Alright, so all the cool kids have their own domain name.
I caved. I paid the $70 and registered IANBELL.COM
Then I went to Eric Woodward’s service @ http://www.myinternet.com and set up a bunch of cool stuff that attaches the domain to my existing email and web accounts using forwarding. Kinda cool.
Try typing in: https://ianbell.com:8888 and you get my lame old web site.
You can provision accounts on your vanity domain that forward mail, such as mailto:me [at] ianbell [dot] com, which goes, you guessed it, to my cafe.net email address. You can also give these out to your friends (I don’t know too many who want to be @ianbell.com).
Then you can set up an email catch-all. This forwards ALL inbound mail to
Now you can register:
yahoo [at] ianbell [dot] com … for Yahoo! buzme [at] ianbell [dot] com … for BuzMe amazon [at] ianbell [dot] com … for Amazon.
G-Nifty. As an added bonus you get to nail them when they sell your email address to some spammer. And you can change them easily. Very nice.
One drawback is that your friends can send you email using insulting addresses like mailto:bighairyass [at] ianbell [dot] com.
-Ian.
PS – My ass is not hairy.