The same email address no matter what your ISP you use.

With the competition between (ISP) Internet Service Providers, you will find that different family members will change their email address often, and if you have a large family it seems that every couple of weeks, someone is writing saying this is their new email address. Or, if you have a large group of friends or a club you might like each person to have their own personalized email address.

If you buy a domain name like www.bishopfamily.com or www.aucklander-unite.co.nz
like any domain name, it has to be unique in the world, there are plenty of places to do searches for domain names, you don’t need to make a website at that address you can just park it, and use it as an email address for everyone in your family or club.

It’s becoming quite common for a family or club or friends to buy a domain name it only costs about $15 for a .com or $35 for a .co.nz name, this costs registers that name for 1 year, and you renew it each year.

You need to find a Web Hosting provider that will host a site that may not be that big, it has to be big enough to hold all the emails sent to each person until they open their email on their computer, and download the emails to their computer. Each person could login and read their emails online if they wanted to, but most people prefer email to come to their computer.

Most website hosts only allow a set number of emails per domain name, but we tell clients if they want to be responsible for all the emails eg, set up each new email, and tell everyone how to make them download or set-up redirects to existing emails etc etc etc , that they can have as many email addresses as they like, we however will only set-up a set number.

So you buy a unique domain name set up email addresses for everyone, like this

lynn@bishopfamily.com
gran@bishopfamily.com
aunty-jan@bishopfamily.com
sally@bishopfamily.com

You can use whatever name you like before the @ symbol, And tell each member how to download their email which can be as easy as logging into the domain name, going into the email, and clicking a link that says "configure my outlook express to download emails from this address"
then no matter how many times the different members in your family change their ISP they will always have the same email address.

I have seen a couple of sites somewhat like this,
one was a family blog, where everyone had the login for the blog, and them had their own email addresses, it was actually really interesting to read the blog, someone in the family had had a baby, and there were photos of the newest addition, and some-one else was on a holiday, and were adding photos for the people back home to see, I wrote to the owner of the site, and they told me the blog had a setting that sent everyone in the family a short email, saying someone had posted to the blog, and a link to the post. He said that website with the blog and all the email addresses costed $100 a year, and they had had the site for about 3 years, and loved it.

The other family site, just has the instructions of how to configure different email programmes to download their emails, and then blurb saying if you are part of this family or have this family name, write and we’ll give you an email address for $5 a year.

We host a couple of these email sites, a couple of years ago one of our clients wrote to me and asked if I would host their family email address, the didn’t need any webspace, but needed to be allowed to have as many emails as they liked.

After explaining that they actually did need space, since the emails needed to be stored somewhere until the owners opened their emails and downloaded them to their computers, I replied that as long as someone in the family was responsible for making email etc, that sure we would host them.

Now one family has 18 email addresses, and pays $50 a year for hosting.

The other place that has an email account, is actually a group of friends, and friends of friends.

They started out with just 7 email addresses, and now have just under 50 emails, and they have hired our CMS, part of which has a photo album that displays photos really well, they made the photo album and all the website for members only, and have over three thousand photos they share with each other.

This site now pays the equivalent of $4 per person per year hosting. They charge $10 to join their community, and that pays the hosting.

They have changed the amount of disk-space for this site 3 times, although our packages 20 50 and 200 MB’s they at fist only wanted a 8 MB site, then 25 MB now it’s 35 MB and 5 years later it’s 150 megabytes.

Most web hosting places won’t make these different allowances or changes to their hosting plans, and most people don’t want personalized plans, but we find that all people have different needs, some need a lot of help with their websites, others only want the space and are happy to learn how to manage the site and emails themselves. So why shouldn’t they get cheaper hosting.