How not to lose your email account

I heard about someone recently who was about to lose their email account and it is an interesting story. They had been with an ISP and had used the ISP's email service. A while back they switched to a different ISP, seeking a better deal. Now the original ISP is shutting down the person's email account because they no longer have broadband with them. The problem is that they rely on their email account and don't want to lose it.

This situation will always arise if you use an ISP's email service and if you aren't a paying customer of their broadband service, they have no obligation to provide you with a free email service. What can you do if you want to switch ISPs?

One solution is to sign up for an email service that is not associated with an ISP. Google Mail, Outlook.com and Yahoo! are three obvious examples, although there are many good services from smaller players. You can switch your ISP as often as you want and your web mail service will always be accessible.

A problem though, is that switching from one email service to another is not easy. One way you could ease the switch is to use a program like Microsoft Outlook, Windows Live Mail or Thunderbird. Configure any of these with your email account and they will download everything in your inbox and store it on the computer's disk drive. When your ISP email account is shut down, you will still have all your old emails and you can refer to them, get contact details to put into your new web mail and so on.

Another way to ease the switch is to add the old email account to the new web mail service. Gmail, Outlook.com and Yahoo! Mail all allow you to add other email accounts. In Gmail for example, go to the gear button, Settings, then the Accounts tab. There is a section called Check email from other accounts (using POP3). Click the link and add the account details of your old email account. Gmail will check it every hour or so and copy any incoming email. It means that people who don't know you have moved can still email you on the old account, but you can use the new web mail account to email people (and tell them you have moved).

If you are using your ISP's email right now, you should sign up for web mail and start making the switch. If you don't like web mail, Yahoo!, Gmail and Outlook.com can al be accessed by email software running on your PC too.