A Personal Email Address

Most people sign up with an ISP and get one or several email adresses which are somthing like smith36798@talktalk.net. The ISP provided email addresses are OK - especially if you get one that you can remember, but if your name IS Smith, then it's very unlikely that you are going to get smith@yourISP.com.

Also if you want to take advantage of the broadband price offers that come and go, you may want to change ISP, and that then becomes traumatic. It's a bit like moving house - you need to remember to tell everyone your new address, and then some of your friends lose it and you lose touch.

So how can you get an email address for life - no more changing addresses and you can change ISP at will without having to change youe email. It's pretty simple - but it WILL cost you a really small amount of money.

What you need is a domain name of your own.
For the endings .co.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk it will cost £5 per year (from Webtamer). For UK names - the minimum time period is 2 years - so that's £10 for 2 years.
For endings like .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, .name the cost is £13.50 per year (from Webtamer)
In addition you need an email hosting account (£7.50 per year)
This gives you 10 separate mail boxes and 10 email forwarders (that's one per family member and probably a few to spare besides) - not bad for £17.50 or so. That's less than 35p per week!

So - go on - buy yourself a domain name and be an individual - stand out from the crowd. Try out Webtamers domain chooser - try your own names to see if they are available or try out the name generator.

Here's a few that were available last time I looked:
jammyhamster.com, jinglejinks.co.uk, spinspider.com, bitethemusic.com.