Keep your email address

[Garrote1]

If I switch providers, is it possible to keep the same email address?

[Statica]

Not if you are using the provider's email address. If your ISP is usuallyfastinternet.com and you use an email address garrote1@usuallyfastinternet.com ; and you switch to another ISP, there isn't an ISP out there who will extend the courtesy of providing you the email address while you get your access from someone else.
If on the other hand you use email addresses provided by a 3rd party company ..like hotmail or yahoo mail then you would be able to keep that address.

[RayH]

For the very reason you're posting, I've not used an ISP supplied e-mail account for my primary e-mail box for years. It allows me to hop around. Plenty of good freebies.

But now that Hotmail wants to begin charging for OE access, I'm jumping boat on them for Gmail!

[WhatsThisBoxFor?]

Originally Posted by RayH But now that Hotmail wants to begin charging for OE access, I'm jumping boat on them for Gmail!

It wouldn't surprise me if google started charging for Gmail access from OE and other clients.

[RayH]

The possibility exists Google will charge for the feature sometime down the road. But now, they've just added it and I'll use it. So I won't sweat the small stuff.

I've had friends (and also my daughter) has had to change e-mail address more than I because their ISP was merged into some other outfit.

I began using Hotmail as a permanent address way back when they were the only free solution that allowed both Outlook Express AND web access.

[tomster2300]

What I do is I have a charter email address which is my permanent one, then I set it to forward everything it receives to my gmail account. I only check my gmail account, so if they start charging then I'll have the original copy of everything in charter's account.

You just have to go in and clean up the charter account every once in awhile so it doesn't get full and begins to refuse emails.