Thursday, May 08, 2003

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Changing email addresses is something I hope never to do again, now that I have my own personal domain. While I think having your own personal domain is the way to go under any circumstances, the reason I finally got motivated to do it was that I got sick and tired of having my email address domain changed against my will: @Home folded and was taken over by the local cable companies, then I moved and was looking at a new local cable company. That's when I got my own domain, and now I am really glad, because the local cable company, whose domain is attbi.com, has been acquired by Comcast whose domain is, of course, Comcast.com. So everybody who has an attbi.com address gets to change to comcast.com! Comcast is doing one thing right, which is to give users a lengthy 18 months to fully make the transition. That is a big step in the right direction, compared to my Indiana local cable company, insightbb.com, who made the transition overnight! But I still have to ask--why can't the attbi.com users just keep their addresses, and have them forwarded? I suppose there are service-level issues--AT&T still owns the attbi.com domain (not sure if they have any further use for it, though, since I believe they sold out lock, stock and barrel to Comcast), so it would be hard for Comcast to make guarantees about service levels. Still, why can't they keep forwarding the attbi.com addresses indefinitely, with a disclaimer that they, Comcast, can't guarantee service levels? Is it because they don't want to bother, or because they are so "greedy" they want to force all their customers to advertise for them by sporting an @comcast.com address? 5:35:09 PM    comment []