I got fed up with provider e-mail services a long, long time ago. I registered my own domain, added hosting to the mix, which has gotten me a very reliable e-mail and enough storage space online. 5 Gb to be exact, which I can access using FTP. Very handy for a private software collection.
A few reasons why I switched to my own domain:
- I got sick and tired of having to tell everyone my new e-mail address after a move... OR after my ISP decided to sell out and the new company forced their e-mail address on me.
- I got sick and tired of the limited storage e-mail providers offer. For instance, TWC/RoadRunner still offers only 10 Mb per e-mail account.
- I got sick and tired of the webhosting "features" of my ISP which usually came down to 10 Mb homepage space and basically no other features besided placing HTML files.
- And the biggest reason was actually that my ISP was getting to be unreliable. Especially their SMTP server did not always sent what I was sending.
I pay $9,95 a month for my services and I am happy with them. Its worth it to me. Others may have enough with GMail or Yahoo Mail which offer quite ample storage as well.