The primary email address I use is from my personal domain name. After all, that’s one of the perks of having your own web site, right?

A problem I routinely encounter is getting people to remember my email address. Is it a long address? No. It is difficult to spell? Not in the slightest. But it does have two things going against it. First is the fact it ends in a dot-net and not a dot-com. Second is the fact people aren’t familiar with my domain name in use with an email address.

It’s the second point that matters the most. If you have an email address that doesn’t use a domain people are very familiar with, chances are they won’t remember it easily.

And just what are the most memorable domains for email out there?

Here are The Big 5, from least to most memorable.

#5 gmail.com

This is memorable because it’s short and has the word "mail" in it with a simple g in front of it.

And there are to this day more than a fair share of people who have absolutely no idea Gmail is run by Google.

Part of the reason Gmail isn’t more widely known is simply for the fact it hasn’t been around as long compared to others.

#4 msn.com

MSN is one of those things where people remember it because the formerly named MSN Messenger (now Windows Live) is so widely used. In addition, we’ve seen "MSN" in one form or another ever since Windows 95 all the way up to Windows XP. And being that a ton of people still use XP, that’s well over 10 years of having MSN etched in our brains – even if we never used the service.

If you have an @msn.com email address, it will be remembered easily by others.

Can you get an msn.com email address for free? Yes. This link will get you one, or at least it currently will.

Email addresses ending in @msn.com WILL WORK with the Windows Live Mail email client just like Hotmail and Live.com mail addresses do.

#3 hotmail.com

This is yet another one that’s easy to remember because it has the word "mail" in it, and the fact that a ton of people use this service as their primary email address.

Fun fact: Hotmail was originally spelled as HoTMaiL. The capital letters are HTML, the markup language used for web pages. The mixed case was supposed to signify web-based mail, but nobody ever saw it that way. Instead they said, "Why is it spelled weird like that?"

#2 yahoo.com

Yahoo is memorable because it has a "funny" name to it and is such a well known web brand. When you hear Yahoo, you know exactly what it is.

#1 aol.com

Sad but true, if you have an email address than ends in @aol.com, people will remember it easily. Why? Pretty much for the same reason people remember MSN so much – repetition. While Microsoft blasted MSN to us in the Windows operating environment/system, AOL blasted us on television and in our postal mailboxes with those stupid floppies and CDs. It’s not something you forget.

"AOL" usually can’t be said without "sucks" following it for most people. But even though that’s true, you know what it is, and with the exception of very young internet users, so does everybody else.

Can you get an aol.com email address for free? Yes. Go to mail.aol.com and hit the link that says "get a free e-mail account". You’ll notice on the signup page your new email will end with @aol.com.