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Why is it when I give people my personal email address they look at me funny? Why does the fact that I own my name as a domain and maintain it as my personal email address surprise folks. It’s kind of like I’m a leper or something.

It all begin back in 2002 when I was one of the many bit by the demise of @Home cable company. I awoke one morning to discover the email address many of my friends, family members, and co-workers had used for me for several years was no longer in existence. Sure, Comcast had graciously agreed to provide service to the @Home subscribers displaced by the bankruptcy however, due to no action on my part I suddenly found myself having to get the word out to folks who had me in their address book that I could no longer get email at the address they had always used for me.

That was the day I decided to change my email address to something over which I had almost total control. So I registered my name (craigkendall.com) and the names of my immediate family (juliekendall.com, jeskendall.com, adamkendall.com) and began the journey of managing our own “permanent” email addresses. At first I just redirected at the server level all email to my “permanent address” to my new Comcast account and spoofed the return to my “permanent” address. But, shortly thereafter I ditched the spoofing due to my email being perceived as spam by some servers and started fully hosting my own email address through my web hosting account.

Since then, I have moved the hosting of my email to Google Apps due to their superior spam filtering. It’s a simple yet really sophisticated solution. I point my domain’s MX record to an address specified by GoogleApps and shazaam… my own email address through webmail@craigkendall.com that looks like Gmail, works like Gmail, but is mine. Not an address forwarded to a Gmail account, but my own with all the cool features of Gmail and IMAP functionality to allow me to access my email directly through my iPhone and it stays in perfect sync with my webmail and Thunderbird on my notebook computer at home.

So, it’s too easy to set it all up and you should do the same. Then, you “own” your email address permanently and folks can look at you weird when you give them your email address too.