Keeping email address when changing broadband supplier

I have my b,band and phone with bt and have paid line rental upfront. Can I change b.band only to another supplier and keep my email address. (Novice user!)

You can retain the BT email address but it will cost you £1.60 per month and is called BT Premium Mail

If you use 123-reg to create your own domain, you can use their email forwarding facility to send in bound emails to whatever ISP's email system you happen to be using. You can forward multiple copies which is useful for backup or if you have a laptop as well as a desktop computer.

Clearly you would have to make one email address change but thereafter you should be able to move ISPs more easily.

Mr Saffon has suggested paying to keep your BT email address. Michael_Clare has suggested getting your own domain, for example magpie.me.uk.

The first is simplest but is not cheap. The second typically (if you buy in 2-year chunks) is under £3.50 per year. In fact from 123-reg that he suggested it is £6.98 for two years.

Of the two, I prefer that way. You get a fully personal email address.

Using my example you can put anything in front of the @magpie.me.uk. In the 123 control panel you set it to forward all emails to your new ISP's email.

There is a one-off job of telling all your contacts a new address, plus all your online shop accounts/mailing lists and so on. But you never have to do it again when changing ISP. All you do next time you move ISP is change the one setting in the 123 control panel.

There is a possible snag - I shall ask Michael how he thinks it could be handled unless you are using what we call an email client - such as Windows Mail. How do you send and receive emails at the moment Maggie?

The third way, which I an many prefer, is to buy your own domain as above, plus email and/or website hosting. If you have a read of this page on my website, you get a lot more detail. Plus a link to the company I use. Very reliable, and excellent Customer Service. You may not wish to have a website yet, but the cost of domain + web hosting plus email hosting is £6.70 per two years for the domain and £14.99 per year for the web+email hosting. That's equivalent to £1.53pm, still less than the BT one. And you can st up a website on that domain in effect for free, using the bulder they provide, or WordPress or whatever.

Using that method you basically can move ISP at will with rarely anything to change. In the rare case, again it is at worst two settings on your computer. Though of course, you still have the initial hassle of changing everything from your BT email address.

Just a thought Michael, if she is using webmail how would she send emails with the domain email reply address? I referred to this as a possible problem in my reply to her.

Why not just set up a, free, Gmail account? No changes ever when changing ISP's.

In reply to a post by Stevenage_Neil:

Why not just set up a, free, Gmail account? No changes ever when changing ISP's.

That would be my suggestion too, for the "average user".

Google knows enough about us all without getting all our/my in/out emails to store and analyse as well. Similarly Microsoft with Hotmail.

Edited by RobertoS (Fri 02-Jan-15 13:18:46)

Do you think BT don't scan emails already?

You don't think the NSA and GCHQ scan private domains? If I were in the security service, private domains/web sites would be high on my monitoring list!

Edited by deleted (Fri 02-Jan-15 13:55:57)