Claire’s Random Thoughts

Wow, it’s been a while since my last update. From now on, I think I’ll slow down to the pace of a normal blog. Just one post every couple days.

You may have heard of the term lifetime email. A lifetime email is an email alias that forwards to whatever email you want. For example, if I have a lifetime email, name@domain.com and people send something to it, the actual emails that they send will go to whatever “real” email account I choose, may it be gmail, yahoo, whatever.

The purpose of this is so that if I decide to switch to a different email provider, I can just change the forwarding location of the lifetime email and do not have to go through the hassle of telling everyone that I have changed my email. It’s easy to change your “real” email frequently but still be able to receive all old mail. Most universities offer it to their alumni, so everyone can keep in touch with former classmates forever, but you can also get one for free from www.fanmail.com.

A company called pobox has a service like this, but they charge for it. There are also several other free lifetime email services, but they usually put tags on the end of your emails or sell your address to spammers. So far, fanmail is the best one that I’ve found, because they do not put ads on your emails, nor do they sell your address.

Fanmail allows visitors to create a free lifetime email that can be customized to any one of their dozens of domains. If you love a particular sports team, then this is more than perfect for you, because their domains have primarily a sports theme. If you look hard enough, you could find a couple that seem generic. If you use one at national-champs.com (that’s the one I use), for example, very few people would associate it with sports.

Just a little tip: be careful who you give your lifetime email to, if you decide to create one. You keep all the messages that get sent to it forever, but that means you also keep the spam. I recommend giving the lifetime email address to friends or using it to sign up for things that you can trust. Give everyone else who might spam you your real email addres (@gmail.com @yahoo.com @hotmail.com, whatever). That way, if you get spammed, you can just move to a different email address and change the forwarding location. That way, you keep all the real mail, but all the spam stays in the old email account.