BT seem to be ditching their email customers during switch to EE brand

You move the domain somewhere else surely. That's the whole advantage of it being your own domaain. If you want secure storage of E-mails (archoved or simply in the IMAP server) then arrange to back them up somewhere else as well as where your domain is currently registered.

Of course. For a time there were many more HOTMAIL users than any other e-mail provider, so of course more were spammed. In addition many used their hotmail address as a disposal address, so when addresses leaked due to web sites being hacked, more were hotmail addresses but I don't believe hotmail addresses are any more susceptible to spam than any other domain..

.. of course, for a while yes hotmail was apparently a source of spam, but in reality the "from" addresses were forged.

Dave

That's the whole point. The vast majority of people simply can't do that. For them a tablet/pc and broadband is a black-box installation and your paragraph immediately above would be double-dutch to them.

Well. Single Dutch at least:-)

One day I'll be looking for help to move my uk.com away from Namesco! Costs are getting silly.

Probably, though that only matters if you use it as a main address. I have an early Hotmail, one with no numbers after my name, but it's only there for emergencies. There was spam in it within half an hour of setting it up, so guess who sold the address.

It's not all that great for some emergencies, either. I got into DNS trouble in changing ownership of a domain, killing the MX entry for it and two other domains. I tried emailing my domain host through the Hotmail address, but since the email had to contain nasty suspicious network terms, MS not only dumped it but stopped the address for 24 hours. Really useful.

But the "what happens when that ..." I was replying to was specifically about someone who **had** got their own domain.

Pay? Pay!?! <poster has a fit of the vapours and reaches for the Sal volatile>

Yes, I had my cucumber.demon.co.uk email address for over 25 years. For the last 10 years, I had the replacement running, but I kept the Demon one until Vodafone (who owned it by then) closed it down.

But it survives on your USENET posts! Probably a smart move.

I still get spam to email addresses I used years ago on usenet, but almost none to the email address I use on usenet now.

I've used the same E-Mail address on Usenet for many, many years. It's a valid, functioning address. I've never received much junk (or other) messages on it, I get maybe one a week at present. It's useful though to be able to say to people on Usenet that they can simply send me E-Mail using that address.

I don't believe I ever used my real name on Usenet since I had control of the computer I used to compose it.

The email from the sysadmin warning me that the amount of time I was wittering on the alt* was getting too much to ignore made me acutely aware of the total lack of privacy.

I am not hard to track down if anybody cares that much, but random stalkers and other maniacs are not that clever.

Interesting. With Demon we used to get dire warnings from Malcolm that if we didn't use a valid email address we would be dumped by Demon :-)

:-) I have retained the treble 6 allocated by Namesco following the demise of Demon. Spam seems to have gone elsewhere anyway. I wonder if anyone tries the address on this post:-)

Well where are Demon now eh? I never used cliffs shaky service. And he never even thanked me for porting POP3 to to SCO linux

Juts another carpetbagger.

sold out to Vodaphone, I expect the owner made lots of money

Are you merely email forwarding or are you paying for a full email server?

If the latter, who with and at what cost?

At the moment it suits me to use Zoho for "free".

However on the back of getting the extra domain, and rather irked by Zohos insistence on *their* 2FA app, I am as we speak looking at setting up a Nextcloud instance on my home server. Which is already backed up to a cloud storage solution.

Cliff Stanford sold Demon Internet to Thus for £66M, of which he got £33M.

Vodafone was a few more buyers later on.