Net Results:Many years ago, I signed up with my first internet service provider and got an e-mail address, writes Karlin Lillington.

In a burgeoning market filled with lots of small competitors, I went with Indigo, which was brash and zippy and, I thought, had a stylish sound to it as part of an e-mail address (Ireland Online's iol.ie sounded too much like America Online's aol.com, which was, and remains, about the least trendy address going in the US, so I had a small and admittedly unfair inbuilt prejudice against IOL).

Yes, it's a shallow way to choose an internet service provider, but what is an e-mail address if not a tiny personal branding exercise? In exoneration, I can reveal that many times in the next few years, someone in some other country - primarily, the US - would say, "Indigo? That's a cool address." My shallowness was vindicated.

Not that we were talking a market full of colourful choice in the US. Along with AOL, Americans were pretty much stuck with corporate names of telecoms companies in front of the .com of their e-mail address. In that context, "indigo" must have sounded fairly exotic.

Fast forward nigh on a decade and I feel a bit like George - that famous Galapagos tortoise from one unique genetic sub-branch of tortoises - who apparently lumbers about the archipelago without encountering any other living examples of his kind.

I cannot remember the last time I came across anyone with an indigo.ie e-mail address. I know there are a few other souls out there but, following Indigo's sale to Eircom many years ago, we indigo.ie folk have become a gradually dwindling tribe. Eircom slowly phased out Indigo's active existence.

Eircom did let Indigo live on for a while as a separate brand, but at some point - seemingly, around the point broadband was introduced - newcomers were steered to eircom.net and the matching e-mail addresses.

There is still an Indigo.ie homepage but it is little more than a skin overlaying the Eircom.net site. Most links simply pull the website user over to Eircom.net.

So what does that matter? Well, there are absurdities to this situation of being the internet equivalent of a man without a country.

A while ago, I wanted to change my Indigo log in password. People should do this regularly instead of waiting nearly a decade, like me. In a properly security-conscious world, people should change their access passwords every few months.

But just try it with Indigo (I say that in the full knowledge that there are probably five other people out there who might still have Indigo accounts and be able to test this out themselves). If you go to do this through links on the Indigo.ie site, you are brought through to the Eircom.net page for changing passwords.

The problem is, the online process won't work for Indigo accounts. So I contacted the support desk by e-mail, and explained my dilemma.

"Tell us what you want to change it to, and we can change it for you," the helpful man said. But then, I said, there wouldn't really be any point, would there, if the reasoning behind a password is that no one else knows it? So on I trundled with the same old password, same old internet address.

I know there are more of you out there - those of us with net addresses from ISPs long since bought out by other companies - the Club Internet folk, the Oceanfree people, and let us not forget Eunet.ie. Have they all vanished as e-mail providers, or are there other small parallel universes our faded e-mail names from Ireland's internet Jurassic era live on?

I suppose it is time to change my e-mail address. I have no shortage of possibilities, as I have a number of domain names and all come with something like 200 e-mail accounts (just in case I want to form a small corporation). That translates to roughly 1,200 possibilities.

But there's something nice about having a consistent e-mail address over time, where people can find you - even if those people are mainly millions of spammers delighting in the fact that they always know where to find me.

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