Choose your new email address carefully!

Lately, I have been getting several emails from my clients to advise me that they have a new email address. This is because high-speed internet is becoming more and more widely available. Obviously a higher speed for your internet connection is always desirable.

However, there is another factor to consider. With your new internet provider comes a new email address. Should you use this as your primary email address? In my opinion, no.

Here's why not: How many internet providers have you had in your lifetime so far? For me, I just counted 7. No matter how much you like your current provider, the chances are very good that they are not going to be your internet provider for the rest of your life. Why would you want to go through the hassle of changing email addresses every time you change your internet provider? Why not just get one email address and use it for life?

Another reason is that most of the spam filters that I have seen for email accounts that are provided by an ISP are not very good. You will miss some email because your internet provider's computer thought it was spam, and you will also get some spam in your email inbox.

What I recommend is to get an account (or multiple accounts) with Gmail - Google's free email service. Some reasons why:

1. You have this email address for life. It doesn't matter who your internet provider is. It doesn't even matter if you are using your own computer - you can get your email from any computer with internet access.

2. You can automatically have your emails come in through Outlook or Outlook Express, if you want (Yahoo charges $20 per year just for that service, last time I checked).

3. Gmail gives you a ton of service space - so you can store all your email there, instead of taking up space on your computer.

4. Computer crash? No problem as far as email is concerned - your emails can all be stored on the Gmail server, so nothing was lost.

5. The Gmail spam filters are very good - it is quite rare that I find a spam email in my inbox.

So next time you change internet providers, don't automatically go for the one they offer you - instead, get one with a lot more features. In fact, get several if you want - Gmail accounts are all free.

This week's video is one I may have posted before, but I don't recall. It is a clip of the Human Slinky.