What is a Private E-Mail Address?
All E-Mail addresses are private, in the sense that an E-Mail address is reserved for your exclusive use. However, you can't necessarily keep your E-Mail address for as long as you may want it. Most people use the E-Mail addresses provided by their ISP, and so, when they change ISPs, they have to change all of their E-Mail addresses. You really don't own the E-Mail addresses provided by your ISP, rather you rent them only for as long as you subscribe to that ISP.
A Private E-Mail address, as we use the term, is an E-Mail address that you do own and that does not depend on who is your current ISP. If you change ISPs, you still retain your E-Mail address; it never changes and it follows you from ISP to ISP. You don't have to notify everyone in your address book of your new E-Mail address and you won't loose any messages during the transition. If your E-Mail address is used only for personal correspondence, this is merely a huge inconvenience. If your E-Mail address is used for business correspondence, then changing E-Mail addresses may prove very costly.
The Problem With ISP-Provided E-Mail Addresses
When you sign-up with an ISP, they provide you with a few E-Mail addresses. However, none of these E-Mail addresses belong to you because you will lose all of them whenever you decide to change ISPs. You will then be faced with the formidable task of notifying all of your correspondents of your new E-Mail address.
Whenever you change ISPs, you have to notify all of the people that you correspond with that you have a new E-Mail address.
If you use an E-Mail program, such as Outlook or Eudora, then most of these addresses will be in your Outlook or Eudora address book, so this won't be too difficult to do, although it may be rather time-consuming. If they aren't all in your address book, then it is going to be difficult to make sure you don't miss any of these correspondents.
If you don't have a local copy of your address book, you may have to stay with your old ISP until you have your new E-Mail address at your new ISP because you will have to use the old address book, and the old ISP, to send an message to all of your correspondents. This means you'd have to subscribe to both ISPs for a least a few weeks. Alternately, if you can figure out how to download a copy of your address book onto your computer in a way that is either human-readable or that allows you to transfer it into your address book at your new ISP, you can notify everyone after you change ISPs. Of course, there will be at least a few messages to you that will get sent to your old address, and therefore will be lost, because these messages were sent to you before you got around to notifying them of your new address.
If you are a member of any E-Mail lists or groups, then you have manually update your email address at each one of them.
Furthermore, all of your correspondents will be inconvenienced every time you decide to change ISPs which is an imposition on your friends and family.
Wouldn't it be nice to never have to deal with this problem ever again?
If you are business, and you change ISPs, then all of the above still applies, except that it is not a trivial matter to have to impose such an inconvenience on all of your vendors and customers. Missing even one correspondent can be disastrous. That should be enough reason for a business to never use an ISP-provided E-Mail address. However, there are more good reasons for a business to have a private E-Mail address.
It reflects very positively on a business when it has its own E-Mail address.
It is just so much more impressive to have an E-Mail address that is something like "JohnWalters@AcmeWidgets.com" rather than "JohnW345@aol.com". Which E-Mail address is easier to remember? Which E-Mail address puts your company name in front of the customer? Especially if you are just starting your business, or are a small business, having your own E-Mail address says that you are serious about your business and that you intend to be in business for a long time, that you are a winner.
Since merely changing ISPs is going to be such a large, difficult, and perhaps costly undertaking, it understandably discourages you from changing ISPs in order to get better service or better prices. It tends to lock you into an ISP that you are not very satisfied with but, since the cost of changing all of your E-Mail addresses may be costly, you are very reluctant to change ISPs.
If you have a Private E-Mail address, you can change ISPs any time it becomes even slightly advantageous to do so because there is no risk or significant cost involved.
Since using ISP-provided E-Mail addresses are fraught with so many potential problems and costs, doesn't it make good sense to own your E-Mail address?
Since five of your own Private E-Mail addresses only cost $20/year, shouldn't you own your E-Mail addresses?
