email forwarding?

[Nutcase]

We're trying to sell the flat at the moment to buy a house, and when we get one I'm not going to be able to afford a decent quality ISP - will have to go with orange or sky or maybe virgin if we get a house with cable.

What I need to be looking at is setting up a non-isp specific email address that's not yahoo/hotmail etc. and can be used on the likes of outlook or mail.

When you buy a domain and have it hosted that seems to come with mailboxes like that, but are there ways of doing just a domain with email, no webspace as such? I don't mind paying a little bit a month for the domain and mailbox, but really don't need webspace. Any ideas on who is best to use?

And then I guess I just need to tell people the new email address and setup a forward on my current ones while people change over?

[Jonny69]

My experience of domains and hosting (which is limited because I have only done jonny69.co.uk and a handful of others) is that you only get the email addresses when you buy hosting to go with your domain. My domain costs about £10 for 2 years and the hosting is about £35/yr from memory. I don't know whether to trust any of the 'free' web hosts but there might be one that is paid for by advertising on the site, and if you just want the email address then it doesn't matter what the website looks like. You might be able to to just stick up a basic home page laden with ads and get your email address that way.

Does it definitely have to be separate to the ISP? Tiscali etc still offer ISP email addresses without having to subscribe to their services.

[Desmo]

Register a name at www.freeparking.co.uk (who I used to use a lot and were fine) and get free pop3 email with them :)

[Blighter]

Just buy a domain and use gmail for your email. Tis what I do with blighter.net

Give me a shout if you need a hand.

[Blighter]

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

[Feek]

Good advice, I use googleapps for all my email after I stopped running my own mail router at home.

[Blighter]

It is great :) Free IMAP/POP3/SMTP access, 7.5GB free storage, awesome webmail access... etc ;)

[Nutcase]

Thanks peeps :) Will have a look at both those options

[Nutcase]

Decided to go the gmail route for portability I guess :) Time to figure out what I'm doing!

Thanks again peeps :)

[Nutcase]

That was easy, I now "own" bucoops.com (bastardisation of my when I get around to it double barrelled surname buckthorpe-cooper) :)