THEY say the three most stressful events in anyone's life are death, divorce and moving house.
While items one and two occur to a limited extent in cyberspace (Timothy Leary's final days were documented through a Web site, and an online divorce must have happened at least once in the US), moving house is something all Net users and email addressees will encounter at least once in their online lifetime.
It's something which can be just as stressful as the real thing. For many Net users, their email address is just as important and widely used as a telephone number or snail mail address. Besides day-to-day communications with friends or business clients, an email user may also be on several mailing lists pertaining to his or her employment or pastime.
When you move house in cyberspace, you have to go through the hassle of re-subscribing to these lists and ensuring you haven't missed a vital posting or thread while off the list, not to mention re-circulating your new address among acquaintances.
Email addresses can change for a variety of reasons: different job, leaving university and changing service provider are three of the more common occurrences which will necessitate a new location for your "a". . While few Internet service providers (ISPs) provide a limited forwarding service - they want you as a client after all, and have little to gain by re-addressing your mail to your new ISP - there are a couple of online innovations to make your change of address that much easier. Welcome to the world of HotMail, pobox and Bigfoot.
HotMail sounds too good to be true. It's a free mail service which gives you an email address (namehotmail.com) to be used anywhere in the world from any computer linked to the Web. Your email "arrives" as Web pages written in HTML (hence the name HotMail).
You can send or receive mail (with attachments) almost as easily as using Eudora, Pegasus Mail or other leading mail programs. Once registered, you simply go to the HotMail Web site, log on, download your messages and send new mail as required. Registering is also a breeze - although you may find your chosen address has already been allocated. No new software to install, no worries about access when away from your base and no fee - too good to be true?
The beauty of Hot Mail is ease of access -just enter the URL and away you go. It also allows you to access normal mail from your server because of course you'll still have a service provider somewhere along the line. As regards security, the HotMail company has a members' charter and promises to respect privacy. And, of course, they're not doing this out of the goodness of their heart - HotMail is free because it's advertiser-supported and certainly there are quite a few plugs as you jump from page to page.
The main disadvantages are that it's far slower to download than conventional email, and it's quite hard to compose mail offline but use of attachments can overcome this.
The pobox system is the equivalent of having a PO box down at the post office - a permanent address as long as you continue to pay for it. With pobox, you receive an email address which looks like namepobox.com. The pobox server will then forward all mail received for you to the actual email address you are using. Unlike HotMail, you can't access the system via the Web - you have to have an account with a service provider. And, while the initial three months are free, you're then billed about $15 per year thereafter.
However, pobox does allow you to redirect your home-page, should it change location. A URL of www.pobox.com/name will redirect users to your real home page. As the process is invisible to the actual user, it means that a site can have the same URL throughout its lifespan but still change location to avail of cheaper rates etc. Provided you keep up the annual payments, you can update your pobox details as often as you change them, yet to all intents and purposes, both email address and site URL will remain intact.
Finally, a similar email redirection service is among the nifty facilities provided by Bigfoot - and unlike pobox it's advertiser-driven and free - for life!
You can register for all three services online - HotMail at www.hotmail.com, pobox at www.pobox.com/pobox and Bigfoot at www.bigfoot.com. While none of these services will completely solve the problems of moving address, they might go some way to alleviating some of the stress. At least it saves on all those crates.