When you move from one house to another, the Post Office will forward your mail to you so that you don’t have to worry about not receiving an important piece of mail. When you get a new phone number, the telephone company will forward your calls so that people know how to contact you. With email becoming an extremely important form of communication for both personal and business use, should email providers be required to forward emails to a new address when someone gets a new account? It’s an interesting topic and one that Federal regulators are investigating.
Of course you’re probably thinking that it’s simple to notify your email contacts when you’re switching to a different address, and it is, especially in Gmail or Yahoo Mail with their forwarding option. But what about the instances when a person has an email address through their ISP and their service gets canceled. That’s what happened to one woman, Gail Mortenson, who filed a six-page petition with the FCC after her AOL account was abruptly terminated which “devastated her business”. According to the AP, Mortenson said that she “lost potential clients because they couldn’t reach her, and she requested that Internet service providers, such as AOL, be required to forward email traffic from a close account to a new email address designated by customers for at least six months.”
Major email providers have yet to respond to the petition, but Richi Jennings who is an analyst with Ferris Research said that while the FCC could require companies to offer a free email forwarding service, it would be expensive to do this. He says, “Service providers typically operate with low margins, relying on volume to make acceptable profit.”
At this point, I don’t think that forwarding should be required. What I do think though, is that providers should give their users the option to pay a reasonable amount for a forwarding service. Email is an important communication method and if someone’s email is essential to keep a personal business going, they’ll be willing to pay to have it done.
This is why I always advise people to use free webmail accounts instead of accounts that come with their ISPs, which will terminate as soon as they decide to ditch the ISP. It would also be handy for people switching from Live Mail to Gmail, but as always the only service that offers free forwarding is Gmail and I doubt many people switch away.
If someone is running their own business, they should get their own domain name, and an ISP terminating their services is not a problem like for the Mortenson lady, because then they always have the same email address. When they keep paying for their domain name, of course. And then email forwarding isn’t necessary.
Great points above.
I have everyone I know use web-based e-mail services for that very reason.
I also believe that it is alarming when I see a business owner that has an @aol.com or @gmail.com e-mail address instead of using their domain. It just looks unprofessional, and like mentioned above, if you use your domain you won’t need to worry about forwarding. I don’t think its as big of a deal for bloggers, but businesses should use their domains.
@Infernon & Satur — great points. I work for a domain-name registrar and many times I see people register their accounts with their ISP or a business e-mail address. They call us because they can’t get into their accounts (forgot customer # and/or password). Normally this is very simple, we will send an e-mail via a utility which given their domain name will send them their customer #. Once they get that then we can send a password reset e-mail.
However if the e-mail is no longer valid they are stuck. The next step would be for them to request in writing (with a digital photo or copy of their ID) to have the e-mail address associated with their domain name changed.
However there are some people who not only used an ISP e-mail (which is no longer valid) but then registered the domain under their business/organization (even though they don’t have a business license or Tax ID info). These people are out of luck and need to go through the process of obtaining a business license or other required paperwork proving they are who they claim they are. Or just have to wait for the domain to expire and try to grab it when it is released back to the registry about 90 days later.
This is almost daily. Had a lady Monday night call with this situation. Luckily she still had access to her old work e-mail for that evening. But she was being rather nasty with me about the process since she had to go through 200+ messages to get to my e-mails. I spent an hour with her and in the end I was able to get her into her two accounts, have her update all the contact info on her four domains and on the account, plus get the two accounts combined. Didn’t get a sale out of it, but in the future I am sure she will continue to do business with us (renew the domains or buy more). She did apologize and thank me at the end.
One more thought, most registrars such as [alnetsolutions.com], provide one free e-mail address with the domain name. So there is no reason why they cain’t have an e-mail at their domain even if it does end up going to an AOL or Hotmail address.
I think most people just assume that it is really hard to setup their own domain name with an email address.
I do believe that it is really important for companies (and even bloggers) to have an email address at their own domain. It gives the site a better sense of credibility, which is important if you’re looking for advertisers.
Most hosting packages come with at least a few email addresses, but it’s a matter of people realizing that they can use them. I think most individuals just overlook the fact that they can setup an email address which can easily be forwarded anywhere that you want.
1. People can use Gmail, Hotmail with their custom domains, if they have one.
2. My university also suddenly closed my email account after my MS course got over, there was no forwarding facility, thankfully I had downloaded all messages through POP3 to my HDD.
So yes, email forwarding is a big plus. Gmail thankfully supports it. Hotmail only does for Hotmail 2 Hotmail accounts.
Oh yeah, forgot about the universities. Our university actually gives you several months after you graduate to convert over to a new email address. So that’s actually kind of nice.