[courses][domains] why own a domain?

Megan Zurawicz listpig at earthlink.net
Tue Jun 8 22:19:20 EST 2004


Commentary interspersed.....--pig

On 6/7/04 19:38, mary-linuxchix at puzzling.org shared this thought:


> Once you own example.com, you are free to choose any @example.com address you
> like (actually, by custom, a few like abuse at example.com and
> postmaster at example.com have specific uses, but that's still a lot of freedom!)

Occasionally I see someone who has only half-a-clue who decides to use one of the "daemon addresses" (often, frighteningly enough, root at example.com) as their standard email address and to subscribe to mailing lists.  A lot of mailing list software will refuse posts from daemon addresses, yet another reason why not to use them for non-canonical purposes.

> 5. Domain names appear more professional
> 
> If you're running a business, particularly a computing business, a URL like
> http://example.net/~businessname/ and an email address like
> itsales_example_2004 at hotmail.com can be off-putting for customers. They're not
> very well branded, they're difficult to remember, and they're difficult to
> dictate over the phone.  It's a pain to associate an email address with a task
> (compare itsales_example_2004 at hotmail.com with sales at example.com)

Periodically I run into non-computer businesses (a local quilt shop comes immediately to mind) where they do have their own domain for webpages, but the owner still sends business correspondence from an AOL address.  No surprise there: one tends to assume this means you're dealing with a businessperson who is utterly computer clueless, and yep, that is very much the case here. :)  But that assumption is something to consider if you find yourself thinking about a cheap hosting service that does websites but not email.

> 5. When you first move to your domain name, you will have to go through the
> pain of changing your email address and breaking links one last time.
> 
> This one should be fairly self-explanatory: moving from username at example.net 
> to
> anotherusername at example.com isn't made easier by the fact that you control
> example.com.

If you're willing to keep paying for the ISP for a couple of months, this can be made slightly less painful by setting your ISP email to forward to your new domain email address, with or without an auto-response that says something like "My new address is user at example.com.  Your email has been forwarded to my new address, but please make the appropriate change to your address book, because this address will cease to work as of August 1, 2004."


--pig



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