Why doesn't everyone have a domain?

I mean, how can people hold their head up high in this digital age when they don't even have their own domain name? I'm not suggesting that everyone should have their own website, it's a well known fact that only transvestites and kitten owners are required by law to have a website. No, what I'm talking about is a domain name that you can call your own for emails etc, and follows you around the internet like your own textual avatar.

So many people seem to make do with being "jenny_tv_2005@yahoo.com" or "yetanotherdavesmith@hotmail.com" when they could be "me@princessjenny.co.uk" or "dave@thesmithmeister.me.uk", and it costs a pittance!

For 3 pounds a year people like UKReg will sell you a nice .me.uk or .co.uk domain name and even give you free mail forwarding to any other email account.

If you're not sure what that means, take me as an example:

I own beckysweb.co.uk, but all of the emails that are sent to anything@beckysweb.co.uk are automatically forwarded to my gmail account. Because I own the whole beckysweb domain name (for 3 quid a year, remember!) I also effectively own all of the email addresses at that domain. This is handy in itself, I can give different people different email addresses and they'll still all get back to me. British Telecom think my email address is btjunk@beckysweb.co.uk. That way if they ever decide to sell on my email address to another person, and I start getting junk mail from that person, I'll know that BT sold them my address because it because the email will have been sent to "BTjunk". Clever eh?

Gmail has recently been cleverly updated to allow you to send on behalf of another address too. So even though I use Gmail as my email client, which has a address like boring@gmail.com, all my sent mail appears to come from beckysweb.co.uk. Even more cleverer huh?

I've also bought a domain for my boy email, at 3 pounds a year it seemed mad not to buy mysurname.me.uk. And that's also set to pump itself at my standard Gmail account. So all of my mail turns up in one place. Gmail will even let me choose which email address I want each outgoing mail to appear to come from. Granted, I have to be careful not to pick the wrong one sometimes! But I enjoy the convenience of collecting all my mail from one web-based location, and Gmail even lets you collect mail via POP, which means I can collect my mail via most any desktop mail client.

Gmail is the best free mail account by far at the moment, in my opinion. The only trouble is that you can still only get in via invitation from an existing gmail user, which used to be like hens teeth. But these days all existing Gmail users have invites coming out the wazoo, so if you'd like one just email me.

"But Becky," I hear you whine, "I don't want to stop using my existing email account! I like it! And what if Gmail gets crappy, won't you be stuck?"

Ah no, my dear, sweet, simple reader. The beauty of email forwarding is that if I get fed up with Gmail I can simply re-direct it elsewhere. So tomorrow beckysweb.co.uk might point somewhere completely different. It's just that at the moment I'm finding gmail a perfect match to my email needs.

As well as free email forwarding, UKreg also offers free web forwarding. So that if you do have a website or blog hosted on blogspot or whatever, you can point a your friendly domain name at it. It sounds a lot better if you say to people at parties "hey, check out my website, it's at www.SteveRocksBigTime.co.uk" rather than "hey, check out my website, it's at steverocks.server125.poxywebhosting.net.cz".

Oooh, I'm ranting about nerdy net stuff on my blog! I really need to admit defeat, buy a kitten and take pictures of it.

And before you ask, no I don't work for UKreg. I don't work for Google either... but that's a different story.