-to-remember email, resembling their name somehow. So I wouldn’t have to be told to update my address book, and so I could easily send them mail without having to lookup their address. Unlike a phone number, an email is well-suited to human memory if only people would exploit that opportunity. In fact, email addresses - combined with VOIP - will render phone numbers obsolete in a few years, at least from the end-user perspective.

Objections seem to be as follows:

Technical Inexperience. I think if people realised how easy it was, they’d go for it…so I’ll explain why the remaining objections don’t stack up. Saying that, I’m surprised how many techies still haven’t done it.

Technical Hassle. Again, it’s actually a diddle to set up a domain with email forwarding. You probably don’t want a website or all the other things anyway.

Cost. Well, there must be some kind of mistake here because GoDaddy for instance, charges $8.99 per year. And the prices should go southward if anything, that’s been the trend.

Name availability. Sure, smith.com would have been nice, but it’s gone now, so go for josesmith.cc or something - it’s still permanent and a lot easier than [email protected].

Spam. You like to email-hop so you can avoid the spam when it gets too busy? Have fun, but don’t expect to me to follow you around. Send me a postcard sometime. I understand that spam’s still a big problem, but server-side solutions make it easy for end-users to deal with. For instance, I notice godaddy claims a $10/year email service with spam protection. Or just forward your mail to gmail.