Email Survival Guide
interactive news
Fifty years from now, we may look back on this early period in the Internet Age in the same way we look back at the Pilgrims landing in Plymouth — explorers in a whole new world. We still have much to learn and sort out, despite the fact that already the internet has become all pervasive for most of us.
One aspect of the Net that we still have to sort out is our use of email. Given that we probably use it for electronic communication the most, we've come to take it for granted without thinking too much about protecting what is really a historical record of our lives.
If you think about how you use email in your daily life, you might begin to see how much information it rather easily and yet passively stores about you. Is this something you'd rather not lose? Even if you don't care, you do need to protect the online identity that your email address gives you.
For the purposes of protecting both, here are some basic tips to ensure that you can properly manage and archive your email communications.
- Do not establish a primary email address tied to your ISP. If you just signed up for your new Comcast cable service and think that your new This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it address sets you up for life, think for a moment what will happen if you decide to jump ship and sign up with Verizon. You then face the problematic task of transferring your email archive to your Verizon account, and you'll also need to give all your friends and associates your new address, which won't help all those other businesses and organizations you registered with using your old email address. For them, you become unreachable.
- Use a free email service. You have several to choose from, Yahoo, Google, Hotmail, and others. These services effectively give you free unlimited email storage (unless you're an atypically huge email user). Given their size and popularity, it's unlikely that any of these services are going anywhere in our lifetimes.
- Use the Internet Message Access Protocol or IMAP. IMAP allows you to automatically keep a complete copy of all your ingoing and outgoing email, including any attachments and folders or directories you've created on both the remote server and on your local machine. If you use an email client like Outlook or Mac Mail, you will have the choice of using either IMAP or POP (post office protocol) to retrieve your email. POP will merely retrieve your latest email, and will remove it from the remote mail server if set up to do so. Any changes you make to your email on your local machine, including deletions, will not be reflected anywhere else. Also, sent mail is not saved using POP as it is with IMAP. With IMAP, you are protected from the hassles of changing your email address and in the unlikely event that Google goes out of business in your lifetime. Read about the difference in protocols here.
- Register your own internet domain. You can go to one of the hundreds of domain name registrars and register a domain for as little as $5 per year (albeit with some conditions). For example, just go to Yahoo Domains and see if YOUROWNNAME.com is available. If so, you could use an email address such as This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and keep it for as long as you pay the annual fee for the domain registration. Once you do this, you can easily have all email sent to this domain redirected to your free Yahoo or Google account. As a sign of the popularity of this practice, it has become rather popular for new parents to register their child's name at birth or soon after.
- Even if you do number 4, do number 2 as well and use that address for signing up for all your internet services. This provides a modicum of protection against spam, but it also helps to separate your important personal or business email from the torrent of email newsletters, special offers, and the rest.