Make Your Email Stand Out by Registering Your Own Domain

In my previous article on How to Reduce Online Fraud and Avoid Email Scams I explained how to use multiple email addresses to make your email more secure, to help prevent scams, junk mail, and to reduce the possibility of online fraud or phishing for passwords etc.

The Problems With Using Free Email or ISP EMail Addresses

Using free services like Hotmail, Google or Yahoo to create extra email addresses, or to register several email addresses with your ISP (Internet Service Provider) is fine, but should anything happen to cause your account to be suspended or canceled, or should you change your ISP, you then have to notify your Family, Friends and other Contacts of your new email address, as well as re-register new addresses with all the web sites that you subscribe to.

This is extremely frustrating, and inevitably you will end up losing track of addresses or registered sites, especially if you can no longer access your old emails.

Improve Your Online Identity By Registering Your Own Domain

By registering your own Domain, your email instantly stands out as yours and is easier to remember. For example, if you registered smithfamily.com you could create emails like john@smithfamily.com, betty@smithfamily.com and the whole family can have an identity.

Registering your own Domain also allows you to create your own web site, which in the case of our example would be www.smithfamily.com. This is a nice thing to have for your family, where you can post photographs, blog about your vacations, events etc, your family history - the scope is endless. But for the scope of this article, I would like to try to demonstrate the benefits with regard to email safety.

You are now in complete control of your own email addresses, so either by changing ISP, or doing anything else, other than acts which cause your domain to be banned, your email address should now last forever.

How Do I Register My Own Domain?
How Much Does It Cost To Register A Domain?

You can register a domain with any valid Registrar, such as GoDaddy.com and it costs about US$10 a year, which is very minimal. You also need to have your email hosted, and GoDaddy offers this for about US$2.75 a month, although you can get cheaper.

What Are The Real Benefits Of Having My Own Domain?

I can see the hands going up now and the questions forming, as you ask why you should pay for having your own domain just to get a pretty email address and web site. You can get free email and free web pages in any case. There must be something that makes this all worthwhile, and not just another drain on your finances.

Valid points, thanks for asking, and I am about to come to this point.

If you read my previous article I explained some scenarios in which using multiple email addresses was useful. However, logging in and out of all those accounts is rather tedious. With your own domain you now have access to a feature which many ISP's don't provide, Forwarding Emails.

The other huge benefit to having your own domain, and I mean HUGE, is that your email addresses never need change again. There is now no need at all to use your ISP provided emails, except to maybe receive emails from your ISP. You can give your address john@smithfamily.com to your family and close friends, and your wife can give hers betty@smithfamily.com to her friends too. Don't forget the kids tom@smithfamily.com and jane@smithfamily.com and even Grandma can now have a fancy email address nana@smithfamily.com. Should you change your ISP, for example going from Comcast to AT&T, or in the UK from TalkTalk to Plusnet, because your email address is not one of their's, it never need change.

I have had my own domain since 2000, and despite having moved from Indiana to Florida, and then to the UK, I can still maintain the same email address.

Oh sorry, I see some more hands going up at the back there...

What Is A Forwarding Email?

I was just about to come to Forwarding Emails, I am pleased you asked.

Imagine that you want to be able to categorize your email messages based on the address that they are sent to.

This is rather like Magazines, Government Departments, Mail In Rebates etc having a P.O.Box Number as part of the address. Even though the mail is received at the same physical address, it can be sorted according to the P.O. Box Number and sent to the correct department for processing.

The same is true of emails if you create forwarding addresses.

In my previous article I suggested creating an email address for your Banking, one for your Shopping etc.

Let's say that you decide to create a physical email address (known as a POP Mail Address) for your banking, and set this up as money@smithfamily.com.

This is great, but it still might be possible for emails to be sent to that address that are not genuine. By creating forwarding email addresses you can greatly decrease the likelyhood of this happening.

When you create a Forwarding Address, it's not a real address that you have to log into. It just points to a real email address.

For example, you might bank with Chase Bank. You can create a forwarding address chase@smithfamily.com that points to money@smithfamily.com and then use chase@smithfamily.com to register with Chase Bank to do all your online banking. When you receive mail from them, they will send it to chase@smithfamily.com, but it will be forwarded and received into your Inbox for money@smithfamily.com. If you look at the "To" address for the email, even though it's in your money@smithfamily.com account, it shows that the message was actually sent to chase@smithfamily.com

Does that make sense?
Hopefully I explained it clearly enough.

If we expand this to say Shopping, you can create a physical email address called purchases@smithfamily.com, and have forwarding addresses for everywhere that you shop online, for example amazon@smithfamily.com, target@smithfamily.com, walmart@smithfamily.com, tesco@smithfamily.com etc.

Now if you receive an email from Chase Bank that looks genuine, and it was sent to any address other than chase@smithfamily.com, you know that it isn't genuine. Ditto any messages from Amazon, eBay etc should have been sent to the correct address. This can greatly cut down the chance that you fall for fraudelent emails.

In addition, if you register with a web site that you are not 100% sure about, you can allocate a forwarding email address for that purpose. Should the email address start to receive lots of junk mail, viruses etc, you can just delete the forwarding address and the mail will stop. Because no messages are actually sent to your physical email address, you don't have to change anything else.

You might not believe this, but I have well over 100 forwarding email addresses. Yes, it's true, and every one serves a purpose.

Why So Many Forwarding Addresses?

Many email readers allow you to create rules to highlight certain messages, or to move them automatically to certain folders. You can also define rules that will send out an Auto-Responder message when an email is received. One of the simplest ways to control all of this is to use forwarding addresses, and I will cover this in a future article.

If you think this out, you can really make your email processing as well as your security a lot better, and when you are receiving 100 or more messages a day from a given source, like I am from Associated Content, having separate email addresses and a good mail reader really make it easier to process. This can also save you a lot of time.

I plan to add to this series on better email usage by showing you how you can save emails from being lost in the event of a computer crash, as well as on highlighting messages to make processing faster.

If you have found this information useful, please can you bookmark it, and help to spread the word by sharing it with your friends. By improving the way that people use email, we can hopefully help to cut down on online fraud, and also save people time and effort.