Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Pobox.com

Are you tired of sending out emails to all of your friends telling them you have a new email address? Wouldn't it be a lot nicer to just give everyone an email address that never changes? Well that's what the Pobox email service offers -- a permanent email address that isn't dependent on your ISP.

It works like this:
  • Sign up for Pobox (for a nominal yearly charge) and pick an email address (like john.doe@pobox.com).
  • Tell Pobox up to three real email addresses (like johndoe@comcast.net, jdoe@gmail.com) to which you'd like your mail sent.
  • Let all of your friends and family know your new Pobox email address.
  • That's it -- now you can check your regular email accounts, but all of your friends only know your Pobox account.
What if you switch ISPs? No problem -- just go to Pobox and tell them where to send your email. It switches almost instantly and you're now in business with your new ISP.
Besides being your new permanent email address, Pobox also performs decent spam filtering to keep the spam in your inbox to a minimum. I've been a Pobox customer since 1998, and I'll gladly keep paying for it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have had a terrible time with pobox.com! They have not responded to my queries, and I haven't had access to their mail for a full week. Warning: they absolutely *NO* telephone number where you can call them, so you are stuck trying to email your complaints. There is no manager with whom you can talk about customer service. There just seems to be some guy who responds to mail when he feels like it. Who are these people? I'm going to stop using these folks and am going to jump ship to google mail, which is free.

furman87 said...

I'm sorry you have had such a bad experience with pobox because I have had the opposite experience since January 1998. I will occasionally have mail held a little longer than I think it should take to get through their servers, but that does not happen often.

Their spam filters, combined with Gmail's spam filters, pretty much get rid of anything that doesn't truly belong to me.

The rare times that I've needed customer service, like splitting my account into two accounts, they were quick and very responsive.