At some point you will probably be faced with changing your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Whether you are moving or you have just found a better deal with a different ISP, there is an important factor to take into consideration: your email address. If your email address is tied to your ISP, you will have to change it, because once you terminate the service, your account, including your email address, is gone forever.

An account tied to your ISP normally has an address that ends with the name of the ISP in some fashion, such as @comcast.net, and with Time-Warner, rr.city.com. This is why I suggest that your primary email is something like Outlook, Gmail, or Yahoo, services you can take with you no matter which ISP you choose.

If you have important emails that you wish to keep, you will need to either download them to your PC using an email client or forward them to an email account not associated with your ISP.

If you have precious pictures and documents hanging out in your old account, you will need to save them to your PC or to the cloud ASAP. (You should already be doing that, although sometimes we get busy and forget.)

You can open free email accounts with Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, and other services no matter where you get your Internet service. This is preferable to switching to another email address provided by your new ISP. If you don’t have one of these free accounts, then when you switch ISPs again, you will have to change your email address again.

Even if you don’t use an account from your ISP as your primary email address, remember that you might have used it as a secondary address. Maybe it is the account where your password code is emailed if you can’t log in to your primary account. So make sure you check all of your other accounts.

When you do create a new email address, make sure your friends, family, and business contacts have your new email address. Also notify your newsletter subscriptions and online accounts with your bank and retailers. You don’t want to miss an important notification because it went to the wrong address.

~ Cynthia
Courtesy of Worldstart.com