When I said about forwarding services, > That's not a guaranteed permanent address either. The forwarding site can > go out of business or institute policies that make you want to dissociate
SRE rejoined, | True, which is why I registered my own domain. Now I have a | permanent address that survives BOTH connectivity ISP and | hosting ISP changes. Ah, but then you have to pay for registration and for hosting, and if your host goes down or out of business you're out of luck (and your mail will bounce) until you have arrangements with a new host and the DNS servers get the word. And let's not even get into what happens if your registrar messes up the records or claims not to have received your payment. For a person without a web site (or with one that doesn't need an identifiable business name), using a free or inexpensive forwarding service incurs less cost and headache than having one's own domain.
