Become the master of your own domain.
Register your own internet domain. It costs about $10 per year through Godaddy. Then you can set up as many email addresses you want @YourOwnDomain.com (or .net or .org or hundreds of others). If you don’t like Godaddy you can register through another company or change your registration to another company whenever you want.
I have been considering buying my own domain name and using a web host. What’s to stop the hosting service or someone else from infiltration?
I also considered buying the domain name and operating my own server but Hillary demonstrated the folly of trusting others with private security.
Staying with Earthlink for now. $5/ month
Good advice, Bubba.
About 20 years ago, I registered our family surname .com TLD for several years, but never really used it so I let it go. Some guy in Germany immediately snapped it and has had it ever since. He renews promptly on his renewal date, too.
Other TLDs are available such as [POFsurname].family,[POFsurname].info, [POFsurname].life, and [POFsurname].online, but none are as simple and memorable as .com.
I wish I had not let it go. It would have made it a lot easier to manage all of our family email addresses. I could have assigned our kids their email address at a young age and had them start using it. Now all three have their own gmail formats which are hard to remember. My wife and I use a very antiquated Baby Bell (RBOC) domain from our very first ISP almost three decades ago. They got acquired by Bell South then AT&T and then we had the AT&T / Yahoo partnership finally ending up with Yahoo landing at Verizon. I’m surprised our original RBOC domain still works after all these year.