I changed ISP some time ago to the wonderful Zen ADSL. My old provider, BTOpenworld (as was) gave me a handful of free email addresses. I never used them myself, but other people in my family did. Since I’ve cancelled the account, obviously BT don’t want me using those accounts for free, so I need to provide some other form of email for the family.
I don’t know if Zen provide any free email to users, and I don’t really want to – if I have to change provider again, I’ve got to move all their adresses again, so I’d rather do something else. They’re all pretty comfortable using Outlook/Outlook Express and Thunderbird (soon to all be using Thunderbird I hasten to add), so I need a provider of POP/SMTP. Most free email services don’t do this, and those that do usually want money at some point. I could tack them onto this davidrickard.net domain, but I’d rather not. I’d look a bit old with other family members having email addresses from this domain.
My solution – register a new domain cheaply, park it somewhere, and redirect the emails at my domain and put POP accounts behind it. That way the mail is going somewhere fairly generic to the sender, so its much nicer in that respect. I don’t mind setting up the backend stuff (its so simple with most hosts) so it’ll be all good.
The problem is, I can’t think of a decent domain name! Rickard. anything is pretty much taken unless you want one of the wierd .uk.net domains, and these are usually really expensive. I’ve tried various other versions, but they all sound either lame, or pretty cheesy. Even ‘therickards.co.uk’ was taken. So now its a case of trying to work out a good domain name. Oh, and I’ve only got about 2 weeks to do it.
These things are so fun…