Family tech: One e-mail address, one phone number forever

Prince William County, Va. - Hardly a week goes by I do not get an e-mail from some friend who has switched his e-mail address. Often it is when they switch from Verizon to Comcast or vice-versa as their Internet service provider or they have moved.

I've had the same e-mail address for 15 years, through two states, three addresses and a couple of service providers.

Having one e-mail address virtually forever is a great way to stay in touch with everyone. There are several free e-mail providers you can use.

My 15-year-old e-mail is with Yahoo. I also use Gmail. I tend to use the Gmail one primarily now, and have the Yahoo account set to forward all incoming e-mails to the Gmail account.

If you do not like web e-mail, you can tie in your e-mail application like Microsoft's Outlook or the free Thunderbird to get your e-mails from Yahoo or Gmail or Microsoft's free Hotmail.

Some expectant parents actually go so far as to choose baby names based on web address availability so e-mails can be like "luke@lukesmith.com." That's going a bit far perhaps, but it does help your child create a strong online "brand" right from birth. Parents can use the web ad-dress for baby pictures now, and the child can use it later for professional reasons.

No e-mail address is guaranteed to be truly forever. Google and Yahoo should be around for quite a while in one form or another.

One final note on e-mails, give some thought to the one you chose. "TequilaLover3239" may be fun with your friends but does not look good on your resume.

You can also have one phone number forever. Google just opened their Google Voice service to anyone in the U.S.

You have it automatically if you have a Google account. They give you a unique phone number. When someone calls it, you can have the call routed to your cell phone, your home phone, your business phone or all of them at the same time.

I hate to listen to voice mail. With Google Voice, calls sent to voice mail are transcribed, not always per-fectly, and the text is sent via e-mail and text. That way I can avoid listening to many voice mails.

Ever lose your cell phone, or break it? Or do you have a pay-as-you-go cell phone, and can't pay one month? Did you panic because important clients and others only had that number for you? If you'd given them your Google Voice number, then you would simply have to go to the Google Voice website and have your calls routed to another number or voice mail instead of your cell phone.

If you don't want calls late at night, you can force all calls to voice mail during certain hours. Or if you have just one friend who tends to call you only when he is drunk, you can have those calls always routed to voice mail.

If a telemarketer calls your number, you can have future calls from their number either always routed to voice mail, or Google Voice can make them believe they have called an invalid number. How sweet is that?

I also love how I can send text messages from my web browser. I often text from my desktop to my own phone, so that I have shopping lists, addresses and notes I need for my next trip out readily available on my phone.

Be sure to check out the link page at http://bit.ly/FamilyTech. Visit Mark's blog at http://markstout.blogspot.com His email address is markstout@gmail.com.