Addresses that go wherever you do

By ADAM GIFFORD

If you have been using the internet for a while, your first email address was probably a bit clunky. Something like myname@myisp, or even worse, myname@thecompanyiworkedfor.

If you changed internet service provider or job, you had to go through your address book and tell everyone you wanted to stay in contact with what the new address was.

Or you might have started with a webmail address at a provider such as Hotmail or Yahoo. You could stay in contact while you travelled, but let's face it, it was a trailer trash address, you couldn't work offline and it could raise credibility problems.

The only way to ensure you have the same email address for life is to buy and maintain a domain name.

Of course there are sound reasons for having email addresses connected with a job or organisation. There is even sense in having several Hotmail addresses to use when signing up to things, in case they are spam traps.

But they all need to be managed, and managed at a reasonable price.

Having had the convenience of a simplified, personalised address for a couple of years, I decided to do something about my siblings' email addresses. The sister in England hides behind a Hotmail address. The brother in Australia shares an ISP address with his partner, using an unmemorable combination of made-up-name dot isp dot net dot au. No wonder I never write.

My first thought was to buy them a domain name in one of the international spaces - .gen or .name perhaps.

That meant when I shopped around for a domain name provider, I looked not just at price and ease of registration, but at the linked email options.

For example, for those who don't want site hosting (which comes with email), Freeparking.co.nz offers an email-only option for $49.95 a year plus GST. Add the annual domain name fee and that comes to upwards of $100 a year to maintain a POP (post office protocol) email account.

Freeparking head Richard Shearer said email-only had proved more popular than the company expected.

The problem with buying a new domain for the sibs is that either I have to pay each year or hand responsibility for the upkeep to them - some gift.

And according to the handy search tool at personal name specialist pdom.com, gifford is gone, so I'd have to construct some other word combination, which is what I am trying to avoid.

That brings me back to my own domain, gifford.co.nz. Is there any way to share it?

"Yes," said Sam Excell, the account manager at Iprolink, which hosts my domain.

There are two initial options, creating aliases or creating new POP accounts. Creating an alias is free, and as the people I want to do this for have existing email accounts, it makes sense to do it that way.

Amelia and Paul are keen, so with a simple email to Excell I arrange to have any mail sent to their new .gifford.co.nz addresses forwarded to their existing addresses. I hope life just got simpler for them.

The other option is to create separate POP mailboxes, which act like post office boxes - when they go online they ask their email program to empty the box on the Iprolink server. If they aren't at their own computer, they can access the box through the Iprolink web interface.

It's not the solution for my immediate problem, but it does make sense if I am hooking up a small business or an organisation of some sort that could benefit from an online mail identity.

Iprolink would charge me a one-off fee of $10 to set up each box and $5 a month to maintain it, only slightly more than doing the same thing through Freeparking.

"We run a lot of POP accounts at Iprolink. When organisations hit about nine or 10 accounts, it makes sense for them to look at investing in a mail server," said Excell.

That could be a simple appliance that is attached to a firm's local area network and attached permanently to the internet. Options include the Linux-based device from local firm Asterisk for about $2500 or the Sun Cobalt server appliance sold through SolNet for about US$1200 ($2180).

There are also software packages to run on existing servers, such as MDaemon. "They are relatively easy to administer - not monkeys, probably chimps," Excell said.

Most ISPs offer domain hosting and additional email accounts. The largest, Xtra, will include additional POP accounts in its hosting charge, but given that its domain registration and hosting charges are among the highest available it could pay to shop around.

Pdom.com

Freeparking.co.nz

Iprolink